Mark Naison, professor of African-American studies and history and director of urban studies at Fordham University, comes to Union College Wednesday, Apr. 19, with a multi-media presentation, “Crossing Racial and Cultural Boundaries Through Music: An Historian's Journey from Rock & Roll to Hip Hop.”
The event, set for 7 p.m. in Arts 215, is co-sponsored by UNITAS, the Catholic Chaplaincy, History Department, Africana Studies Program, Bronner House, Phi Iota Alpha Fraternity and several other groups. It is free and open to the public.
Nasion is the author of “White Boy: A Memoir” and “Communists in Harlem during the Depression” (University of Illinois Press, 1983), and co-author of “The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1940-1984” (Rutgers University Press, 1986).
David Levering Lewis, the Martin Luther King, Jr., University Professor at Rutgers University and twice recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1994 and 2001 wrote about “White Boy,” “… if a shade of doubt had ever existed about this white boy's qualifications to teach and write African American history, Naison's engrossing, tumultuous memoir ought assure the author a place of honor not only among his professional peers of color but in the front ranks of all those for whom differences based on ideas and ideals-not on color or gender or class-are the only ones that matter.” –
Naison has also written articles on African-American culture and contemporary urban issues, including “Outlaw Culture in Black Culture,” Reconstruction (Fall 1994). His study of Buffalo's African-American community appeared in the Urban League's anthology, “African-Americans and the Rise of Buffalo's Post-Industrial City” (1990) and he was one of the historians asked to contribute his story to “Historians and Race: Authobiography and the Writing of History” (1996).
He is working on a collection of essays on Paul Robeson and the American political tradition, while serving on the advisory committee of the Paul Robeson centennial project at Rutgers University. He is a founder of the Bronx Youth Employment Project, “Save a Generation,” and an organizer and fundraiser for the Bonnie Youth Club, the largest sandlot baseball league in Brooklyn and the only one that is predominantly African-American.