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Posts in Race & Ethnicity
(Podcast) Clarence Taylor's Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City

In his most recent book, Clarence Taylor, dean of the history of the civil rights movement in New York, looks at black resistance to police brutality in the city, and institutional efforts to hold the NYPD accountable, since the late 1930s and '40s.

Listen to this interview here.

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To Build a Mature Society: The Lasting Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” Speech

To Build a Mature Society: The Lasting Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” Speech

By Kristopher Burrell

At Riverside Church in Harlem on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a blistering and sophisticated critique of U. S. intervention in Vietnam. His “Beyond Vietnam” speech was prescient in ways that continue to haunt our society into the present day.

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New Podcast Series, Hosted by Gotham

New Podcast Series, Hosted by Gotham

Today on Gotham, something different: a podcast.

From now on, we'll occasionally be featuring not just written but oral interviews on the blog, with authors of recent books dealing with New York City history. The series is a partnership with the New Books Network, a consortium of academic podcast channels whose very admirable goal is, like ours here at The Gotham Center, to raise the level of public discourse by introducing serious research to much wider audiences than normally get scholarly work.

Today, Beth Harpaz, editor of CUNY SUM, interviews the esteemed Cuban scholar and sociologist Lisandro Pérez about his new book, Sugar, Cigars and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York.

Listen to their interview here.

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The Problem We All Live With: An Interview with Sarita Daftary-Steel

The Problem We All Live With: An Interview with Sarita Daftary-Steel

Today on the blog, editor Molly Rosner speaks to Sarita Daftary-Steel, founder of the East New York Oral History Project, an interview project documenting the experiences of people who lived in East New York during a decade of rapid change from 1960-70.

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Remembrance of Things Not Yet Past: A Report from “Difficult Histories / Public Spaces: The Challenge of Monuments in NYC and the Nation”

Remembrance of Things Not Yet Past: A Report from “Difficult Histories / Public Spaces: The Challenge of Monuments in NYC and the Nation”

By Arinn Amer

A year after white nationalists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia in a deadly riot they framed as a protest against the planned removal of a bronze rendering of Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park, monuments loom large in our national consciousness. With new memorials and markers raising awareness of America’ dark history of racial terror and hundreds of Confederate flags and generals retreating from public view even as thousands more remain firmly entrenched, the incredible power of the stories we tell about the past in shared physical space has never been more apparent.

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