The draft riots in New York City, which took place during the summer of 1863, remain to this day the worst civil disturbance in American history. In his 2002 book, “Paradise Alley,” Kevin Baker used the chaotic event as a backdrop for the critically acclaimed historical novel. “This really was more of a revolution than a riot, as one observer noted, it was a pitched battle.” At a Book Talk Lecture Series: Writers on Writing, sponsored by City College’s Center for Worker Education, Baker describes the mob of mostly poor, Irish Catholics, as overcome with anger at the Protestants who had exploited them and with resentment toward African Americans for being forced to fight for their freedom by the newly enforced Civil War draft. What happened during the riots was horrific, says Baker, including “killing, raping and looting.”
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Despite record-setting losses suffered by Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections, President Obama still has the edge — if only by default — to be re-elected, says New York Times columnist, Gail Collins. “All of our presumptions about how well Barack Obama will do in the 2012 election are based on the incredibly awful Republican candidates that appear to be out there ready to run against him.” Collins was joined by Mike Allen, chief political correspondent for Politico, in a discussion at the Graduate Center hosted by Peter Beinart, associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and senior political writer for The Daily Beast, that examined the likely field of Republican candidates and what a second Obama term might mean for the nation.
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Freed from the legal bonds of slavery by the state’s Emancipation Act of 1827, New York’s black leaders moved from local to national politics in the decades leading up to the Civil War. At a Graduate Center event, Carla Peterson, author of the new book, “Black Gotham: A Family History of Africans in Nineteenth-Century New York City,” focused on the experience of students at the Mulberry Street School and how it propelled them into political activism, as well as trade and business. “Education formed character, led to respectability, provided wealth and helped to make you cosmopolitan,” says Peterson, who discussed the challenges she faced finding source material for this forgotten part of American history, in a program sponsored by the Gotham Center for New York City History.
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Reform at both the local level and system-wide is needed for New York City public schools to succeed, according to Pamela Mills of the Math and Science Partnership in New York City. “We believe the urban classroom is too complicated to expect a single person to solve the problems,” says Mills, principal investigator for the partnership, which studies student performance in grades K through 12, and is funded by the National Science Foundation. In her lecture, “Be Bold, Be Brave: Changing the Educational Landscape,” part of the Serving Science Cafe Series, Mills emphasizes learning through partnerships by adopting a new model called the Peer-Enabled Restructured Classroom, or PERC, where students help other students, while teachers teach, to build a community of learning.
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A junior at Macaulay Honors College at Hunter and eyewitness to the massive demonstrations in Egypt, watched firsthand as social media platforms like Facebook were used to help mobilize the political protests. “People who normally would use the Internet as a distraction, now used it as a tool to organize,” says Alex Schindler, who was studying Arabic at the American University in Cairo during the weeks-long uprising. Schindler and Norhan Basuni, a senior at the CUNY Baccalaureate program at John Jay College, who was also in Cairo, shared their experiences at the CUNY Study Abroad Re-entry Conference at the Graduate Center. “The day after the government started messing with the Internet, Tahrir Square went from a few thousand protesters to 100,000 people,” says Schindler.
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In a White House ceremony earlier this year, Anthony Carpi, professor of Environmental Toxicology at John Jay College, was recognized with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring — the most prestigious honor in his field. “It was an absolute thrill to see the program that we had initiated become so effective and to be recognized on a national level,” says Carpi, who was nominated by the college and selected by the National Science Foundation for his work in creating PRISM. The undergraduate research initiative creates opportunities for forensic science students to engage in faculty-mentored research projects. It was also gratifying, Capri says, “to meet the president, who has been so involved with science and education.”
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Julian Bond, social activist and former chair of the NAACP, says that although slavery was abolished nearly 150 years ago, achieving true racial justice is an ongoing struggle. “The truth is that Jim Crow may be dead,” says Bond, “but racism is alive and well.” Bond appeared at a Queens College Black History Month event celebrating the legacy of civil rights activist James Forman, whose family recently donated his personal library and audiotapes to the college’s Civil Rights Archive. Bond, who worked with Forman on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, said, “We need to have a constantly growing and always reviving activist movement across America, if we’re going to maintain and expand our victories.”
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A year after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, Nicole Cooley saw the scale of destruction for the first time, as she drove from Florida to her hometown of New Orleans to visit her parents. “Everything was gone,” says Cooley, a professor of English at Queens College, recalling the ride with her husband and two daughters along Highway 90. “It was as if someone had erased all of the towns — from Mississippi to New Orleans.” Cooley, a poet and founding director of the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at the college, was so affected by what she witnessed, she devoted her next book of poems, “Breach,” (April 2010), to the tragedy and its aftermath. “I had to spend the next year working on this book about Katrina.”
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“There are an estimated 27 million people in the world today living as sex slaves,” says Kenneth B. Morris Jr., great-great-great-grandson of Frederick Douglass and the great-great-grandson of Booker T. Washington, two of the major figures in American history. Morris, who is co-founder of the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation with his mother, Nettie Washington Douglass, spoke at a Black History Month event at Kingsborough Community College. The work of the foundation to end modern-day slavery with its “abolition through education” is urgent, says Morris. “We need modern-day abolitionists like Frederick Douglass,” says Morris, “to lead the way for a better tomorrow.”
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