From Harlem to Hanoi: Recovering Black Radical Anti-imperialism
With Robyn Spencer
Part of the Social Histories of Revolution series. Hosted by Haymarket Books.
Join us for the final talk in our Social Histories of Revolution series, as historian Robyn Spencer discusses the relationship between Black Power movements and anti-imperialism.
6:45pm, 2 July, The Daryll Forde Seminar Room, 2nd floor, Anthropology Building, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW.
Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/from-harlem-to-hanoi-recovering-black-radical-anti-imperialism-tickets-62728116485
The Tet Offensive, a coordinated wide scale attack of North Vietnamese troops on South Vietnamese cities in late January 1968, was the opening salvo in a year that would see uprisings of workers and students spread across the world. In the US, Tet shattered the government myth that the war was winnable, and further fuelled a growing anti-war movement.
Black Power activists in organizations like the Black Panther Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the National Black Antiwar Anti Draft Union were on the front lines of anti-imperialist efforts that combined a critique of the US war in Vietnam with a call for racial justice and social transformation in the US. These activists critiqued the racism of the draft, traveled to conflict zones to offer solidarity, participated in international conferences and created music and poetry to protest against the US war.
Their vibrant history, largely hidden behind the popular conception of a predominantly white anti-war movement, redefines the relationship between Black Power and the Global 68 uprisings.
Robyn C. Spencer is a historian who focuses on Black social protest after World War II, urban and working-class radicalism, and gender. In 2018-2019 she is Women’s and Gender Studies Visiting Endowed Chair at Brooklyn College, CUNY and is currently an Associate Professor of History at Lehman College. Robyn’s book The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland was published in 2016. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Mid-career fellowship at Yale University, the Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, and the ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars at the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science. Professor Spencer’s writings have appeared in academic journals such as the Journal of Women’s History and Souls, in essay collections about the 1960s and in The Washington Post, Vibe Magazine, Colorlines, Ms. Magazine and Truthout.
