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In person tickets are now sold out.  Virtual viewing is still available. 

This event is brought to you by the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute’s Baldwin-King Project in partnership with the Filson Historical Society.

A reception with food and drink will be held before the lecture starts from 5-6 PM.

Three accomplished Black men discuss Black History and contemporary racial struggle. They intentionally do so after Black History Month. Their conversation moves from the impetus of “Miseducation of the Negro” author Carter G. Woodson founding Negro History Week in 1926 to current political, educational, and political attacks on “diversity,” which they see as the latest iteration of “American anti-Blackness.”

Mawuli Mel Davis, J.D., Founding partner of the Davis Bozeman Johnson Law Firm. Davis is a former Naval officer who is now a civil rights attorney, human rights organizer, and author based in Atlanta, Georgia. Davis Bozeman Johnson Law, one of Georgia’s largest African American-owned law firms has three offices in Savannah, Statesboro, and Decatur, Georgia. He is the author of “We Need You: Encouraging My Son’ Generation for Black Liberation.”

Ricky L. Jones, Ph.D., Baldwin-King Scholar in Residence, Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute & Professor of Pan-African Studies, University of Louisville. Jones is the past chair of the Department of Pan-African Studies, opinion columnist for the Courier Journal/USA Today Network, and organizer of the Envirome Institute’s “Baldwin-King Project.” He is author of “Black Haze” and “What’s Wrong with Obamamania?”

Derrick White, PH.D., Professor of History and African American and Africana Studies, University of Kentucky and Author of "Blood, Sweat, and Tears".

Sponsored by The Association for Teaching Black History in Kentucky.

**Due to travel complications the speaker will be joining us virtually.  The Filson will still be holding a reception and have seating to view the lecture for those who wish to attend in person at the Filson Historical Society.**

Reception begins at 5:00 pm, with the discussion beginning at 6:00 pm.

For hundreds of years, the American public education system has neglected to fully examine, discuss, and acknowledge the vast and rich history of people of African descent who have played a pivotal role in the transformation of the United States. The establishment of Black studies departments and programs represented a major victory for higher education and a vindication of Black scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Nathan Huggins. This emerging field of study sought to address omissions from numerous disciplines and correct the myriad distortions, stereotypes, and myths about persons of African descent.

In An Introduction to Black Studies, Eric R. Jackson demonstrates the continuing need for Black studies, also known as African American studies, in university curricula. Jackson connects the growth and impact of Black studies to the broader context of social justice movements, emphasizing the historical and contemporary demand for the discipline. This book features seventeen chapters that focus on the primary eight disciplines of Black studies: history, sociology, psychology, religion, feminism, education, political science, and the arts. Each chapter includes a biographical vignette of an important figure in African American history, such as Frederick Douglass, Louis Armstrong, and Madam C. J. Walker, as well as student learning objectives that provide a starting point for educators. This valuable work speaks to the strength and rigor of scholarship on Blacks and African Americans, its importance to the formal educational process, and its relevance to the United States and the world.

Eric R. Jackson is professor of history and associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Northern Kentucky University. The former director of the Black Studies program at NKU, he has published reviews and articles in a number of journals, including the Journal of African American History, the Journal of Negro Education, International Journal on World Peace, and Journal of Pan African Studies. He is coauthor of Cincinnati's Underground Railroad and Unique Challenges in Urban Schools: The Involvement of African American Parents.

Sponsored by the Louisville Coalition on the History of Enslavement (Farmington, Historic Locust Grove, Oxmoor Farm Foundation, and Riverside, the Farnsley Moremen Landing).

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists crafted a variety of visual messages about the plight of enslaved people, portraying the violence, familial separation, and dehumanization that they faced. In response, proslavery southerners attempted to counter these messages either through idealization or outright erasure of enslaved life.

In Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture, Rachel Stephens addresses an enormous body of material by tracing themes of concealment and silence through paintings, photographs, and ephemera, connecting long overlooked artworks with both the abolitionist materials to which they were responding and archival research across a range of southern historical narratives.

Stephens begins her fascinating study with an examination of the ways that slavery was visually idealized and defended in antebellum art. She then explores the tyranny—especially that depicted in art—enacted by supporters of enslavement, introduces a range of ways that artwork depicting slavery was tangibly concealed, considers photographs of enslaved female caretakers with the white children they reared, and investigates a printmaker’s confidential work in support of the Confederacy. Finally, she delves into an especially pernicious group of proslavery artists in Richmond, Virginia.

Reading visual culture as a key element of the antebellum battle over slavery, Hidden in Plain Sight complicates the existing narratives of American art and history.

Rachel Stephens is associate professor of art history at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Selling Andrew Jackson: Ralph E. W. Earl and the Politics of Portraiture. In preparing this project, Stephens served as a Tyson Scholar at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in the fall of 2018; a fellow at Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition in the spring of 2019; and an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in the fall of 2020.

Thank you to our sponsors: Dace Brown Stubbs, Marshall Farrer, Dace Polk Brown, Laura Lee Brown, Garvin Deters, Polk Deters, Laura Lee Gastis, Garvin Brown IV, and Campbell Brown. Members - Use code FILSON for complimentary tickets.

Tickets for this event must be purchased for both members and potential members through the Kentucky Performing Arts.

At 9:20 a.m. on the morning of May 30, General Groves receives a message to report to the office of the secretary of war “at once.” Stimson is waiting for him. He wants to know: has Groves selected the targets yet?

So begins this suspenseful, impeccably researched history that draws on new access to diaries to tell the story of three men who were intimately involved with America’s decision to drop the atomic bomb—and Japan’s decision to surrender. They are Henry Stimson, the American Secretary of War, who had overall responsibility for decisions about the atom bomb; Gen. Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific, who supervised the planes that dropped the bombs; and Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, the only one in Emperor Hirohito’s Supreme War Council who believed even before the bombs were dropped that Japan should surrender.

Henry Stimson had served in the administrations of five presidents, but as the U.S. nuclear program progressed, he found himself tasked with the unimaginable decision of determining whether to deploy the bomb. The new president, Harry S. Truman, thus far a peripheral figure in the momentous decision, accepted Stimson’s recommendation to drop the bomb. Army Air Force Commander Gen. Spaatz ordered the planes to take off. Like Stimson, Spaatz agonized over the command even as he recognized it would end the war. After the bombs were dropped, Foreign Minister Togo was finally able to convince the emperor to surrender.

To bring these critical events to vivid life, bestselling author Evan Thomas draws on the diaries of Stimson, Togo and Spaatz, contemplating the immense weight of their historic decision. In Road to Surrender, an immersive, surprising, moving account, Thomas lays out the behind-the-scenes thoughts, feelings, motivations, and decision-making of three people who changed history.

Evan Thomas is the author of eleven books: The Wise Men (with Walter Isaacson), The Man to See, The Very Best Men, Robert Kennedy, John Paul Jones, Sea of Thunder, The War Lovers, Ike’s Bluff, Being Nixon, First, and Road to Surrender. John Paul Jones, Sea of Thunder, Being Nixon, and First were New York Times bestsellers. Thomas was a writer, correspondent, and editor for thirty-three years at Time and Newsweek, including ten years (1986–96) as Washington bureau chief at Newsweek, where, at the time of his retirement in 2010, he was editor at large. He wrote more than one hundred cover stories and in 1999 won a National Magazine Award. He wrote Newsweek’s fifty-thousand-word election specials in 1996, 2000, 2004 (winner of a National Magazine Award), and 2008. He has appeared on many TV and radio talk shows, including Meet the Press and The Colbert Report, and has been a guest on PBS’s Charlie Rose more than forty times. The author of dozens of book reviews for The New York Times and The Washington Post, Thomas has taught writing and journalism at Harvard and Princeton, where, from 2007 to 2014, he was Ferris Professor of Journalism.

Oscie Thomas met her husband Evan at the University of Virginia law school, where they were classmates. In 1977, she joined Donovan Leisure, a litigation firm, in New York and Washington DC, before moving to AT&T, retiring as a Federal Government Affairs Vice President in 2000. Since then she has worked with Evan on his books as an editor and researcher.