Black Lives Matter: Panel Discussion
Date and Time
Oct 1, 2015 6:30 pm
Location
450K
450 K St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20001
Oct 1, 2015 6:30 pm
450K
Join Busboys and Poets and an elite group of panelists for a discussion on the "Black Lives Matter" movement.
Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.
Panel to include:
Angela Davis is an American political activist, scholar, and author. She emerged as a prominent counterculture activist and radical in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, although she was never a party member. Her interests included prisoner rights; she founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She is a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a former director of the university's Feminist Studies department
Eugene Puryear is a D.C.-based activist and graduate of Howard University, who ran for an open seat on the D.C. Council as the endorsed nominee of the D.C. Statehood Green Party. In nearly a decade of social justice activism, Eugene has been involved in the anti-war movement, helping to organize mass opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and has served as a key organizer around police brutality, prisoners’ rights and abuses in the U.S. criminal “justice†system. He was the co-founder of the Jobs Not Jails Coalition in D.C. for the rights of returning citizens and is the author of the recent book Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America, which analyzes America’s prison system. He is a socialist and serves on the editorial board of Liberation newspaper.
Erika Totten is a wife, mother, educator, healer, spiritual life coach, and community organizer who continues to work tirelessly in the fight for Black liberation. She is the co-founder of Black Lives Matter DMV where she focuses on coalition building nationally and abroad, disrupting the status quo, and creating weekly healing spaces for Black people to process racial trauma and to experience collective Black joy in the midst of dismantling systems of oppression. Her organization, Unchained, works to support the collective healing and liberation of all Black people through identifying and unlocking the mental, emotional and spiritual chains that hinder us from being exactly who the Creator designed us to be. Through individual coaching sessions and Emotional Emancipation Circles, she focuses on breaking the chains of internalized white supremacy, self-hatred, anger, perfectionism, feelings of unworthiness and inadequacy, generational pathologies, self-limiting beliefs, fear, rejection, abandonment, denial, shame, guilt, and judgment. Guided by the principle of self-determination, Erika teaches the importance of taking the time to heal, learning and practicing essential emotional wellness skills, and intentionally detoxifying our minds and spirits by replacing the lies we’ve been fed with the truths of who we really are.Â
Kymone Freeman is a poet, playwright, activist, father, and director of the National Black LUV Festival (NBLF), one of the largest annual AIDS mobilizations in the nation, as well as being the founder, program director and co-owner of Newton Media Group and We Act Radio WPWC 1480AM.
