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Ford Hall Forum

The Ford Hall Forum is the nation's oldest continuously operating free public lecture series. Its mission is to foster an informed and effective citizenry and to promote freedom of speech through the public presentation of lectures, debates, and discussions. Forum events illuminate the key issues facing our society by bringing to its podium knowledgeable and thought-provoking speakers. These speakers are presented in person, for free, and in settings, which facilitate frank and open debate.

http://www.fordhallforum.org/

Holding onto Humanity

Mon, Sep 23, 2024

An Israeli and a Palestinian who has lost a close family member to the conflict tell their personal stories of loss and explain their choice to engage in dialogue and reconciliation. Robi Damelin, spokesperson and director of International Relations for The Parents Circle - Families Forum joined the organization after her son was killed by a Palestinian Sniper. Layla Al-Sheikh, lives in Bethlehem in the West Bank. In 2002, her six-month-old son, Qussay became ill, and Israeli soldiers prevented her from taking him to the hospital, and he soon died from the lack of timely treatment.

The moderator is Charles M. Sennott, an award-winning author and editor with 30 years of experience in international, national, and local journalism. Previously, Sennott worked for many years as a reporter at the Boston Globe, where he became Bureau Chief for the Middle East and Europe and a leader of the paper's international coverage.

The Parents Circle - Families Forum is a joint Israeli-Palestinian organization made up of more than 750 bereaved families. Their common bond is that they have lost a close family member to the conflict. But instead of choosing revenge, they have chosen a path of reconciliation. Through their educational activities, these bereaved members have joined together to take tens of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis on journeys of reconciliation. Learn more about the work of
The Parents Circle – Families Forum

American Friends of the Parents Circle – Families Forum shares the human side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the American public in order to foster a peace and reconciliation process.

Presented by Suffolk University's Ford Hall Forum, Political Science & Legal Studies Department, Communication, Journalism & Media Department, Office of Diversity, Access, and Inclusion, Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion, and The Parent’s Circle – Families Forum and the Global Citizens Circle.

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A History of Our Future

Thu, Sep 19, 2024

Luisa Neubauer, the acclaimed German climate activist and co-founder of the school strike for climate movement in Germany, commonly referred to as Fridays for Our Future discusses her recent co-authored book, Beginning to End the Climate Crisis: A History of our Future with Sabine von Mering, director of the Center for German and European Studies and professor of German and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Brandeis University and co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Grassroots Climate Activism, and a climate activist with 350Mass, and Jule Manitz, a climate justice activist with Extinction Rebellion Boston, where she plays a pivotal role in organizing and supporting impactful protests, including civil disobedience actions.

The moderator is Beth Daley, executive editor and general manager of The Conversation and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for climate reporting at The Boston Globe.

In this book, Luisa Neubauer, the best-known German climate activist, and her co-author create the history of our future. If we don’t change course now, we’ll eliminate ourselves. Politicians, entrepreneurs, citizens, everyone must take action. But how? One thing is undisputed: There is no planet B. We must inform and organize ourselves to save the future. In Beginning to End the Climate Crisis, Neubauer presents solutions that are ready to be implemented and must finally be put into practice. But she also demonstrates the attitude with which we must deal with this exceptional situation: undaunted but level-headed. And unyielding towards those who determine our future. Because the last chance for a positive end to the climate crisis is NOW.

This event is part of a new series of author events - the First Annual Book Festival- , presented by Ford Hall Forum at Suffolk University and Brandeis University Press. The series is based on recently published books from Brandeis University Press and brings prominent authors to Boston to discuss topics of current and enduring interest.

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“Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History” with co-author Gregory P. Downs & historian Vincent Brown

Mon, Oct 7, 2024

Join American Ancestors featured author and a guest historian-expert for an insightful discussion of Nat Turner, Black Prophet, a bold reinterpretation of the causes and legacy of Nat Turner's rebellion. This new, definitive account offers a fresh look at Black history.

In August 1831, a group of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, rose up to fight for their freedom. They attacked the plantations on which their enslavers lived and attempted to march on the county seat of Jerusalem, from which they planned to launch an uprising across the South. After the rebellion was suppressed, well over a hundred people, Black and white, lay dead or were hanged. The uprising was the idea of a single man: Nat Turner. An enslaved preacher, he was as enigmatic as he was brilliant. He was also something more—a prophet, one who claimed to have received visions from the Spirit urging him to act.

With co-author Gregory P. Downs and moderator-historian Vincent Brown of Harvard, we’ll unpack how and why Nat Turner inspired the largest enslaved people’s rebellion in the US between 1811 and 1861 and became an enduring icon of resistance. Nat Turner, Black Prophet, a narrative history by the late historian Anthony E. Kaye and Downs, his collaborator, provides a new understanding of one of the nineteenth century's most decisive events.

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Nancy Nichols with Women Behind the Wheel

Thu, Apr 18, 2024

Suffolk University’s Ford Hall Forum; Communication, Journalism & Media, English, and the History, Language & Global Culture Departments, and Women’s & Gender Studies Program; present:

An evening with award-winning author Nancy A. Nichols, upon the publication of her new book Women Behind the Wheel: An Unexpected and Personal History of the Car. She will be joined in conversation by Amy Monticello, MFA, associate professor and chair, English Department, Suffolk University.

About Women Behind the Wheel

The invention of the automobile a little more than a century ago created a new and movable arena in which women’s struggle for power and autonomy would play out in myriad and often unexpected ways. Cars shaped the way women live, the way women work and date and dress, the way they care for their families, and the way they approach the elusive dream of work-life balance.

Yet despite its dramatic impact on the lives of women, few have stopped the speeding automobile in its tracks to document the impact this technology has had on women. The car may have been “born in a masculine manger,” but beyond this persistent men-and-machine myth lies a different story: women, too, have always loved their cars and the exhilarating freedom of the open road.

Blending cultural analysis, biography, literary criticism, and memoir, Women Behind the Wheel reclaims a neglected history and reveals how the car—and all that surrounds it—has become our most gendered technology.

Praise for Women Behind the Wheel
“Fascinating, funny, enraging and often very moving. For all its hard-edged machinery, gender warring and auto-business shenanigans, the emotional engine of this book is Nichols’s own poignant story.”—The New York Times

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Upward Mobility in Boston: 50 Years After Busing

Mon, May 6, 2024

Suffolk University's Ford Hall Forum and Moakley Archive & Institute, The Boston Desegregation and Busing Initiative, and GBH Forum Network, continue a series of programs examining the lasting impacts of the l974 landmark decision to desegregate Boston’s Public Schools. This panel discusses upward mobility in Boston, exploring the city’s historic institutional roadblocks that have hindered progress for people of color fifty years after busing. It explores solutions to address these persistent issues such as enhancing educational opportunities, closing the wealth gap, increasing home ownership, and broadening access to job opportunities.

The panelists are Ron Bell, longtime community activist and founder of Dunk the Vote, and alumnus of Boston Latin School; Karilyn Crockett, Ph.D., assistant professor, Urban History, Public Policy & Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Tatiana M. F. Cruz, Ph.D., assistant professor and interdisciplinary program director of Africana Studies, Department of Critical Race, Gender and Cultural Studies, Simmons University. The program’s moderator is Kris Hooks, editor-in-chief of The Boston Globe’s newsroom team, Money, Power, Inequality: Closing the Racial Wealth Gap, which focuses on addressing the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston.

Background
In our first program, Driving for Desegregation: Boston 50 Years After Busing, Adrian Walker, columnist for The Boston Globe, led a panel that explored the long-term impacts of busing on the city of Boston, including the current state of Boston’s public schools and racial equity in a myriad of arenas. In our second program held last week, our panel, moderated by Stephanie Leydon, GBH News, the panel explored race, housing, and education equity 50 years after busing. This discussion explored the impact of race-based discriminatory housing policies and education funding formulas while addressing the more recent problems of gentrification and housing affordability and how Boston positions itself to compete with its suburban neighbors when it comes to educational outcomes.

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Busing Crisis in Boston

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Ford Hall Forum
Gender Equality and Reproductive Rights After Dobbs

Tue, Apr 2, 2024

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade sparked dramatic shifts in the abortion and reproductive rights landscape in the United States. These changes have cut to the core of the nature of democracy in America.

This panel examines the far-reaching consequences of restrictions on reproductive and LGBTQ rights nearly two years after the Dobbs decision. Gender equality activists and advocates discuss how reproductive justice is intertwined with the wider attack on bodily autonomy and what can we do to protect these rights in this election year and beyond.

The afternoon’s panelists are Dallas Ducar, RN, CEO, Transhealth; Polly Crozier, Esq., Director of Family Advocacy, GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), and Kristie, Monast, MS Ed, Executive Director, HealthQ. The afternoon’s moderator is Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber, PhD, associate professor and chair, Communication, Journalism & Media Department, Suffolk University.

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Odie Henderson with Black Caesars And Foxy Cleopatras - A History of Blaxploitation Cinema

Wed, Feb 28, 2024

Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras is a definitive account of Blaxploitation cinema—the freewheeling, often shameless, and wildly influential genre—from a distinctive voice in film history and criticism

In 1971, two films grabbed the movie business, shook it up, and launched a genre that would help define the decade. Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, an independently produced film about a male sex worker who beats up cops and gets away, and Gordon Parks’s Shaft, a studio-financed film with a killer soundtrack, were huge hits, making millions of dollars. Sweetback upended cultural expectations by having its Black rebel win in the end, and Shaft saved MGM from bankruptcy. Not for the last time did Hollywood discover that Black people went to movies too. The Blaxploitation era was born.

Written by Boston Globe film critic Odie Henderson, Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras is a spirited history of a genre and the movies that he grew up watching, which he loves without irony (but with plenty of self-awareness and humor.) Blaxploitation was a major trend, but it was never simple. The films mixed self-empowerment with exploitation, base stereotypes with essential representation that spoke to the lives and fantasies of Black viewers. The time is right for a reappraisal, understanding these films in the context of the time, and exploring their lasting influence.

Odie Henderson will be in conversation with Candace McDuffie, nationally acclaimed senior writer at The Root, who focuses on race, gender, and entertainment.

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50 Years After Busing: Race, Housing, and Education Equity in Boston

Thu, Feb 15, 2024

Suffolk University’s Ford Hall Forum, the Moakley Archive & Institute, and GBH Forum Network present a program exploring the relationship between access to affordable housing and educational opportunity in Boston’s public schools nearly fifty years after the school busing crisis. This program, moderated by Stephanie Leydon, Executive Producer of digital video at GBH News, is the second in a series examining the lasting impacts of the landmark decision to desegregate Boston’s Public Schools in 1974. This discussion will take a look back at the impact of race-based discriminatory housing policies and education funding formulas while addressing the more recent problems of gentrification and housing affordability. How does Boston position itself to compete with its suburban neighbors when it comes to educational outcomes?

Join us and lend your voice to this important discussion.

Event sponsored by The Boston Desegregation & Busing Initiative.

Explore the history of Boston’s busing crisis via the digital archives of The Boston Public Schools Desegregation Project, the GBH Archives, and Suffolk University’s Moakley Archive & Institute.

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Busing Crisis in Boston

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Ford Hall Forum
The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America

Thu, Apr 11, 2024

Boston, April 5, 1976. As the city simmered with racial tension over forced school busing, newsman Forman photographed a white protester outside City Hall assaulting the Black attorney Landsmark with the American flag. The photograph shocked Boston and made front pages across the U.S. and the world and won a Pulitzer Prize. Masur has done extensive research, including personal interviews with those involved, to reveal the unknown story of what really happened that day and afterward. This evocative "biography of a photograph" unpacks this arresting image to trace the lives of the men who intersected at that moment, to examine the power of photography and the meaning of the flag, and to reveal how a single picture helped change race relations in Boston and America. The Soiling of Old Glory, like the photograph itself, offers a dramatic window into the turbulence of the 1970s and race relations in America.

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Busing Crisis in Boston

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Ford Hall Forum
Driving for Desegregation: Boston 50 Years After Busing

Thu, Oct 26, 2023

Adrian Walker of The Boston Globe moderates a discussion with Zebulon V. Miletsky, PhD., associate professor of Africana Studies, Stonybrook University and the author of, A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Struggle, Alisa R. Drayton, Executive Director, Yawkey Club of Roxbury, and Marilyn Flowers-Marion, chairperson, Retired Teachers Chapter of the Boston Teachers Union, on their lived experiences of court-ordered busing in Boston during the 1970s. The panel also explores the long-term impacts of busing on the city of Boston, including the current state of Boston’s public schools and racial equity in a myriad of arenas. Looking to the future, the panel considers what a more equitable Boston Public School System might look like.

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Busing Crisis in Boston

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Ford Hall Forum

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