Monday, February 20th
10:30am - Noon
1111 South Campus, 3rd Floor
Humanities & Sciences Room 330
IN-PERSON ONLY - RSVP required.
OPEN TO ALL ArtCenter Community & Networks
** Seating is Limited**
Just (Enough for The) City:
Detroit and Los Angeles Beyond the Olympic Games
In 1963, the cities of Detroit and Los Angeles competed with each other to secure the United States bid to host the 1968 Olympic Games. Of course, the 1968 games in fact took place in Mexico City, immortalized by the iconic “Black Power fist” protest of Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Yet, while neither city won the opportunity to host the ‘68 games, Detroit and Los Angeles each city spent considerable resources in their effort to secure the bid, and along the way they fashioned enduring self-congratulatory civic narratives that have obscured and belied the lived experiences and political aspirations of black communities. Taking this moment as its point of departure, this presentation will explore contested meanings of “urban” and our understandings of black people’s relationship to and experiences in cities over the last 60 years. This will include an examination of how Los Angeles and Detroit figured into mis-placed notions of “urban crisis,” offer some thoughts on the many ways that black activists, artists, and intellectuals have challenged these narratives, and show some examples of current place-based activism and community work in Detroit that is attempting to create new visions for cities.
Stephen Ward is Associate Professor in the Department of Afro-American and African Studies and the Residential College at the University of Michigan, and he is a board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership (BCNCL) in Detroit. He is the editor of Pages from a Black Radical's Notebook: A James Boggs Reader (2011), and author of In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (2016).
