Date:
Location:
VISIT THE OFFICIAL CONFERENCE WEBSITE
The ASALH Annual Conference is an occasion to explore the history and culture of people of African descent. Our conference brings together more than one thousand people, including educators, students, community builders, business professionals, and others who share an abiding interest in learning about the contribution of African Americans to this nation and the world.
For over a century, our conference has featured a rich program, which now includes scholarly sessions, professional workshops, plenaries, a Film Festival and other presentations that analyze and illuminate a critical theme in the Black experience. Our 2019 conference will offer attendees from across America and beyond more than 200 sessions, featuring ASALH members who are prominent figures in Black cultural studies, as well as students from many disciplines.
Sessions will be on the theme and many aspects of black life, history, and culture.
ABOUT THE THEME
ASALH’s 2019 theme Black Migrations emphasizes the movement of people of African descent to new destinations and subsequently to new social realities. While inclusive of earlier centuries, this theme focuses especially on the twentieth century through today. Beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, African American migration patterns included relocation from southern farms to southern cities; from the South to the Northeast, Midwest, and West; from the Caribbean to US cities as well as to migrant labor farms; and the emigration of noted African Americans to Africa and to European cities, such as Paris and London, after the end of World War I and World War II. Such migrations resulted in a more diverse and stratified interracial and intra-racial urban population amid a changing social milieu, such as the rise of the Garvey movement in New York, Detroit, and New Orleans; the emergence of both black industrial workers and black entrepreneurs; the growing number and variety of urban churches and new religions; new music forms like ragtime, blues, and jazz; white backlash as in the Red Summer of 1919; the blossoming of visual and literary arts, as in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Paris in the 1910s and 1920s. The theme Black Migrations equally lends itself to the exploration of the century’s later decades from spatial and social perspectives, with attention to “new” African Americans because of the burgeoning African and Caribbean population in the US; Northern African Americans’ return to the South; racial suburbanization; inner-city hyperghettoization; health and environment; civil rights and protest activism; electoral politics; mass incarceration; and dynamic cultural production.
ABOUT ASALH
ASALH is the world’s oldest learned society devoted to the research, education, culture and history of people of African descent. Dr. Woodson is the recognized “Father” of Black history. From its inception, ASALH has remained the paramount organization dedicated to promoting scholarship involving the life and history of African Americans.
