The George Padmore Institute and New Beacon Books July 2008 Public Events Programme

Black Liberation Struggles: Movers and Movements

Talk by David Hilliard on The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service

1967-1980

Friday 4 July 2008 at 7.00pm

The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service 1967-1980 is a collection of pages from the original groundbreaking editions of the Black Panther Party’s official news organ, selected and edited by David Hilliard. It also includes original essays by Hilliard, Elaine Brown, Dr. Stan Oden and others. First called The Black Panther Community News Service and then The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, the weekly periodical was distributed in the USA and internationally and, in its heyday, sold several hundred thousand copies every week. It ultimately became the most influential independent black newspaper in the USA and was part of the inspiration for the setting up of a Black Panthers organisation in the UK. This collection was published in 2007 to mark the 40th anniversary of the periodical.

David Hilliard was a founding member and former chief of staff of the Black Panther Party. Since 1993 he has directed the activities of the Dr. Huey P Newton Foundation, a grassroots community-based not-for-profit organisation committed to preserving and fostering Newton’s intellectual legacy and the original vision of the Black Panther Party. He has written numerous books, has written for newspapers including the New York Times and regularly speaks on radio and television.

Talk by Carole Boyce Davies on Left of Karl Marx:
The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones

Wednesday 9 July at 7.00pm

Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones is the latest publication by Carole Boyce Davies, in which she assesses the activism, writing and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915-64), the pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist and feminist. Born in Trinidad, Claudia Jones moved to New York in 1924 and lived there for 30 years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early twenties, travelling across the USA to speak and organise. She was arrested several times and was in prison for nearly a year before being deported and given asylum in the UK in 1955, where she founded the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and the Caribbean Carnival. She is buried in Highgate cemetery in London to the left of Karl Marx — a location Boyce Davies finds fitting given Jones’s expansion of Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race into her political critique and activism.

Carole Boyce Davies was born in Trinidad and lives in the USA. She is Professor of Africana Studies, English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She has published numerous books on black women’s writing and on African diaspora studies including Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (1990) and Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies (2003) among others.

Talk by Colin Grant on Negro with a Hat:
The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey

Wednesday 23 July at 7.00pm

At one time in the first half of the 20th century, Marcus Mosiah Garvey was the most famous black man in the world. Born into poverty in rural Jamaica and then moving to the USA, he was a self-educated man with an incisive mind and astonishing ability to electrify the imagination. His championing of the Harlem Renaissance and use of pageantry to evoke a lost African civilisation and to articulate the submerged thoughts of a despised but awakening people brought him admirers and enemies in equal measure. In 1920 he masterminded the month-long first InternationalConvention of the Negro Peoples of the World, and his Universal Negro Improvement Association soon boasted over 1100 branches in more than 40 countries. His newspaper, the Negro World, published writers including Claude McKay and Langston Hughes. Yet only a decade later, Garvey was serving time in a US penitentiary for mail fraud.

Colin Grant is an independent historian. He is the son of Jamaican parents who came to England in the late 1950s. He studied medicine for five years before turning to the stage and has written numerous plays and scripts. He now works as a radio producer in the BBC Science Unit.

Negro with a Hat is Grant’s first book which effortlessly captures Marcus Garvey’s life of contradictions, of successes and painful failures.

All talks to be held at the George Padmore Institute, 76 Stroud Green Road, London N4 3EN
Tickets cost: £5.00 per talk or book all three for £12.00

For more information or to book a place at one of these talks, please contact the George Padmore Institute at info@georgepadmoreinstitute.org or
call tel. 020 7272 4889