To Possess Freedom Once Again
Join us for a week of activities to excavate and return to a tangible freedom* that our ancestors once knew. This week of events, centered on BIPOC business, culture and social change, invites participants to practice freedom through political education, participatory decision making, social exchange and more.
This week is presented in partnership with the Black Econonomic Council of Massachusetts (BECMA), Boston Impact Initiative, CommonWealth Kitchen, Foundation for Business Equity, Matahari Women Workers’ Center, King Boston, The Collier Connection, Boston Teachers Union, U.S. Haitian Chamber of Commerce, Amplify Latinx, LISC Boston, Print Ain’t Dead, North American Indian Center of Boston (NAICOB) and New England Blacks in Philanthropy.
Register via Eventbrite | Share on Facebook
Sunday 7/19: BLACK FEMINIST STUDY HALL
1PM-2:30PM EST
The Black Feminist Study Hall is an exploratory working group / political education initiative grounded in study, citation, and conversation. Black Feminism is one of the most important theoretical frameworks and political analyses we have in the struggle for collective liberation. Created by Print Ain’t Dead and Jovonna Jones, this gathering takes root in the perspectives and experiences of Black women.
This edition features Bilphena Yahwon (@goldwomyn) of the Womanist Reader, an online library of Black literature. Bilphena Yahwon is a Baltimore based writer, abolitionist and restorative practices specialist born in Liberia, West Africa. Yahwon is the author of ‘teaching gold-mah how to heal herself.’ the co-creator of For Black Girls Considering Womanism Because Feminism Is Not Enuf and a core member of Press Press. Her online library, The Womanist Reader, is dedicated to archiving free texts from Black women across the diaspora. Bilphena’s work uses a womanist approach and centers women’s health and well being, intersectionality and abolition. She writes of the immigrant experience, of blackness, and of healing.
We encourage you to purchase the book if you can from your local Black bookseller. If you cannot afford the text, you can access it here.
Monday 7/20: Business Social Hour
7:30PM-8:30PM EST
Connect with other business owners of all types (sole proprietors, cooperatives, and small businesses of varying sizes) over casual conversation and fun social activities during this unique virtual gathering.
Tuesday 7/21: Business 2 Business Assembly
8:00AM-11:00AM EST
The Assembly is a core part of the Ujima Project's ecosystem for change. It is a structure for shared decision making, created to shape the future of our neighborhoods, and ultimately our world. This Assembly in particular is geared towards Business Owners of Color. During the event, you can expect to:
- Learn about and discuss Ujima's Good Business Standards
- Add to Ujima's neighborhood investment plan: Businesses we Love, Need, & Want to Replace
- Engage in Participatory granting for Boston's Black businesses, a process where we will distribute 5K grants to 5 Black owned businesses, and YOU decide.
- And leave with a plan of action for investing together in the future of our communities!
Thursday 7/23: Black on Black Investing
6:30PM-8:30PM EST
Black On Black Investing is a series of workshops produced with The Collier Connection and Ujima's Black Investor Committee, aimed at excavating the underappreciated heritage of Black investment and philanthropy. In the initial workshop, titled What is Black on Black Investing?, topics will include:
- Investments in yourself
- Investments in your community
- Black giving, and how we already do this in our daily lives
- Community standards for investing
- Black trust and white supremacy
- Black futurity
Friday 7/24: LECTURES AINT DEAD
5:30-6:30PM EST
LECTURES AINT DEAD is a performative lecture series, organized by Print Ain’t Dead, which welcomes Black artists and scholars to present on a range of cultural, political and philosophical investigation. The intention is to create spaces which promote public knowledge sharing, dialogue, and uplifting scholarship outside of traditional institutions.
This edition features Ra Malika Imhotep (@tar_babyyyy) a Black feminist writer/root worker from Atlanta, GA currently pursuing a doctoral degree in African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her thinking engages Black femme performance aesthetics and cultural production throughout the Black Diaspora. Her creative praxis is invested in a textual and performative enjoyment of undisciplined movement, the historical present, black obscenities, black spiritual practices and other blackityblk happenings.. In addition to being the co-convener of the experimental study group, The Church of Black Feminist Thought and a member of the curatorial collective, The Black Aesthetic.
Monday 7/27: Black Trust: Chuck Turner Arts and Lecture Series
6:30PM-8:30PM EST
We are excited to welcome former Massachusetts State Representative and Executive Director of King Boston, Hon. Marie St. Fleur and artist Anastasia Warren to be our guests for the "Black Trust" series.
Marie St. Fleur received her Bachelor's degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and received her law degree from the Boston College Law School. In 1999, Marie ran and won the race to become the Massachusetts State Representative of Dorchester and Roxbury, where she held that office for 11 years. She became the first Haitian-American person to hold a public office in Massachusetts. While in office, she was the vice-chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. Marie also served as the Chair of the Joint Committee on Education, Arts, and Humanities, and led the establishment of the new Massachusetts Board and Department of Early Education and Care. Most recently, Marie served as the Executive Director of King Boston, a nonprofit working to create a living memorial and programs honoring the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, and their time and work together in Boston. She is the principal of St. Fleur Communications.
✸✸✸✸
Born in The Bronx, Anastasia Warren lives and works in New York City. Through video, performance, and sculpture, she considers the paradox of blackness as a cultural identity forged in dissonance with humanity. Her practice is an ongoing exploration of Afrovoidism – an original idea/train of thought which suggests the possibility/impossibility of blackness based on an ancestral memory of existing as less than a man yet more than human.
Black Trust: Chuck Turner Arts and Lecture Series brings community together to discuss those concepts which frame the relationships in a community — trust, belief, and faith. Black Trust is creating a space for people to learn, trust, and believe in each other.
To Possess Freedom Once Again: Week at a Glance
.png)
*This notion of a tangible freedom derives from a passage in Robin D.G. Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original," a critically acclaimed biography of the iconic jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. The passage, describing part of Monk's lineage, briefly describes life during and post Reconstruction, a time period that resonates with today's uprisings both just before and during this year's Juneteenth, now a formal holiday in some states, including Massachusetts, only just this year, since its first celebration in 1866, and ongoing movement for Black lives.
"The vestiges of slavery were everywhere in the Jim Crow South. More important than the memory of slavery, however, was the memory of freedom. The two generations that preceded Thelonious's lived through one of the greatest revolutions and counterrevolutions in the history of the modern world. Thelonious, his sister Marion, and brother Thomas were raised by people for whom freedom had tangible meaning. They heard first-hand stories of emancipation from their parents; stories of black men going to the polls and running for office, of former slaves founding churches and schools, and helping to build a new democracy in the Southern states. For any Southern black person living between 1865 and 1900, freedom wasn't a word taken for granted or used abstractly. As Theleonious's parents in turn passed to him, freedom meant more than breaking the "rules" of musical harmony or bending tempos. His grandparents were part of freedom's first generation of African-Americans, a generation that could dream of a good life under a hopeful democracy. Yet his parents watched that democracy--and their freedom--burn, sometimes literally, under assault by white supremacists as Jim Crow laws descended across the South. The disfranchisement of black folk and the restoration of power to the old planter class was rapid and violent. Like many families, the Monks never lost their memory of post-Civil War freedom, or their determination to possess it once again."
