Jelani Cobb’s riveting, hopeful keynotes are up-to-the-moment meditations and breakdowns of the complex dynamics of race and racism in America. Whether speaking on Black Lives Matter and activism, the battle zones of Ferguson or Baltimore, the legacy of a black presidency, or the implications of the Trump era — or, more generally, on the history of civil rights, violence, and inequality in employment, housing, or incarceration in the US — Cobb speaks with the surety and articulate passion of only our best journalists.

The 46th Annual W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture, organized by the Department of Africana Studies, presents Nikki M. Taylor, professor of history at Howard University, who will speak on Seizing Justice with their Own Hands: Enslaved Women and Lethal Resistance. In this lecture, Taylor contends that enslaved black women carried deep and personal ideas about justice, which they exercised to resist slavery and ultimately end the tyranny of their enslavers. This event is part of the Fall 2024 Social Sciences Forum and Humanities Forum.