January 14, 2021

Jeanne Theoharis and Pam Horowitz

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes contributors JEANNE THEOHARIS—Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and author of A More Beautiful and Terrible History—and PAM HOROWITZ—renowned Southern Poverty Law Center activist and lawyer—for a discussion of Julian Bond's Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. They will be joined in conversation VANN NEWKIRK II, acclaimed journalist and senior editor at The Atlantic.

Details

Horace "Julian" Bond was an influential social justice activist, politician, and visionary who is best known as one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). For over two decades, he taught a popular class at the University of Virginia on the history of the civil rights movement.

Compiled from his original lecture notes, Julian Bond's Time to Teach brings his invaluable teachings to a new generation of readers and provides a necessary toolkit for today's activists in the era of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Bond sought to dismantle the perception of the civil rights movement as a peaceful and respectable protest that quickly garnered widespread support. Through his lectures, Bond detailed the ground-shaking disruption the movement caused, its immense unpopularity at the time, and the bravery of activists, some very young, who chose to disturb order to pursue justice.

Beginning with the movement's origins in the early twentieth century, Bond tackles key events such as the Montgomery bus boycott, the Little Rock Nine, Freedom Rides, sit-ins, Mississippi voter registration, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing, the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act, Freedom Summer, and Selma. He explains the youth activism, community ties, and strategizing required to build strenuous and successful movements. With these firsthand accounts of the civil rights movement and original photos from Danny Lyon, Julian Bond's Time to Teach makes history come alive.

About Author(s)

Jeanne Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of City University of New York and the author or coauthor of numerous books and articles on the civil rights and Black Power movements and the contemporary politics of race in the US. Her books include The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (winner of a 2014 NAACP Image Award) and A More Beautiful and Terrible History (winner of the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction).

Pam Horowitz was one of the first lawyers hired at the Southern Poverty Law Center. She worked in partnership with her late husband, Julian Bond, in multiple public, private, and academic projects and is involved in several activities honoring his legacy.

Vann R. Newkirk II is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He has covered the battles for voting rights since the 2013 Shelby County Supreme Court decision, the fate of communities on the front lines of climate change and disasters, and the Black vote in the 2018 and 2020 elections. He is the host of The Atlantic's podcast Floodlines, a narrative series about Hurricane Katrina. Vann was a 2020 11th Hour Fellow at New America, and a 2018 recipient of the American Society of Magazine Editor's ASME Next Award.