“Bloody Lowndes and the Politics of Black Power” is the topic for the opening event of the Fall 2011 Colloquium Series presented by the Department of African American Studies in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences.  Civil rights scholar Hasan Kwame Jeffries of Ohio State University is the guest speaker for the event, 4 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 1, in SU’s Bird Library, the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons Room (114).  The event is free and open to the public. Discounted parking is available in Booth Garage.

Hasan’s first book, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (NYU Press 2009), tells the remarkable story of ordinary people and college-age organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who ushered in the Black Power era, transforming rural Lowndes County, Alabama, from a citadel of violent white supremacy into the center of southern black militancy. The SNCC was behind the creation of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an all-black, independent, political party that was also the original Black Panther Party.

Jeffries holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Morehouse College, and a master’s degree (1997) and Ph.D. (2002) in American history from Duke University. A Brooklyn, N.Y. native, Jeffries served as the Bankhead Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Alabama before being appointed to his current position at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University.  Jeffries has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship at the W.E.B. Dubois Institute at Harvard University and a Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship.