“Have We Been Here Before? Police Brutality, Institutionalized Racism, and Black Activist Responses”

As several scholars have noted, activists have organized a range of responses to police violence against unarmed Blacks in U.S. cities dating back to the 1940s. These Black activists often have placed such state violence within the broader context of institutionalized racism. Join Professor Winston Grady-Willis, director of Black Studies, for a discussion of bedrock issues of change and continuity between protests against police violence in these contemporary times and those earlier grassroots movements. Winston Grady-Willis returns to Skidmore College as professor and founding director of Black Studies. (From 2008 to 2011 he was associate professor of American Studies and a member of a three-person diversity and inclusion leadership team along with Mariel Martin and Herb Crossman.) Most recently, he was inaugural director of the School of Gender, Race and Nations at Portland State University and professor and chair of Africana Studies at MSU Denver. While at Syracuse University, where he taught in the Department of African American Studies, he received the Meredith Teaching Recognition Award. His first book, Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960-1977, seeks to provide a gendered examination of the transition between nonviolent direct action and Black Power during the contemporary Black Freedom movement. He is also lead author of the electronic textbook The Struggle Continues: Historical and Contemporary Issues in Africana Studies. He is enjoying being back in the classroom and teaching Introduction to Black Studies this semester.