Acclaimed Photojournalist Laylah Amatullah Barrayn Pays Tribute to John Hope Franklin at Black History Month Memorial Event
Feb. 28, 2019
The noted artist, academic, and activist honored Franklin, chair emeritus of the Brooklyn College History Department, and his groundbreaking impact on academia and social justice.
Acclaimed photojournalist Laylah Amatullah Barrayn. All photos by Craig Stokle.
Professor and Chair of the Department of History Gunja SenGupta speaks to the audience.
Barrayn begins the presentation of her latest photography collection.
Barrayn demonstrates the standard greeting of the Senegalese Sufi Murid community.
Left to right: Associate Professor and Daniel M. Lyons Chair of History Benjamin L. Carp, Assistant Professor of History Louis Fishman, Associate Professor of History Philip Napoli, Professor of History Jocelyn Wills, Barrayn, Professor of History David G. Troyansky, and SenGupta.
Faculty, students, and members of the community gathered in the Woody Tanger Auditorium in the Brooklyn College Library on Feb. 27, to delve in the life and work of John Hope Franklin for "Black History Month: Commemorating John Hope Franklin with Art and Activism." The event is part of a recurring memorial designed to honor the renowned historian, who in 1956 at Brooklyn College, became the first African American to chair a history department at a primarily white academic institution—a feat which, at that time, earned him both the front page and a feature in The New York Times. The featured speaker this year was acclaimed photojournalist Laylah Amatullah Barrayn.
"It was my distinct honor and privilege to have this opportunity to celebrate the life and work of John Hope Franklin," said Barrayn, who covered the first Million Woman March in Philadelphia in 1997, which she says was not only a catalyst for her professional aspirations, but also for her activism.
Barrayn's work has been featured in a number of museums and public history forums like the Brooklyn Historical Society, as well as across a variety of international print and digital media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and BBC. She engages in the work of what commentators have described as "women seeing women"—documenting the lives of women of the African diaspora neglected in traditional media or historical narratives. Her latest project, which she shared on a projection screen for the audience, focuses on a Sufi Murid community hailing from Senegal called Baye Fall. It represents a tradition of activist scholarship and creative activity that connects what exists in the historical records and in her own studio with the work of building an inclusive, pluralistic society of the sort that Franklin envisioned.
"John Hope Franklin has left us a transformational legacy as a scholar, teacher, public intellectual, and civil rights activist," says Gunja SenGupta, professor and chair of the Department of History. "A pioneer in the field of African American history, he taught us to place this history at the center of our understanding of the United States, and the larger world with which it is connected. His work, From Slavery to Freedom, updated and reprinted numerous times, and translated into several languages, remains an iconic text in U.S. history."
In the spirit of Franklin, the Department of History seeks to use their programming to help Brooklyn College students, and the larger community, appreciate the ways in which examining history can produce a better, fairer, and more just society. The department believes understanding that structures of inequality or injustice developed historically, and are not "natural," can help reform or dismantle those structures.
Previous memorial events at the college commemorated Franklin with lectures by leading scholars of African-American history, such as David Levering Lewis, Paula Giddings, David Blight, Manish Sinha, and Marisa Fuentes, and filmmaker Sam Pollard; a student play on Franklin; and a freedom concert led by Assistant Professor, Director of Choruses, and Coordinator of Voice Studies Malcolm J. Merriweather, interweaving prose, poetry, and music, including a student composition inspired by Franklin's life and legacy.
Yesterday's event was hosted by the Department of History in cooperation with the Ethyle R.Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, the departments of Africana Studies, Art, Political Science, Sociology, and Television and Radio, and the Women's and Gender Studies Program, and was generously funded by historian and former Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences Kimberley Phillips-Boehm.
Last year's event included Franklin's son, John W., who serves as the cultural historian and senior manager in the Office of External Affairs at Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, and was co-editor, with his father, of My Life and an Era: the Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin. He also arranged for Brooklyn College students to visit the museum.
"We will continue this series in the fall with programs on public history featuring John W. Franklin, among other figures from the worlds of academia, art, and activism," SenGupta says. "These events will provide an opportunity to reflect on the continuities that bind the issues of our day, from voting rights challenges, poverty, and racialized criminal justice, to policy debates over affirmative action and reparations. The events will also serve as a bridge between the academy and the communities by which we are surrounded."
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