Distinguished journalist, educator and activist Charles E. Cobb will deliver University of North Carolina’s 2021 African American History Month Lecture on Tuesday, February 23 at 6:30pm EST via Zoom.
Cobb1 is a founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists. As a field secretary with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he originated the idea of Freedom Schools as a part of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. The memo he wrote described a project where schools should be designed to “fill an intellectual and creative vacuum in the lives of young Negro Mississippians.”
UNC’s African American History Month Lecture is an annual tradition that brings leading scholars and activists whose work centers on the lives of African Americans from both historical and contemporary perspectives. The lecture is open to the entire campus as well as the surrounding community and is the University’s major programming initiative to recognize the importance of African American histories nationally, statewide and on campus.
If you are interested earning extra credit for attending this virtual event, continue reading below.
CHALLENGE | What do you think of Mr. Cobb’s African American History Month? What did you learn? What was the most interesting about the lecture? What was the least interesting? Why? After watching the lecture, what questions did you walk away with? Explain in detail with examples to support your ideas.
*Extra Credit:
| Activity | Points | Points Verification Task(s) |
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10 | Successfully complete the verification form:
*Complete the verification form before 11:59 pm on February 25, 2021. |
- Brief Biography: Charles E. Cobb began his career as a journalist in 1974 as a reporter for WHUR Radio in Washington, DC. In 1976 he joined the staff of National Public Radio as a foreign affairs reporter, bringing to that network its first regular coverage of Africa. From 1985 to 1997, Cobb was a National Geographic staff member. He is the coauthor, with civil rights organizer and educator Robert P. Moses, of Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project (2002) and the author of On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail (2007) and This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (2014). While a visiting professor of Africana studies at Brown University in the 2000s, he designed and taught a course called “The Organizing Tradition of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.” His current work includes an essay in Ibram Kendi and Keisha Blain’s edited volume 400 Souls: A Community History of African Americans 1619-2019 and a forthcoming book for Duke University Press, tentatively titled Get in the Way!: Protest, Politics and the Movement for Black Lives. ↩