Prof. Austin to Discuss Her Book for First Event in BU IOC Race, Place, and Space Series

Professor Paula Austin will discuss her book Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life in the first installment of Race, Place, and Space, a new event series co-hosted by the BU Initiative on Cities, the BU Arts Initiative, and BU Diversity & Inclusion.

Drawing on passages from the book and its historical context, Austin will discuss the everyday lives of young Black people in Washington DC during the 1930s, a period marked by racial, economic, and political segregation. Austin uses previously unstudied archival material to counter existing narratives and to portray young Black people as thinkers, theorists, critics, and commentators as they reckon with the boundaries imposed on them in the Jim Crow era of America’s capital city.

The Race, Place, and Space series, co-hosted by the Initiative on Cities, BU Arts Initiative, and BU D&I, focuses on the ways in which racial and ethnic groups access, inhabit, occupy, shape, and are memorialized in urban contexts—as well as the ways their contemporary and historical contributions have been made invisible, disregarded, or denigrated. Learn more at bu.edu/ioc/rps

The event will take place as a Zoom Webinar on Wednesday, February 3rd at 4 pm. Attendees should register for the event at https://bostonu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_V_h8u7qtQjitThuVLVm1bQ.