A Community Conversation: with Historian Matthew J. Countryman
Event Details
Matthew J. Countryman, author of “Up South; Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia” will be joined by a panel of distinguished local residents to discuss his book and the fight for Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia. This FREE event to be held at the Germantown Friends School, Friends Free Library 5418 Germantown Avenue. Free parking available onsite.
Join us for a riveting panel discussion with Congressman Dwight Evans, Sharmain Matlock-Turner & Supreme Divine-Dow as they discuss the fight for Civil Rights & Black Power in Philadelphia with Dr. Matthew J. Countryman.
Up South traces the efforts of two generations of black Philadelphians to turn the City of Brotherly Love into a place of promise and opportunity for all. Although Philadelphia rarely appears in histories of the modern civil rights struggle, the city was home to a vibrant and groundbreaking movement for racial justice in the years between World War II and the 1970s. By broadening the chronological and geographic parameters of the civil rights movement, Up South explores the origins of civil rights liberalism, the failure of the liberal program of antidiscrimination legislation and interracial coalition-building to deliver on its promise of racial equality, and the subsequent rise of the Black Power movement.
Matthew J. Countryman is Associate Professor of Afroamerican & African Studies and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he previously served as Chair of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies. Countryman is the author of Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia which won the 2006 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for the best book in civil rights history from the Organization of American Historians. Among other publications, Countryman is also the author of “2020 Uprisings, Unprecedented in Scope, Join a Long River of Struggle in America,” in the online magazine, The Conversation.
Since 2021, Countryman has served as a founding member of the Black Washtenaw County Collaboratory, a community-campus collaboration of community historians, housing activists, and Michigan faculty and students committed to documenting and recounting histories of racial segregation and African American community building in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan.
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