On October 29, Jelani Cobb, New Yorker staff writer and dean, Columbia Journalism School, was the keynote speaker at the 2024 Howard Zinn Lecture Series at Boston University.
Cobb is a staff writer at The New Yorker, writing on race, history, justice, politics, and democracy, as well as Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism and Dean of Columbia Journalism School. He recently co-edited, “The Matter of Black Lives,” a collection of The New Yorker’s most ground-breaking writing on Black history and culture in America, featuring the work of legendary writers like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. Cobb also edited and wrote a new introduction for “The Kerner Commission,” — a historic study of American racism and police violence originally published in 1967 — helping to contextualize it for a new generation.
View the lecture at the Boston University website.
EXCERPT FROM INTRODUCTION
Jelani Cobb: Before I get into the substance of my talk I thought it would be good to ground with a couple of parallels, a couple of convergences, between my life and the life of Professor Zinn, whom I never had the pleasure of meeting. We did, however, share a biographical detail in that both he and I were both at one point professors in and then chairs of the department of history at Spelman College. In reading his memoir — and also knowing a little bit about what he left out of the memoir — I can say that in both of our instances, our time at that institution was an educational experience.
Significantly, one of the other points, one of the reasons I was really excited when I got this invitation, was the fact that when I became chair of the department — which required a little bit of coaxing from the provost — and we were going back and forth on what I wanted if I took on the responsibilities of being chair, high on my list was that I wanted the college to support me in the creation of an annual Howard Zinn lecture. That project, that idea, was underway but then I was recruited away and left for another institution, and unfortunately that was one of the things that was left on the drawing board when I departed. So it’s fitting in some way that, all these many years later, I’ve come to Boston to speak at another institution that was so central and so formative and so important to his life, a place where he indeed was equally important to the community.
So I’ll jump into this. There are three parts of this talk. I promise I will not talk excessively long, but this conversation, or this discussion, will be divided into three parts. Well, the first is the American evasion of democracy. I’m keenly aware — indeed all of us are — that this conversation takes place on the cusp of a contentious presidential election. We are, many of us, accustomed to hearing the old political adage of any presidential election, “This is the most important election of your lifetimes.” Unfortunately, for the last three election cycles that statement has had a kind of renewed resonance. Indeed, the stakes are not simply matters of policy or culture or general direction, or our particular orientation toward one part of the world or another — the stakes in these elections have been discussed in existential terms, and not from simply the most radical or the most easily provoked corners of American opinion. But from more staid voices, such a centrist figure as Joe Biden, who discussed the 2020 election saying that democracy was on the ballot. We have heard similar language used this time and for very many reasons that appears to be the case one of the presidential contenders, Donald Trump, has made alarming statements for anyone who is concerned about the future of democracy. I should say that over the course of the evening I will make some points regarding this. I’m not making partisan criticisms; I, by and large, had the same criticisms of Donald Trump when he was a Democrat.
Recent Howard Zinn Lecture Series
Jules Gill-Peterson, "What Sort of Work is Transition? Class, Labor, and Trans History"
Jules Gill-Peterson, associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, was the featured speaker for the 2023 Howard Zinn Lecture Series at Boston University. Video and transcript available.
Mae Ngai, “The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes, Chinese Migration, and Global Politics”
Introduction by Takeo Rivera
Dr. Mae Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University, was the featured speaker of the 2022 Howard Zinn Lecture Series at Boston University with an introduction by Dr. Takeo Rivera, assistant professor in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Video and transcript available.
