From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

On Thursday, November 1, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor delivered the 12th Annual Anne Braden Memorial lecture to a packed house in Strickler Hall's Middleton Auditorium. Her talk, "From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation," was based on her 2016 book of the same name. 

The author of two books, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2016) and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Haymarket Books, 2017), Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor been awarded the Lannan Foundation’s Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book and the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality, while connecting anti-police brutality protests with a larger anti-capitalist movement. Race matters. Class matters.   

Taylor received national attention in 2016 when she was forced to cancel speeches in Washington and California due to violent threats from the right-wing after referring to Donald Trump as “a racist, sexist megalomaniac” in a commencement speech at Hampshire College. Her insight and voice are more vital than ever in today’s political climate, and we are honored to host her visit to Louisville. 

Dr. Taylor is currently Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, after serving as the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013-2014.

See coverage from the Louisville Cardinal here