Karima Amin, Educator, Storyteller, Consultant, Author, 716-834-8438

Her storytelling repertoire includes fables, folktales, poetry, stories from children’s literature, personal stories, and participation stories.

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra,  performances arranged by contact on Education Committee.

Kevin Cottrell,  lecturer, African American Studies, University at Buffalo, 716-556-0759

Mr. Cottrell will lecture and conduct guided tours of the sites of the Underground Railroad in western New York.

James Pappas, Professor, African American Studies, University at Buffalo, 645-2082

He lectures in the field of Black Cinema Studies. His specialty is in the area of black aesthetics, the examination of the Black image in film. Pappas recently returned from the University of Central Florida, Orlando, where he was a research fellow at the consortium for Africana Film Education, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute. His work in integrating African American Cinema into the Arts and Humanities Curriculum is best known for his course called Blacks in film.

A noted film critic, Professor Pappas' will survey films dealing with the African Slave Trade,  and providing the historical context for such films as Sankofa, Ill forgotten Gains, and Amistad.
 

William H. Siener, Executive Director, Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society
873-9688
 

 “The Red Scare Revisited: Radicals and the Anti-Radical Movement in Buffalo, 1919-1920”

 To stop “Bolshevism” at the Canadian border, police in 1919 and 1920 charged Buffalo residents with criminal anarchy.  This presentation shows why attacks on civil liberties failed and actually helped bring immigrants into the political system where they insisted on helping to define what was “American.”

 “Closing the Back Door: Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Act on the Niagara Frontier, 1900-1909”

 A lengthy waterfront, excellent transportation to larger cities, and an open border have made Buffalo a point of entry for illegal immigrants, especially during the period of Chinese exclusion.  Caught between smugglers and law enforcement agents, immigrants then, as now, suffered untold hardship.  This presentation describes their plight and why efforts to end immigrant trafficking failed.
 

Peter St. Jean, Professor, Department of Sociology, University at Buffalo, 645-2417, ext. 0436.

Lecture Topic: “Black on Black Crime”

 This presentation will focus on a timely and pressing issue:  Black on Black Crime in America.  I offer an alternative argument for the dominant discourses which seem to suggest that there is something inherent about African Americans, their culture, and personality which predisposes them to disproportionate involvement in violent and predatory crimes, especially against each other.  My argument is based on an ongoing study which indicates that we need to understand Black on Black crime in America as a function of three main issues:  (1) the general functioning of criminal opportunity, (2) the general functioning of criminal motivation, and (3) the results of demographic segregation.  My discussion will explain these observations and make suggestions for practical ways to reduce violent and predatory crimes among African Americans and others.

Judy Scales-Trent, Professor, Law School, University at Buffalo, 716-645-2092
 
 Professor Scales-Trent will discuss the Amistad Trial.  She has lectured extensively on race and gender.  She is the author of Notes of a White Black Woman.

Lillian S. Williams, Associate Professor and Chair, African American Studies, University at Buffalo, 716-645-2082, ext. 1126.
 She is the author of Strangers in the Land of Paradise: The Creation of an African American Community, Buffalo, New York 1900-1940. Professor Williams has lectured widely on African American social history and she also has published in the field of African American women’s history.

Lecture topics:

“Slavery in the North”

“African American Women’s Volunteer Organizations, 19th and 20th Centuries”

“William Wells Brown and Abolition in Buffalo”

“Blacks in antebellum Buffalo”

Jason Young, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University at Buffalo, 645-2181, ext., 574

Professor Young’s research examines the development of an African-Atlantic religious complex that emerged, in varying forms, throughout the Americas and within West and West-Central Africa itself.  In the slave South he examines this religious complex as a crucial space not only for the recuperation of certain West African ritual forms and processes, but also for the creative emergence of new spiritual practices.  He also lectures on the structure and organization of the Atlantic world and slave folklore that analyzes the history of slavery and slave culture in light of relevant visual materials, music, and dance.