MIAMI, FL. — To a crowd of more than 450 attendees, both in person and online, the 21st Eric E. Williams Memorial Lecture, for the second time, hosted distinguished scholar, activist/organizer, teacher, and writer Angela Davis, renowned for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the U.S. and abroad. Davis delivered an impassioned plea to listeners on April 4 to know their history, to embrace it, and never, ever, to allow partisan politics to negate it.
Angela Davis. (Photo courtesy of Michael Davis)“Revolutionary Winds…” generally focused on the thinly-disguised attempts in the United States to stifle democracy, eradicate dissenting voices – to deny black and brown peoples, indeed all people, the opportunity to be educated about their story, regardless of how painful or shameful a narrative - from slavery, and its continuing ‘legacy’ over the decades since “radical” Reconstruction, to the present day. In this, there was a direct correlation between her strident call to action and the Jewish mantra, “Never forget…”
Professor Davis skillfully wove into her talk multiple references to Eric Williams and his “towering intellectualism”, as she called it, and affirmed that “we would do well if Eric Williams could be with us now” to make sense of, and even to navigate, the current moment.
A living witness to the historical struggles of the contemporary era, Davis outlined the current numerous attempts to ban books, to mold education into an amorphous curriculum of pablum, where disaffected parents and their offspring, usually in the minority, are encouraged to hallenge the professionalism of teachers and librarians and their ability to train and guide enquiring minds. In recent days, this censorship has even extended, incredulously, to Michelangelo’s legendary sculpture of ‘David’! Professor Davis applauded Eric Williams’ groundbreaking policies in this regard, practically eliminating illiteracy in his native country, Trinidad and Tobago.
The Lecture concluded with a lively Q&A session, one of which was: “ Is it possible to defeat the far right extremism rising around the world without anti-capitalist measures?” Davis responded with a terse but unequivocal, “No!”
After 19 consecutive years at Florida International University (FIU), the Eric Williams Memorial Lecture, in its new home at the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin (UT), honors the distinguished Caribbean statesman, consummate academic, internationally-celebrated historian, and author of several books. His 1944 trailblazing study Capitalism and Slavery, popularly referred to as The Williams Thesis (which Professor Davis held in the highest esteem), arguably re-framed the historiography of the British Transatlantic Slave Trade and established the contribution of Caribbean slavery to the development of both Britain and America. The book has been translated into nine languages, including Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish and Korean. The tenth, Dutch, is in process. Thus, it continues to generate and innovate today's ongoing debate about slavery and abolition, and remains “years ahead of its time…this profound critique is still the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development,” according to the New York Times. Last year, almost 80 years after it was first published in the US, the book registered at #5 on the UK Sunday Times Bestseller List (non-fiction). Eric Williams was also the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago and Head of Government for a quarter of a century until his death in 1981. He led the country to Independence from Britain in 1962 and onto Republicanism in 1976.
Among prior Eric Williams Memorial Lecture speakers have been: the late John Hope Franklin, one of America’s premier historians of the African-American experience; Kenneth Kaunda, President of the Republic of Zambia; Cynthia Pratt, Deputy Prime Minister of the Bahamas; Mia Mottley, Attorney General of Barbados; Beverly Anderson-Manley, former First Lady of Jamaica; Portia Simpson Miller, Prime Minister of Jamaica; Hon. Kenny Anthony, Prime Minister of Saint Lucia; Hon. Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and The Grenadines; and prize-winning Haitian author Edwige Danticat.
The Lecture, which seeks to provide an intellectual forum for the examination of pertinent issues in Caribbean and African Diaspora history and politics, is co-sponsored in part by UT’s Center for Women’s and Gender Studies; Dr. & Mrs. Leroy Lashley; and Jerry Nagee. It is also supported by The Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research Library, Archives & Museum at the University of the West Indies (UWI, Trinidad and Tobago), which was inaugurated by former US Secretary of State, Colin L. Powell in 1998. It was named to UNESCO’s prestigious Memory of the World Register in 1999.
