LECTURES, 2008-09

Click here to see a complete list of 2008-09 lectures

Wednesday, October 8, 2008, 12:00-1:00pm
Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center

George Washington Williams:
The Case of a Neglected American Hero
A Wednesdays at the Center Program

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN
James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History
Duke University

LEA WERNICK FRIDMAN
Professor of English, City University of New York

This conversation explores the life and work of George Washington Williams, an African American writer, historian, legislator. A pioneer of the keystone human rights concept of “crimes against humanity,” Williams played a remarkable role in exposing the horrors of Leopold’s Congo and calling the Belgian monarch to account internationally.

John Hope Franklin, after whom the FHI is named, is the author of, among many other works, George Washington Williams: A Biography. Winner of the Clarence L. Holte Literary Prize, the book traces Dr. Franklin’s forty-year quest to find information about Williams. For a more detailed profile of Dr. Franklin, click here.

Lea Wernick Fridman is Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY. Fridman has published many scholarly works and a play on the Holocaust. She is the author of Words and Witness: Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies in the Representation of the Holocaust (SUNY 2000) and W/Hole in the Heart, a play was directed in New York by Robert Kalfin (2005) and will be forthcoming with the subtitle: An Illuminated Play in art book format. Her interest in Williams grew out of work on Conrad. Her current research focuses on Williams and, through his work, the relationship between American black experience of slavery and the development of human rights thought.

Part of “In the Name of Humanity: Atlantic Slavery, Leopold’s Congo, & the Legacy of Early Human Rights Pioneers,” an event series inaugurating the affiliation of the FHI and the Duke Human Rights Center (DHRC). Other events in the series include a screening of the documentary film King Leopold’s Ghostwith Director Pippa Scott and author Adam Hochschild, and a lecture by Hochschild entitled Freeing an Empire’s Slaves.