“Malcolm X is a well-known figure, but I wanted to know more about his mother and her impact on his life,” said Collins. She recently published the historical fiction novel “Ocean Stirrings” (Peepal Tree Press, 2023), based on the life of Louise Langdon Norton Little, a working mother and activist who raised eight children, including Malcolm X. The book, along with other work by Collins, is currently being taught in Fordham’s African & African American Studies program. 

In a Q&A, Lambert—an interdisciplinary scholar who studies literature, history, and the African diaspora—asks Collins about Little’s life and influence and teases a glimpse of what to expect at Collins’s upcoming lecture at the Rose Hill campus. 

Lambert: What was Louise’s vision of Black nationalism? What kind of activism was she involved in that Malcolm X might have witnessed and learned from? 

Collins: Louise was an activist in the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) led by Marcus Garvey. She sent in reports from various places where they lived and organized. As she went from place to place with her husband, establishing UNIA groups, she was at the forefront, writing the minutes, organizing people, getting people to come to meetings, talking about Black identities, etc. She was not only doing activist work out there, but also at home, showing her children the work of Grenadian political thinker T.A. Marryshow, for example—helping them realize that Blackness is not stupidity. 

Lambert: I can’t help but think about what else she might have done with her life, had she been allowed to continue her education. She really took it upon herself to re-educate her children after they came home from school, helping them to openly question what they learned, teaching her children as Black people and as Black Americans.

Collins: Yes, it was interesting to me how she helped to socialize them. How she told them, “You’re being taught that you are worth less as Negro people. And that is not so.” 

Lambert: Most historians agree that Malcolm X is an important figure in Black, American, and Caribbean history. What does the story of Louise Langdon Norton Little add—not only to our understanding of Malcolm, but also to history itself? 

Collins: I think she’s important as a woman, mother, and individual, dealing with all of the complexities of a Black woman’s relationships, and the way society responds to her. In a sense, it’s not only her story, but a collective trauma. 

Every time someone says her full name, Louise Langdon Norton Little, I think that is a story in itself. Little is the name that her husband had because of the white Littles in Georgia. Norton is the name of the father who raped her mother. Langdon is the name of white colonials in Grenada. So every time her full name is mentioned, I think about all those last names that don’t truly don’t belong to her. 

This woman is more than Malcolm X’s mother. We know Malcolm’s story, but there are so many people whose stories we don’t know or acknowledge because they have not come to public attention. Louise Little is one such person.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Laurie Lambert joined Fordham’s African and African American Studies department in 2017. She served as the co-founder of the University’s Freedom and Slavery Working Group from 2019 to 2023. She is the author of several published works, including her book “Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution” (University of Virginia Press 2020). She is the daughter of Grenadians and grew up splitting her time between Toronto and Grenada. 

Learn more about the upcoming lecture on Feb. 1, to be held at 6 p.m. in the Great Hall in the McShane Center.

“This talk comes out of having—after a year and a half of lockdown, terror, and isolation—the opportunity to encounter the work of Black artists that I was not familiar with, and to be able to encounter it in ways that made the spaces of their exhibition much clearer and more fraught to me,” Campt said in the Feb. 3 webinar. 

Campt is a professor at Brown University and a Black feminist therorist. She has authored five books, including the newly released A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (The MIT Press, 2021), which explores the work of contemporary Black artists. Her webinar explored the work of three Black artists that were not included in her newest book: Maxwell Alexandre, Troy Monches-Michie, and Jennifer Packer. Through different mediums, their artwork collectively probes different parts of the Black identity—including masculinity, queer desire, and vulnerability—and establishes critical dialogue in the largely white art world, said Campt. 

She recalled her recent visit to Maxwell Alexandre’s New Power exhibit at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France, which features paintings of Black and brown people in scenes of everyday life. As museum visitors contemplate the illustrated people, the figures in the paintings also observe their real-life onlookers. While viewing the artwork, Campt arrived at an uncomfortable realization. 

“In their gallery, all the visitors are Black. In mine, I am the only non-white spectator for the two hours I spend in the space. It’s a contrast I’ve internalized as normal—an expectation of being out of place that usually overtakes me as I approach the counter of a museum. It is equally palpable when I pass the threshold of a gallery and am met with stares or a complete lack of acknowledgement from blasé gallery staff who fail to look up from their counters,” Campt said. “New Power upends the dynamics of being out of place by recentering those often neglected and relegated to this position.”

Alexandre’s art revealed something else to Campt. As she walked around the gallery, she saw Black security guards—both the illustrated and real-life versions. When a lively group of young people arrived at the gallery, she noticed a Black security guard who closely monitored them. 

“Watching the guard as he shadowed them while moving through the gallery, I was struck by the fact that the art gallery is one of the few places where Black folks, often armed, are permitted to actively surveil white audiences,” Campt said. “What do the guards think of encountering their painted simulacra in spaces where they are usually overlooked or made invisible? … Sadly, both my French and my nerves failed to let me pose these questions. But it’s nevertheless one of the central questions posed by Alexander and articulated unequivocally in New Power … How might we lay claim to these spaces in ways that refuse not only a white gaze of consumption or exploitation, but instead initiate moans of reclamation and redress?” 

In a Q&A with the audience, Campt explained her creative process every time she encounters new art. In addition to considering the artwork, she observes the actual space surrounding the piece, the sounds of the gallery, and the people within the room, and then records her observations on an iPad. 

What’s most important is not what we literally see in the moment, but how we respond to the artwork, she said. 

“When I say that I’m writing to images, I’m writing from that response that they are soliciting from me. And in doing that, I’m trying to create a dialogue,” she said. 

At the end of the webinar, moderator Brandy Monk-Payton, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies, said she observed in Campt’s work “this kind of insistence on the local, the intimate, and the interior as a way to sort of remain vigilant in some respects.”

“I’m wondering how we can sort of remain vigilant in supporting understanding of a Black gaze in this moment, this proliferation of wonderful media makers, creatives,” Monk-Payton said.

Campt said that the key to vigilance is discomfort. 

“What I’m talking about in terms of a ‘Black gaze’ is art that makes us feel uncomfortable. Artwork that makes us work. Not artwork that’s good, per se, but artwork that’s good because it’s hard,” Campt said. “How easy is this? How comfortable do I feel with that? And what does it mean to question that comfort?” 

This event was co-sponsored by the Arts and Sciences Council, the Division of Mission Integration and Ministry, and the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer.

The event featured presentations from Catherine Powell, J.D., professor of law, on the color and gender of COVID; Christina Greer, Ph.D., associate professor of political science on being Black in Biden’s America; and Michele Prettyman, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies on the politics of the Black image of rebirth. The webinar was hosted by Laurie Lambert, associate professor of African and African American Studies.

“Let me start with what I call the ‘color of COVID,’” Powell said. “I start with our current inflection point, our moment of interlocking pandemics of COVID-19, economic insecurity, and inequality.”

Powell said that we must examine the race and gender issues built into the COVID-19 pandemic to understand how this crisis relates to economic and social injustice. With Black and Latinx populations being overrepresented among essential workers, they’ve been exposed to COVID-19 more, she said. And they are more likely to have pre-existing conditions and live in congregate settings, which is part of why they’ve been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, she said, both in terms of health and finances.

One way to think about addressing these pandemics is through a “viral convergence,” she said, a twist on civil rights scholar Derrick’s Bell’s theory of “interest convergence,” which argued that Black people have been able to achieve civil rights victories only when white and Black interests align.

“My idea of viral convergence is a recuperative project—one that seeks to span our shared and differential interests,” she said. “It calls for the adoption of transformative laws to reinforce our shared and unifying elements of our current crisis, while also addressing our differential vulnerabilities, whether in the context of the cross racial nature of the movement for Black Lives, or the rise of urban-suburban alliances that are paving the way for large scale inclusive politics.”

Greer said the alliances Powell discussed were instrumental in electing President Joe Biden. But she also noted that the current political landscape includes a “swinging pendulum” that moved dramatically from the first African American president to Donald Trump. That swing has brought large, overarching questions about how Black people are thinking about their roles in the country, she said.

“Can Black people ever be full citizens in this country? Can anyone who’s not white ever be a full citizen in this country, especially after what we just experienced for the past four years, and especially what we saw over January 6?” Greer said.

Biden, to start, has made efforts to swing the pendulum back, including putting together one of the most “inclusive cabinets,” Greer said. But he also has to deal with the historical context of these “multiple pandemics.” and “systemic inequalities.”

One way to continue to swing the pendulum, Greer said, is through the combination of “protest politics” and “electoral politics.”

“Black people in this country have never gotten anything without the duality of both,” Greer said. And I think a lot more Americans are understanding the power of protest politics, to change policy and to change electoral politics.”

Protests are some of the most common images depicted in the media of Black people and others fighting for justice, Prettyman said. She showed the image of TIME magazine’s cover from the Baltimore uprisings in 2015, featuring a photo of a Black man running from police. She asked everyone to consider what a “revolutionary image” might be in this time.

“As we consider this notion of a revolutionary image, I wonder, is it an image of protest, a visual articulation of defiance or resistance?” she said. Or, she said, “perhaps a revolutionary image is one that challenges that paradigm and offers us one of intimacy or care.”

Prettyman showed images from protests and from movies such as Judas and the Black Messiah, where Fred Hampton, a Black Panther leader from Illinois as played by Daniel Kaluuya, is depicted giving a rousing speech. She contrasted those to more everyday images of Black people working, living, experiencing joy.

“Is it possible that that is also a revolutionary image? Perhaps still, a revolutionary image is one that simply shows the everyday life of Black people doing nothing spectacular, nothing dramatic, titillating, or comedic?”

Lambert said these presentations worked together in a way “that’s blown my mind.”

“As we move through these dual pandemics, I thought that was great to ask us to reconsider images of joy and care and intimacy, and everyday life—seeking those out, finding those, but also thinking of them as the spaces of possibility where some of this work is going to be done,” she said.

At a Nov. 11 virtual event sponsored by Fordham and The Bronx Is Reading, which puts on the annual Bronx Book Festival, Rankine spoke about her new book Just Us: An American Conversation with Laurie Lambert, Ph.D., Fordham associate professor of African and African American Studies. 

Through Just Us, Rankine narrates her personal experiences related to race and racism with white friends and acquaintances—and, in some cases, their own rebuttal to her stories.

“The book’s intention was to slow down these interactions so that we could live in them and see that we are just in fact interacting with another person, and that there are ways to maneuver these moments and to take them apart—to stand up for ourselves, to understand the dynamic as a repeating dynamic for many Black people, white people, Latinx people, and Asian people,” said Rankine, a Jamaica native who grew up in the Bronx. 

Rankine has authored several books, plays, and anthologies, including Citizen: An American Lyric, which won the 2016 Rebekah Johnson National Prize for Poetry. Her other awards and honors include the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. She currently serves as a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a professor at Yale University. 

A Portal to Reflect on Your Own Life

At the evening event, Rankine said she wants her readers to use her as a portal to reflect on their own experiences and assess them, rather than simply live them. Reading Rankine’s stories can also serve as a restorative experience for some readers, particularly Black women, said Lambert. 

“As a reader, I felt like I was being guided through these situations by a narrator I could trust—a narrator who understood a lot of my experiences as a Black person,” Lambert said to Rankine.

Naming ‘Whiteness’

The acknowledgement of a person’s “whiteness” can be perceived as threatening because it sounds similar to white nationalism and the violence associated with it, said Rankine. But “whiteness” is a necessary term when talking about race. 

“The kind of clever thing that was done by white culture is the naming of white people as people. They are allowed to hide behind the generality of that statement. They are people and we are African Americans, Caribbean Americans, Latinx Americans, Native Americans,” Rankine said. “That’s how white people have negotiated their lives: We are just neutral people living our lives, and you all are people of color.” 

This centralization of whiteness still stands in many places today, Rankine said. She cited the example of students and other people telling her they have received recruitment calls from white people who say they have perfect jobs for them, but they’re being “forced” to hire Black people to diversify their departments. This strategy to create equity is being falsely framed as something that takes something away from white people, said Rankine, who spoke at Fordham in 2016. 

‘It Gives Me Hope’

Rankine acknowledged that it’s hard to confront covert racism. She’s had to train herself not to let things go—to stop saying she’s tired, that it will stop the conversation, that somebody else in the room should say something instead of her. It’s essential, she said, to hold people accountable because they make critical decisions with long-term effects on places like juries, boardrooms, tenure committees, and dissertation evaluation committees. 

“We have been socialized so much towards silence and stability and not speaking up. And that’s what’s so amazing about the young people now—this new generation of high school students and college students,” Rankine said. “They are speaking up before things even get said. It gives me hope.”

Listen to the full conversation here. 

“They’re from Grenada and some of them were living there during the revolution. Others were living in the diaspora in Toronto,” she said. “And it was always kind of a part of our history that I didn’t always understand. My family would say that the revolution was a good thing. But then I would also hear them say that the U.S. invasion [to end the revolution]was a good thing, and that it had sort of saved the country. So I grew up being interested in those conversations.”

Lambert, now an associate professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham, said that interest stayed with her through graduate school and into her work today, which is why she decided to research and write Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (June 2020, University of Virginia Press).

“I got really into reading the creative literature around this revolution —I was training as a literary scholar—and the major writers of this revolution were women,” she said.

Understanding the Revolution Through Literature

Lambert recalled reading works by Merle Collins, a poet, novelist, and scholar, and Dionne Brand, a poet, novelist, and essayist, who told stories of everyday women during this time through nonfiction, poetry, essays, and novels.

“What an interesting way to understand a political context–by having characters who are everyday folks in their villages, in their towns, and focusing on their relationships, but having the politics play out in the background and showing what kind of effect the politics had on the lives of women,” she said.

However, as she began diving into the official archives of the Grenada Revolution, she noticed “women were absent, in some ways.”

In Comrade Sister, Lambert said, she tried to explore the revolution and the emotions and experiences women faced at the time to provide a detailed look at how gender and sexuality produced different narratives. One theme that came through in many of the works she studied was this feeling of resilience from the women, despite the uncertainties and challenges.

For Women, a Way to Look Beyond

“I found that this was really a literature also about a particular resilience that women had– working class women, rural women—and the fact that they are able to survive this,” she said. “And I think some of it has to do with the fact that even though they saw a lot of the benefits of the revolution, they understood that they were not the target constituents of that revolution because of their gender. So they don’t put all of their hopes into it … whereas with some of the male writers that I looked at, I found that there was either a total refusal of the revolution, or an over identification with it, so that when it ended violently, they are kind of stuck. For the women writers, there was always a way to look beyond it, a way to start again.”

She also was able to highlight the stories of women who made a difference both during and after the revolution, such as Joan Purcell, a Grenadian politician who spared the lives of the revolutionaries who were sentenced to death. Purcell was asked to review the verdicts and decided to commute their sentences to prevent another cycle of political violence, Lambert said.

“She looks at the situation, but she also looks at Grenadian society, and as a member of that society, determines that it would be another experience of trauma all over again if these people were going to be hanged,” Lambert said.

Lambert said this book ties into her classes at Fordham, which include a Black feminism course and a Caribbean literature class.

“It’s actually been really nice to have an ongoing dialogue between my research and my teaching and also to expose my students to some of this literature and some of this history,” she said

Broadening Freedom and Slavery Studies

Lambert participated in a conversation on her book on Monday, October 26, which was sponsored in part by the Fordham Working Group on Freedom and Slavery, a group of faculty and graduate students she helped co-found last year with Yuko Miki, Ph.D., associate professor of history and associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies.

“We’re interested in thinking broadly about the archives and poetics and politics of freedom and slavery. So last year, we were thinking more narrowly about the Transatlantic Slave Trade and freedom, and we had a great opportunity to talk about the 1619 project [from The New York Times],” Lambert said. “This year, we decided we wanted to really kind of expand what we were doing so—the group is still on freedom and slavery—but we really wanted to think about freedom in terms of Black studies more broadly, so we’re not just looking at the period of slavery. It really becomes a space to think about new directions and Black studies, to think about freedom and slavery studies, but also to think about all of the ways in which we define freedoms in Black studies.”

The rededication, which is free and open to the public, will take place at the site, which contains the remains of more than 419 Africans buried during the late 17th and 18th centuries in a portion of what was the largest colonial-era cemetery for people of African descent, some free, most enslaved.

It will feature talks, tours, film screenings, dance, drum and vocal performances, and a street fair.

Laurie Lambert, Ph.D., assistant professor of African and African-American Studies, said the monument is a powerful reminder to New Yorkers that slavery was not exclusively the province of Southern states. Key parts of the Big Apple, in fact, owe their existence to the labor of Africans and their descendants.

“Many people know that enslaved Africans helped build the structure of the White House. In New York, there are cases of that, but we also have to pay attention to where the financing came to actually produce certain businesses and certain buildings,” she said.

“Even if they weren’t involved in the physical building of something, what kind of economic benefit did their labor produce that helped to produce some of these things? Part of what we miss out on is how that legacy of enslaved labor works in terms of building our economy.”

Sandra Arnold, PCS ’13, founder of the Periwinkle Humanities Initiative and the National Burial Database of Enslaved Americans, said the site, which is the first and so far only burial ground of enslaved people to be made into national monument, is a testament to what can be done when disparate partners, from the City and citizens of New York to Howard University, work together.

“Many times when people think of slavery, they only think of the African American experience, but what I love about the story of the African Burial Ground in downtown Manhattan is, people from all walks of life, all nationalities, all backgrounds, were involved in saving it, and they were all involved in making sure it was recognized as a national monument,” she said.

Tuesday, Oct. 3
11 a.m. Opening ceremony and spiritual blessings
2 p.m. Fusha dance performance

Wednesday, Oct. 4
11 a.m. Film screening: African Burial Ground: An American Discovery Living Historians 

Thursday, Oct. 5
10:30 a.m. Memorial talk and tour, African drumming, cultural lectures
7 p.m. Panel discussion

Friday, Oct. 6
11 a.m. Fusha dance performance
12 p.m. Redhawk Native American Council dance
12 p.m. Memorial talk and tour
1 p.m. Eclectic Butterfly performance

Saturday, Oct. 7
10:30 am Family day street fair
11:30 a.m. Universal Dance and Drum ensemble performance
12 p.m. Uptown Dance Academy performance
1 p.m. Cumbe Dance/Drum Storytelling workshop
2 p.m. Spoken work by Verbal Artisan
2:45 p.m. Ernest Johnson vocal performance
3 p.m. Fusha dance performance

For more information, visit www.nps.gov/afbg