Upcoming Events

The Du Bois Freedom Center is partnering with the Scottsboro Boys Museum in Scottsboro, Alabama, to host the museum’s traveling exhibit at its 309 Main Street office from February 10 through late April. This marks the first time the exhibit has traveled beyond Alabama. The exhibition examines one of the most notorious legal injustices in U.S. history—the 1931 false accusation of nine Black teenagers known as the Scottsboro Boys.

During the opening week, the exhibit will also be presented for public viewing at New Africa House in collaboration with the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst. The opening programming will include a public event in the New Africa House Theatre featuring the museum’s Executive Director, Dr. Thomas Reidy, in a discussion moderated by Marcus P. Smith, Ph.D. Candidate in Afro-American Studies. The discussion will reflect on the legacy of the Scottsboro Boys and the late Sheila Washington, founder of the Scottsboro Boys Museum, whose decades-long advocacy led to the men’s posthumous exoneration through the 2013 Scottsboro Boys Act. The discussion will also examine the museum’s ongoing work engaging public memory, accountability, and justice.

Black History, First-Hand Accounts, and the Digital Humanities: A Workshop on the HistoryMakers Digital Archives

Presenting - I'Maya Gibbs, PhD Student in Afro-American Studies

I'Maya Gibbs is a student ambassador for The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, the nation’s largest African American video oral history archive. 

Dr. Stefan M. Bradley, Charles Hamilton Houston 1915 Professor of Black Studies and History at Amherst College

"Rescuing Democracy:  Black Youth in Ferguson and Freedom" 

Responding to the August 2014 police shooting death of their peer, Michael Brown, Jr., young Black people in Ferguson, Missouri showed the world what democracy looks like.  They organized and protested to expose racial capitalism and the blatant violations of their Constitutional rights.  By shutting down roadways and disrupting comfortable life in the St. Louis Metropolitan area, society's most marginalized members shook the status quo.  They threatened decision-makers that if they didn't get their freedom, they would shut down the system.  The efforts those young demonstrators made on the ground and in the political sphere provide a model for the modern moment.  As Americans face a rise in state violence against and abuse of the most vulnerable, they should learn from Ferguson, USA.