Ready for a deep dive into the Schomburg Center’s Black Liberation Reading List? 

The 95 recommendations by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s staff, curators, archivists, and  Schomburg Shop seek to foster a better understanding of the Black experience. The selections convey the activism, challenges, excellence, joy, resilience, pain, and triumphs of people of the African Diaspora and provide historical context on the global uprisings demanding justice for Black lives.
 
The Schomburg Center has had the pleasure of hosting some of these authors for in-person conversations at live events. Authors such as Dr. Bettina Love, Dr. Candacy Taylor, Chef Michael Twitty, and Schomburg Center Director Kevin Young shared insights into their research process and discussed the stories that did not always make it to the printed page during their talks at the Schomburg. 

The following video clips offer a preview of their discussions. You can view the full talks on the Schomburg Center’s Livestream channel to learn more about the writers before reading their books or to gain additional knowledge after learning their stories. 

Between the Lines: Overground by Candacy Taylor, January 2020

Dr. Candacy Taylor is a 2016-17 alumna of the Schomburg Center’s Scholars-in-Residence program. During her tenure, she researched what would become Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America. Her book captures the stories of the African American men and women who stood up to segregation by including their names in the Green Book —Black travel guides, begun by Victor Hugo Green, listing hotels, gas stations, businesses and restaurants where people of color were welcomed.

You can view and learn about the Green Book series, many of which are digitized, at The Schomburg Center which  houses the largest and most extensive collection in the world.
 
While researching Overground Railroad, Dr. Taylor came across information that was close to home. “It was just crazy that this story was literally in my own family, and I’m reading about it in the archives. And, trying to piece it together and figure out if it’s ‘true,’” she said.

Watch Taylor's full conversation with Schomburg Center Director Kevin Young. 

Black Culinary History, June 2019

“This food journey is so integral to who we are,” said Michael W. Twitty, author of The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South in 2019. “When we were moved from the coast into the interior of the South…our health changed. Our bodies changed.”
 
Twitty’s book uses food history to tell the story of his family and the politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and Southern cuisine. His work added another layer to the context of enslavement and how it, literally, impacted Black bodies as it spread from the East coast and westward. 

Watch Twitty’s entire conversation with Thérèse Nelson, chef and founder of BlackCulinaryHistory.com.  

Book Talk: We Want To Do More Than Survive, March 2019

In We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom, Dr. Bettina Love discusses that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make positive long-term changes in their communities.

Using the example of Bree Newsome and James Tyson and their story of taking down the Confederate flag in South Carolina in 2015, Love discusses the difference between an ally and co-conspirator in the fight for racial justice. “Allies know all the language,” Dr.  Love said. “To be a co-conspirator…is to take risks for somebody to put something on the line, but to use it in a way in which you are using your privilege.”

Watch Dr. Love's conversation with Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, associate professor of English education at Teachers College, and Genevieve DeBose, a former New York City public school teacher. 
 

Between the Lines: Brown by Kevin Young + Claudia Rankine, May 2018

Take a journey through some of the sorrows, milestone events, and everyday joys of being African American by Schomburg Center Director Kevin Young in Brown,a collection of poems.
 
Using his childhood years of growing up in Kansas as inspiration and rooted in the lens of African American culture, Young speaks about his pilgrimage to the site of Emmett Till’s lynching, Mr. W. (a high school teacher in his Kansas hometown), and abolitionist John Brown’s raid.
 
“We were Black then/Not yet African American/So we danced every chance we could get/Thursdays and Saturdays we’d chant ‘The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire/We don’t need no water and folks perms began to turn/We had begun to dred or wear locks anyway.” Experience the joys of 1990s music in “A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturdays” in this clip.

Watch more of Young’s talk with Claudia Rankine, poet and author of Citizen: An American Lyric and hear more of Young’s poems.  

Ready to watch more discussions? Visit the Livestream channel to see more conversations with authors on the reading list or to see more of the Schomburg Center’s public programs.