A co-founder of the Black Panther Party and the University of Virginia student who was arrested in a bloody struggle with state Alcohol Beverage Control agents in March were the keynote speakers at Syracuse University’s first Blacktivism conference.

The conference was sponsored by the SU chapter of the NAACP. It began at 9 a.m. and ended at 9 p.m. and took place in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. The inspiration for the conference came from the first Blacktivism conference, which was held at Harvard University in October 2014. The conference featured a lecture, a keynote speaker and several panels and workshops.

Bobby Seale, the founding chairman and national organizer of the Black Panther Party, led off the conference with a lecture titled “Parallels in Activism,” which focused on whether systemic racism in modern society corresponds with society in the 1960s during the civil rights era.

“It’s one thing to sit up and talk about your politics … and promise this and promise that, blah, blah, blah,” he said. “With me, you have to do the real thing.”

Seale said he was inspired when Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Oakland, California, in 1962 and talked about how it was necessary to boycott Wonder Bread because the company refused to hire black people.

MLK’s idea of taking action to advance the causes of black people in America in the 1960s inspired Seale to create a year-round tutorial program for youth, he said.

In 1966, Seale co-founded the Black Panther Party, along with Huey Newton, because he recognized the “vicious police brutality, murder and killing against civil rights people” who were exercising their First Amendment rights to protest, he said.

Seale advised members of the Black Lives Matter movement to attach a program with their ideology, like he had done with the BPP.

Martese Johnson, the University of Virginia student who was assaulted by ABC officers, was the keynote speaker for the dinner that concluded the conference..

Johnson, 21, said he felt like a slave when he was arrested in March. In the altercation with three officers, shackles were put on Johnson’s legs and handcuffs on his wrists. As he was slammed to the ground, blood poured down his face. In response, Johnson screamed, “How could this happen? I go to UVA.”

A video of Johnson’s arrest outside of a bar near the UVA campus went viral, prompting him to become an advocate against police brutality and member of the Black Lives Matter movement.

When he recalled the incident, Johnson said it “shattered his sanctuary” at UVA where he worked for years to assimilate and adapt at the predominantly white institution. He later said that sanctuary never existed because he had to give up part of himself: his blackness.

“No matter what I did, I would always be an African American male,” he said.

Johnson added that although he was a victim of police brutality, the future of the Black Lives Matter movement should focus on non-physical forms of violence against the African American community, like housing discrimination and failing public education systems.

“I am sometimes afraid that the Black Lives Matter movement is boiled down by some to be just a protest against physical violence on black bodies by police officers,” Johnson said. “At a time when we’ve gained a national platform, we need to highlight so many other forms of violence against the African American community.”

Throughout the day, there were several panels and workshops discussing topics of the education system, race in the media, black feminism and the future of activism.

At a panel about the status of black children in the current education system, Marcelle Haddix, the chair of the Reading and Language Arts Center in the School of Education, said the state of the system is “not good” for black children.

Haddix said in order to improve the system, there should be more teachers of color, a change in the way people think about police and security in schools and a regard for the individual child and the child’s family.

At a panel about race in the media, Newhouse Dean Lorraine Branham said almost 50 years after the civil rights riots of 1967, white peoples’ perceptions about people of color are still coming from stereotypical images of people of color portrayed by the media.

Angela Robinson, a news anchor and Class of 1978 graduate of Newhouse, said it is her responsibility as a black news anchor to bring balance to the way the black community is portrayed in the media.

During the “Black Feminism” panel, Ife Olatunji, a visual anthropologist and one of the panelists, said twerking is a feminist movement that allows women to express their sexuality and reclaim their bodies.

Olatunji and the other two panelists — Linda Carty, an associate professor of African American Studies at SU, and Lani Jones, an associate professor at the University at Albany — also discussed what it means to be a black feminist.

The day’s panels ended with one focused on the future of activism and featured DeRay Mckesson, an American civil rights activist who participated in the Ferguson protests, as one of the three panelists.

The consensus of the panel was that the fight for justice is not over and it is important to continue moving forward with more activism.

Published on November 15, 2015 at 10:18 pm

Contact Sara: smswann@syr.edu | @saramswann