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Black History Month celebration continues

An audience diverse in age and ethnicity crowded into Ballroom A in the Student Center Tuesday evening to hear Deborah Gray White of Rutgers University speak on the state of the black community retrospective to the Million Marches.

A turnout greater than expected forced people to line the walls and gather outside of the door, peering in with hopes to hear the famous lecturer.

"It was very thought provoking," said Anthony Powers of Chicago, a local poet and junior in speech communication. "I disagreed with some things, but I respected her openness and energy."

White's lecture, "The Million Marches: Assessing American race, class, and gender relations at the turn of the 21st century," emphasized the importance of the Million Marches and reflected on what is going on in the black community today.

The lecture was a composition of short vignettes and testimonies from people affected by the Million Marches. White researched and then analyzed the opinions of both attendees and non-attendees of the Marches.

"Sometimes it is not what things are said, it is what is not said," she said. "That's what's important to a historian."

Tuesday's lecture compared and contrasted the Million Man and Women Marches and the March on Washington in 1963. For instance, the march in 1963 focused more on black rights, whereas the latter black marches stressed racial unity.

The Million Man March of 1995 and the Million Women March of 1997 signified that black women and men experience their race separately.

"I didn't realize that black people aren't just unified under one race," said Jennifer Franklin of Cahokia, a junior in information systems technologies. "We have so many different subgroups that also unify us."

White also spoke of a new wave of black Americans who are headed into the "post-black era."

"The post-black era is when racial identity has been liberated - free from black romanticism," White said. "It's about expressing yourself as an individual as opposed to black people first."

White is a New York resident and she has two daughters. She received a bachelor's degree from State University of New York at Binghamton, a master's from Columbia University and a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

White is the author of three books: "Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Antebellum South," which received the Letitia Brown Memorial Book Prize, "Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves 1894 -1994," and "Let My People Go: African Americans 1804 - 1860." She was also the co-author of "Our United States."

She was co-director of the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis which sponsored the "Black Atlantic: Race, Nation and Gender" project.

Presently, Professor White is working on an oral history of New York's Lincoln Center, a study that will look at the cultural center's impact on the long-term residents of the San Juan Hill area.

Reporter Angel Johnson can be reached at ajohnson@dailyegyptian.com