Announcing the inaugural Ida B. & Beyond Conference to be held at the University of Tennessee, March 26, 2015
“The conference begins at 9:30 a.m. in UT’s Black Cultural Center, 1800 Melrose Avenue. It is open to the university community and the public. During the daylong event, attendees will learn about the life, work, and legacy of daring anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett and other like-minded social justice campaigners from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”
The keynote speaker for this event will be Mia Bay, the director for the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University, who recently released her second book about Wells-Barnett. Read more about the event in Tennessee Today.
The conference is part of the Ida B. Wells Initiative, spearheaded by UT’s School of Journalism and Electronic Media professor (and TNDP Advisory Board member!), Amber Roessner. Dr Roessner and her students have created an open access resource providing information about Wells and her work as a journalist, civil rights advocate, and suffragist.
Lost Newspapers: Wells spent several years as journalist and co-owner of the Memphis-based Free Speech and Headlight. Sadly there are no known extant copies of this paper. If you know of any, please contact us here at TNDP!