Ground-breaking black lesbian feminist, activist, essayist and poet Cheryl Clarke will present the inaugural William Monroe Trotter Lecture, “Is black why we die? Audre Lorde and the Mixed Media of Resistance.”
The talk is at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Michigan League Ballroom. Doors open at 5 p.m.
The former Livingston Dean of Students at Rutgers University says she plans to continue talking about “trouble-making” as she has at some previous lectures. “I like the idea,” she says.
Clarke says Lorde — a poet, essayist, novelist and self-described black, lesbian, mother, warrior and poet — taught us to refuse silence, especially if we think it will protect us. Clarke says she plans to speak through poetry, “of the ways black queer people make trouble.”
She adds that Trotter, for whom the lecture series is named, also made trouble by “challenging accommodationist politics and certainly died because he was black.” A Harvard-educated journalist and activist, Trotter (1872-1934) championed equal rights for African Americans.
Clarke’s activism spans the last four decades. She has actively contributed to liberation struggles in America and was a key figure in the black women’s and gay liberation movements. In 2013, she earned the distinguished Kessler Award endowed by the City University of New York for outstanding contributions to the field of LGBT studies.
“Cheryl Clarke is a black lesbian feminist committed to the liberation of all people, especially black lesbians and gay men, and she has committed all of her adult life — as a young activist in the civil rights movement and as a critical witness to the onslaught of anti-black and anti-queer violence in America today — to recognizing the rights and freedoms of black women and black LGBT folks,” says David Green, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Culture and the James Winn Graduate Student Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities, and principle organizer of the event.
Clarke is the author of the influential essays “Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance” and “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community.” She also has written four books of poetry: “Narrative Poems in The Tradition of Black Women” (1982), “Living As A Lesbian” (1986), “Humid Pitch” (1989) and “Experimental Love” (1993).
Clarke was chosen to deliver the inaugural lecture “because we want the university and community to recognize the danger of single-issue politics. Race matters and so does gender and sexual violence — you cannot promote one political agenda at the expense of the other,” Green says.
Organizers want Black History Month to celebrate and recognize the diversity of blackness, and that black queer folks, and especially black lesbians, were critical to liberation movements in and throughout the United States. “We wish to recover and celebrate our unsung heroes and sheroes,” Green says.
Sponsors for the lecture are the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, Helen Zell Writer’s Program, Horace Rackham School of Graduate Studies, Students of Color of Rackham, the Department of American Culture, Doing Queer Studies Now, the Department of History, the Department of Philosophy, the Center for Campus Involvement, Women’s Studies Department, Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs, Student Life, and the Institute for the Humanities.
