This year, Swarthmore College presents a slate of virtual events to celebrate Black History Month. Highlights include: 

Thursday, Feb. 18  @ 7 p.m. 

Praise Song for the Everyday by Joshua Bennett

Poet and professor Joshua Bennett will share original work from his first three collections of poems — The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), Owed (Penguin, 2020), and forthcoming The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022) — while also offering reflections on the art of storytelling, the history of Black poetic practice in the United States, and the future possibilities of the art forms that African Americans have created toward the end of imagining, and inaugurating, another world. In 2009, Bennett was a featured poet at President Barack Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. Bennett is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College.

This event is free and open to the members of the Swarthmore community: Link

Sponsored by the Black Cultural Center and the Black Studies Program.

Monday, Feb. 22 @ 7 p.m.

An Evening with Garrett Bradley, Director of Time

New Orleans-based filmmaker and photographer Garrett Bradley will discuss her profoundly moving feature documentary Time, in which she delicately captures one family’s milestones and everyday joys as they fight to free their father from prison. With Time, Bradley won the 2020 Sundance Film Festival Directing Award and the 2021 International Documentary Association Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award. Moderated by Assistant Professor of Sociology Nina Johnson. 

The film is screening on Amazon Prime and will be streamed through the Bryn Mawr Film Institute the weekend before the event. 

This event is free and open to the public. Registration can be found here.

Sponsored  by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College, the Department of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College, and the Film Studies Program at Bryn Mawr College.

Tuesday, Feb. 23 @ 7 p.m.

Conversation on Higher Education, Racism, and Disciplinary Knowledge with Katherine McKittrick and Nick Mitchell 

Join the Aydelotte Foundation for a conversation with professors Katherine McKittrick (Queen’s University) and Nick Mitchell (University of California, Santa Cruz), moderated by Assistant Professor of Sociology Nina Johnson, on higher education, racism, and disciplinary knowledge. McKittrick is the author of numerous books, including most recently Dear Science (Duke University Press, 2021), which investigates and explores the collision of what she terms Black ways of knowing and academic spaces. Mitchell has written on academic labor and what it means to be a “critical ethnic studies intellectual,” and in collaboration has defined the field of abolitionist university studies.

The event is open to the public. Registration information can be found here.

Co-sponsored by the President’s Fund for Racial Justice, the Black Cultural Center, the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, and the Black Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies programs.

Friday, Feb. 26 @ 7 p.m.

Black Friday Series Black Music Excellence Through the Ages with Richelle Claiborne 

Black Music Excellence is a joyous ride through the history of African American music across the diaspora. It’s more than a soul revue, more than a gospel concert, more than a night of great jazz: It is one part history lesson, one part testimonial, and filled with inspired musical performances and spoken word. Claiborne tells her story through music with her soul-stirring vocals and a witty script,  accompanied by some of the best musicians from the Charlottesville, Va., area, who thrive to bring an understanding of equity, peace, and love with each performance.  

Claiborne debuted Black Music Excellence Through the Ages in 2019 to a sold-out crowd. Joining Claiborne on stage will be Ti Ames (vocals), Ivan Orr (keyboard), Tucker Rogers (guitar), Bud Bryant (bass), and Rob Hubbard (drums).

This event will be broadcast via the College’s YouTube page.