Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall In Conversation with Kalamu Ya Salaam

Mark your calendars!

Thursday, May 13, 7pm CDT

Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Black Arts Movement writer and activist Kalamu Ya Salaam will be in conversation to celebrate the publication of her memoir Haunted by Slavery: A Southern White Woman in the Freedom Struggle.

Registration Link: https://tulane.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ag7CWVe5TT6uTCSa-j48rQ?fbcli…

Please join us in celebrating together with pathbreaking historian Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall the publication of her long-awaited memoir, Haunted by Slavery: A Southern White Woman in the Freedom Struggle. From the Haymarket press release:

The memoir of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall offers today's activists and readers an accessible and intimate examination of a crucial era in American radical history.

Born in 1929 New Orleans to left-wing Jewish parents, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's life has spanned nearly a century of engagement in anti-racist, internationalist political activism. In this moving and instructive chronicle of her remarkable life, Midlo Hall recounts her experiences as an anti-racist activist, a Communist Party militant, and a scholar of slavery in the Americas, as well as the wife and collaborator of the renowned African-American author and Communist leader Harry Haywood. Telling the story of her life against the backdrop of the important political and social developments of the 20th century, Midlo Hall offers new insights about a critical period in the history of labor and civil rights movements in the United States.

Detailing everything from Midlo Hall's co-founding of the only inter-racial youth organization in the South when she was 16-years-old, to her pioneering work establishing digital slave databases, to her own struggles against cruel and pervasive sexism, Haunted by Slavery is a gripping account of a life defined by profound dedication to a cause.

Poet, editor, music producer and arts administrator, Kalamu Ya Salaam was born Val Ferdinand III in New Orleans on March 24, 1947. Inspired by the poetry of Langston Hughes and the civil rights movement in New Orleans, Salaam became interested in writing and organizing for social change. Graduating from high school in 1964, he joined the U.S. Army and served in Korea. After service, Salaam attended Carleton College but returned to New Orleans in 1968 to earn an associate's degree from Delgado College.

During the Black Arts Movement, Salaam was a member of John O'Neil's Free Southern Theatre for five years and was a founder of BLACKARTSOUTH. Changing his name along the way to Kalamu Ya Salaam, which is Kiswahili for "pen of peace," he was a founder of Ahidiana Work Study Center. He also assumed the editorship of the Black Collegian magazine, a post he held from 1970 to 1983. Salaam published cultural and political essays in Black World, Black Scholar and Black Books Bulletin. In 1977, he was part of the first African American activist delegation to the People's Republic of China.

Ya Salaam has written Our Women Keep Our Skies From Falling: Six Essays In Support Of The Struggle To Smash Sexist And Develop Women (1980) and Our Music Is No Accident (1987), an essay accompanied by 20 duotone photographs, New Orleans Griot: The Tom Dent Reader, UNO Press: New Orleans, 2018, and Be About Beauty from UNO Press: New Orleans, 2018.

Produced by NOLA Reconnect, Postmambo Studies, and CubaNOLA Arts Collective, in association with the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University and the University of California at Berkeley American Studies.