Day One: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 11TH
Education-Focused
All times listed in ET
9:00 am - 9:45 am
Welcome and Opening Remarks ​
9:45 am - 10:30 am
Lectureer #1 - STEVE HAHN
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s was rooted in the structures of freedom, liberation and justice that underlie the history of African descendant people in America. Steven Hahn brings to life the mycelium of our freedom struggle - the myriad and immeasurable efforts that local people, unseen in the limelight of the national press, and routinely unmentioned in the narrative of racial progress, engaged in to make the civil rights gains that we laud today possible. That little told story is a bridge that connects the lessons learned from our past to our liberation strategies of today.
Bio: Professor Steven Hahn is a professor of history at New York University. A prolific writer, he has published numerous books, and has contributed to The Nation, Dissent, and The New York Times, among others. He is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Merle Curti Prize for his Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.
10:30 am - 10:45 am
Break
10:45 am - 11:30 am
LECTURER #2: DONALD YACOVONE
The fashioning of America as a ‘white’ nation requires the erasure and distortion of the cultural artifacts and history of African and Indigenous descendents. A primary tool in bleaching the American consciousness continues to be its systems of education. Donald Yacovone has examined children's literature, primary readers, textbooks, and academic journals from colonial days to the present to illustrate how the collective northern and southern cultural psyche of the country has been forged in a cauldron of anti-Blackness.
He lays bare the inconvenient truth that “the thousands of text books that have stained the minds of generations of students ….were produced almost entirely by Northern publishing houses mostly in New York, Boston and Chicago, and by Northern trained scholars and education specialists.”
He challenges us to create a history that is a tool for the liberation of the minds of all of our nation’s children.
Bio: Historian Donald Yacovone is an Associate of Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research. He is the author or editor of nine books, and, along with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recipient of the N.A.A.C.P. IMAGE Award for The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross. He is the author of “Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of our National Identity.”
11:30 am - 11:45 am
Break
LECTURER #3: RUHA BENJAMIN
The architecture of racial hierarchy and bias is welded into the technologies of the 21st century. Features of the old Jim Crow have shape-shifted into what Ruha Benjamin has called the New Jim Code. These are insidious, invasive mathematical technologies - silent intruders contorting what we think about ourselves and the world around us. She cajoles us to unleash our imagination to create, nurture and protect our children so that they can fully express who they be!. She understands that impoverished Black communities have been ‘amputated’ from the collective imagination of the nation, and what this forebodes for those communities – especially their children.
Bio: Founder of the Ida B Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton University, Professor Benjamin is a 2024 MacArthur Fellow and a Stowe Prize awardee for “Viral Justice.” She is also the author of “Race after Technology,” “People’s Science,” and “Imagination, A Manifesto.”
11:45 am - 12:30 pm
12:30 pm - 1:45 pm
Power Building & Reflection Lunch
1:45 pm - 2:30 pm
LECTURER #4: NOLIWE ROOKS
Professor Rooks explores the unfulfilled promise of the Brown v. Board of Education decision and deftly challenges the idea that integration was necessary for Black children to achieve academically. She deeply understands both as an academic and through her family’s history of survival in Jim Crow Florida that what Black children need is education, whether it be segregated or integrated. She lifts up Bob’s voice in calling for a Constitutional Amendment for a quality public school education as a substantive right of citizenship and as a bulwark against further abdication of our moral responsibility for the intellectual and social well being of all the nation’s children.
Bio: Noliwe Rooks is University Professor and chair of the Africana Studies Department at Brown University. Professor Rooks is the author of “Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation and the End of Public Education,” “A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune,” and “INTEGRATED: How American Schools Failed Black Children”
2:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Break
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Power Building & Organizing Concurrent Working Session on Topics Presented
4:30 pm - 5:30 pm
Day 1 Closing Plenary and Remarks
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Counted Out Film Screening”
A feature documentary showcasing how in the 21st century, fueled by technology, data, and algorithms, math determines who has the power to shape our world.
Day Two: Sunday, October 12th
Mass Incarceration-Focused
All times listed in ET
9:00am - 9:30am
Welcome Back, Day Two Remarks
9:30am - 10:15am
LECTURER #6: RACHEL BARKOW
Decided erroneously - in violation of basic Constitutional rights - these decisions are responsible for shredding the Constitution and wreaking havoc on the lives of millions of citizens who - as one commentator notes - “...would not face incarceration in any other liberal democracy on earth!” Barkow leads us through the six cases and challenges us to think of the Constitution itself as a resource in the battle against mass incarceration. She goes a step further: “ the originalist methodology that the majority of the current Court embraces DEMANDS overturning the unconstitutional policies underlying mass incarceration.”
Bio: Rachel Barkow is the Charles Seligson Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Zimroth Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at NYU School of Law. She was a member of the US Sentencing Commission. She is the author of “Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration,” and “Justice Abandoned: How the Supreme Court Ignored the Constitution and Enabled Mass Incarceration."
10:15 am - 10:30 am
Break
10:30 am - 11:15 am
LECTURER #7: WILLIAM DARITY, JR., PH.D.
In the shadow of the promise of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, the machinery of mass incarceration—much like the engine of slavery and Jim Crow, trammelled the economic and political life of Black, Latino and Native communities to clear ground for the construction of America’s carceral state. Dr. Darity, a foremost expert on Reparations and the racial wealth gap understands the history, construction and maintenance costs, budgeted out of state/taxpayer coffers, of our growing carceral enterprise. He leads us along the money trail—from the loophole in the 13th amendment to the coffers of companies that in 2025 pay incarcerated workers little or nothing—to help us see what is hidden in plain sight: slavery by another name.
Bio: Professor William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, Economics, and Business and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Professor Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, and the economics of reparations. In 2005, he launched the subspecialty of stratification economics. Professor Darity is the 2022 W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Social Insurance. Dr. Darity is a 2025 inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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11:15 am - 12:00 pm
Lunch
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Concurrent Curated Conversations
1:15 pm -
1:30 pm
Break
1:30pm - 2:30 pm
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: BRYAN STEVENSON
Lynching in America was outlawed in March, 2022, just three years ago. The Emmett Till Anti Lynching Act makes lynching a federal hate crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison - a much lighter sentence than many imposed for drug possession. Bryan Stevenson reminds us of that painful history in which thousands were murdered, and challenges us to understand the mass incarceration of today as the 21st century version of lynching: the criminalization, brutalizing, and terrorizing of America’s Black, Latino and Indigenous communities. Acknowledgement of this history is necessary in order to undo its vestiges today.
Bio: Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults. Among numerous awards, he is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Non-Fiction for his acclaimed book “Just Mercy.” He led the creation of EJI’s highly acclaimed Legacy Sites, including the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. These national landmark institutions chronicle the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation, and the connection to mass incarceration and contemporary issues of racial bias.
2:30pm - 3:30pm
Closing Plenary