12:30 PM
Speck Auditorium in MBL's Rowe Laboratory
10 MBL Street, Woods Hole

Lecture Abstract:
Dr. Daniel Black will discuss and illuminate the various motivations which drove hundreds of thousands of black people from the south to Northern centers such as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Kansas City, Boston, and St. Louis. These reasons are varied and complicated, to be sure, but one thing is certain: Black people were in search of the American dream and meant to find it. Often, these migrants were young people who became the urban workforce, filling factories and doing domestic work for twice or even three times what they had made picking cotton or working tobacco fields. Yet the north did not turn out to be Heaven. To be sure, racism in Northern cities equal that in the south. Yet economic opportunities made most stay and hope for the best. In this presentation/speech/lecture, Dr. Black will share some of those specific experiences and speak of the historical context in which black Americans risked everything in search of a “livable” life somewhere between the trials and tribulations of the South and the nation’s burgeoning centers of the North.

Daniel Black is an award-winning novelist, professor, and activist. His published works include They Tell Me of Home, The Sacred Place, Perfect Peace, Twelve Gates to the City, The Coming, and Listen to the Lambs. In 2014, he won the Distinguished Writer’s Award from the Mid- Atlantic Writer’s Association. The Go On Girl! National Book Club named him “Author of the Year” in 2011 for his novel Perfect Peace. Perfect Peace was also chosen as the 2014 selection for “If All Arkansas Read the Same Book” by the Arkansas Center for the Book at the Arkansas State Library. The novel has been reprinted more than ten times and is being heralded as an American literary classic. Dr. Black has also been nominated for the Townsend Literary Prize, Ernest J. Gaines Award, Ferro-Grumbley Literary Prize, Lambda Literary Award, and Georgia Author of the Year Prize.

In 2015, Dr. Black’s The Coming was published to broad critical acclaim. The novel is a first-hand account of the trauma and triumph of Africans aboard a slave ship in the 16th century. In 2016, Dr. Black’s long-awaited novel Listen to the Lambs was published. This novel explores the lives and agency of homeless people who find each other on the street and create lives of meaning without material substance.

A native of Kansas City, Kansas, Dr. Black spent his formative years in rural Blackwell, Arkansas, Dr. Black graduated from Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University) where he earned the prestigious Oxford Modern British Studies fellowship and studied at Oxford University. He was awarded a full fellowship to Temple University where he studied with poet laureate of the Black Arts Movement, Sonia Sanchez and earned his Ph.D. in African American Studies. Dr. Black is Professor of African American Studies at his alma mater Clark Atlanta University. Dr. Black lives in Atlanta and is the founder of the Ndugu-Nzinga Rites of Passage Nation, a mentoring society for African American youth.