Activist gauges impact of #BlackLivesMatter movement

Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor will deliver the 12th Annual Anne Braden Memorial Lecture on November 1, 2018
Activist gauges impact of #BlackLivesMatter movement

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Princeton University scholar and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor will discuss “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation” Nov. 1 during the University of Louisville’s 12th annual Anne Braden Memorial Lecture.

The free, public talk, based on her book of the same title, will begin at 5:30 p.m. in Middleton Auditorium, Strickler Hall. Her book, which won the Lannan Foundation’s Cultural Freedom Award, examines the history and current state of black America and the development of the #BlackLivesMatter social movement in response to U.S. police violence.

Taylor’s latest book, “How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective,” won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction. Her current research focuses on race and public policy, especially in housing. She is examining private-sector forces in the federal government’s low-income housing programs in the 1970s and how they affected black neighborhoods.

Taylor is an assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University. Her book “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation” made her a highly sought-after lecturer in 2016, but she was forced to cancel several talks after receiving death threats from white-supremacy extremists following her critical comments after the presidential election that year.  

 UofL's Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research in the College of Arts and Sciences sponsors the annual lecture about U.S. racial justice history. The lecture series and institute are named for a Louisvillian active in the civil rights movement.

For more information, contact Cate Fosl at 502-852-2944 or Catherine.fosl@louisville.edu or check louisville.edu/braden.