Mark Naison, professor of African-American studies and history and director of urban studies at Fordham University, will give 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. Wednesday in Arts 215, is co-sponsored by UNITAS, the Catholic Student Association, History Department, Africana Studies Program, Bronner House, Phi Iota Alpha Fraternity and several other groups. It is free and open to the public.
Naison is the author of “White Boy: A Memoir” (Temple University Press, 2002) 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 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1994 and 2001, wrote the following 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 written articles on African-American culture and contemporary urban issues, and 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).
Currently, 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.
Naison's latest venture is the Bronx African-American History Project, which has conducted more than 100 interviews with African-American professionals, community activists, business leaders and musicians who grew up in the Bronx between the 1930s and the 1980s.