Ida B. Wells Festival
Join us for the Ida B. Wells Festival to commemorate the legacy and 160th birthday of the revolutionary activist Ida B. Wells. The festival will be held near the Ida B. Wells National Monument on Saturday, June 25th. A panel discussion will take place on Bronzeville and its importance to the Black American Story featuring guest speakers Jamie Nesbitt Golden, Lionel Kimble, and Dawn Turner. The discussion will be moderated by Darryl Dennard.
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About Ida B Wells: Born in Mississippi within a year of emancipation, journalist and activist Ida B. Wells lit up the injustice-soaked, Jim Crow-era south with boycotts, legal battles, and scorching editorials. As a fierce investigative journalist, she led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States, unveiling the racist violence taking place against African Americans and humanizing the stories of the victims.
About the panelists: Jamie Nesbitt Golden is a wife, parent, and recovering journalist from Chicago. She has written for a number of sites, including Salon, xoJane, and Ebony. She loves liquor, historical biographies, and silence. She cohosts Nerdgasm Noire Network, a weekly podcast, with four other nerdy, opinionated broads.
Lionel Kimble Jr., an associate professor of history at Chicago State University, is the president of the Chicago Branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. His essays have appeared in the Journal of Illinois History and the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, and he has published chapters in several encyclopedias. He is the author of A New Deal for Bronzeville: Housing, Employment, and Civil Rights in Black Chicago, 1935-1955.
Dawn Turner is an award-winning journalist and novelist. A former columnist and reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Turner spent a decade and a half writing about race, politics, and people whose stories are often dismissed and ignored. Turner, who served as a 2017 and 2018 juror for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary, has written commentary for The Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, CBS Sunday Morning News show, NPR’s Morning Edition show, the Chicago Tonight show, and elsewhere. She spent the 2014–2015 school year as a Nieman Journalism fellow at Harvard University. In 2018, she served as a fellow and journalist-in-residence at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. Turner is the author of three novels, Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven, An Eighth of August, and Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood. In 2018, she established the Dawn M. Turner and Kim D. Turner Endowed Scholarship in Media at her alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Please purchase panelists' books ahead of time if you wish to have them signed by authors.
For more information about the festival contact bronzevillehistoricalsociety@gmail.com
Related Titles
Limited signed copies are available at both stores.
A Best Book of 2021 by BuzzFeed and Real Simple A "beautiful, tragic, and inspiring" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) memoir about three Black girls from the storied Bronzeville...
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute...
Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human
During the early 1890s, a series of shocking lynchings brought unprecedented international attention to American mob violence. This interest created an opportunity for Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist and civil rights activist from Memphis, to travel to England to cultivate British...