I'll Make Me A World
Join us online for an afternoon with Harvard University African and African American Studies Professor Jarvis Givens.
On its one-hundredth anniversary, a powerful and essential meditation on the origins, evolution, and future of Black History Month from one of America’s leading historians of Black education and the author of American Grammar.
In I’ll Make Me a World, acclaimed Harvard scholar Jarvis R. Givens takes us on a personal and political journey through the 100-year history of Black History Month—from its radical beginnings in 1926 as “Negro History Week” to its role today as a celebration and flashpoint in America’s cultural battles. Drawing on archival research, personal stories involving family and students, and especially the wisdom of Black educators, Givens recovers the legacy of Carter G. Woodson and many others who envisioned Black history as a liberatory force—knowledge that shapes who we are, how we resist, and what we dream.
With striking clarity, Givens challenges today’s myopic commemorations of iconic figures and urges us to expand our understanding of Black history to include the everyday lives of ordinary people—the “workadays” whose stories have long gone untold but form critical parts of Black history. Indeed, people who played important roles in passing on Black memories that helped disrupt oppressively narrow perspectives on human life. Givens also attends to the labor involved in preserving Black history, especially in intellectual environments where it is constantly denigrated and undervalued, and he insists that more transparency about such processes is necessary to ensure this worthy tradition is passed on to future generations.
I’ll Make Me A World is a call to remember, reimagine, and reclaim an intellectual tradition built by communities well before our time, and to take seriously what is politically at stake in its preservation. At a time when Black history is under attack, this book offers an inspiring vision for how it can still be a source of power, truth, and possibility.
Jarvis Givens will be joined in conversation by Karsonya Wise Whitehead, host of Today with Dr. Kaye on WEAA 88.9 FM.
About the Author:
Jarvis R. Givens is a Professor of Education and African and African American Studies and the co-founding faculty director of the Black Teacher Archive at Harvard University. He is also the current Leverhulme Visiting Professor at University College London’s Institute of the Americas. Givens is the author of three books, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching; School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness; and American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation. Givens is originally from Compton, California, and lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
About the Moderator:
Karsonya Wise Whitehead is the host of Today with Dr. Kaye on WEAA 88.9 FM. She is the founding director of The Karson Institute for Race, Peace & Social Justice, as well as a communication and African and African American Studies professor at Loyola University.