Скачать или смотреть Whose Beloved Community - Keynote

The Whose Beloved Community? Black Civil and LGBT Rights conference fulfills in part the vision of the late Rudolph P. Byrd, Goodrich C. White Professor of American Studies and Founding Director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. This conference is an outcome of Rudolph’s final project, a multiyear investigation of the points of convergence and divergence between the black LGBT movement and the civil rights movement. In convening a national working group of academics, public intellectuals, and artists and reaching out to community activists here in Atlanta, he hoped to inspire a deep interrogation of the contours of one of the most important civil rights issues of our day. Convening in the South, and focused squarely on the meaning of LGBT issues to black communities, this project upsets easy assumptions about where, how, and by whom LGBT activism takes place, and recovers a history and a present that can help us chart a more inclusive future.

This conference is generously supported by The Arcus Foundation and matched by substantial contributions from Emory University and The Ford Foundation. The Arcus Foundation also has enabled the production of a volume of scholarly essays spearheaded by the national working group as a well as an oral history project on black LGBT leaders in Atlanta that is being conducted in conjunction with StoryCorps Atlanta.

Following Rudolph’s untimely death, a range of people too numerous to mention here stepped in to see this phase of his vision to completion. We hope that your attendance here is intellectually enriching and socially engaging. But, most important, we hope that it inspires you to return to your work renewed and reinvigorated for the struggle ahead.