Brian Jones — Black History is for Everyone

In the next Roosevelt House event to mark the centennial of Black History Month, please join us—along with the Hunter College Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies—as we welcome longtime educator Brian Jones for a conversation about his new book, Black History is for Everyone. The author will be in conversation with Hunter College associate professor of sociology Calvin John Smiley.

As powerful forces seek to minimize or even erase Black history from classrooms, libraries, and museums, Black History is for Everyone encourages readers to delve deeper into the country’s collective history—and shows how essential it is that students and citizens remain curious about our nation and its full story. As Jones writes, what opponents of Black history fail to comprehend is that the best education challenges our assumptions, helps students see larger forces at work, and gives them glimpses of alternate futures.

In Black History Is for Everyone, Jones offers a meditation on the power of Black history, using his own experiences as a lifelong learner and teacher to question everything—from the radicalism of the American Revolution to the meaning of the words “race” and “nation.” With warmth and immersive storytelling, Jones pointedly, and powerfully, shows readers the many ways that the study of Black history enriches us all.

As former executive director of the American Library Association Tracie D. Hall has said, Black History is for Everyone “reminds us that the Black experience is so central to the American experience that no one’s education is complete without its examination.”

Brian Jones has taught many ages and grades in New York City’s public schools and the City University of New York. He served as the inaugural director of the Center for Educators and Schools at the New York Public Library and was the associate director of education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The author of The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History, his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, and Jacobin.

Calvin John Smiley is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College. His research focuses on issues related to justice, inequality, and race. He is the co-editor of Prisoner Reentry in the 21st Century: Critical Perspectives of Coming Home and the author of Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition and Defund: Conversations Towards Abolition. His next book Prison Hashtags: Incarceration, Reentry, and Digital Identity will be published in the Fall.