TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEYS FOR RACIAL JUSTICE:
AN EVENING IN CONVERSATION WITH ANGELA DAVIS, FANIA DAVIS AND MARGARET BURNHAM
Wednesday, October 26 at 7:00 pm
Doors open at 6:30pm
Spatz Theatre, 1855 Trollope Street
Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 0A4
MASKS ARE MANDATORY
This special event brings together three remarkable leaders who are beacons for racial justice in the US and around the world. Their advocacy and work for justice transformation has shaped a generation and seeded a vision of a better future. Their journeys for racial justice began together in Birmingham, Alabama, and continued to be interwoven through the height of the civil rights movement. Their relationship and connected experiences have rooted each panelist’s unique work for racial justice shared commitment to transformation through restorative justice.
Evening Program
Drumming performed by Drummers from Home
Welcome
Blessing provided by Elder Geri Musqua-Leblanc
Introduction by Emcee, Lindsay Ruck
Conversation with Panelists
Q & A (video)
Books written by Panelists and Emcee are available for purchase in the foyer before and after the event.
Panelists
Angela Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator – both at the university level and in the larger public sphere – has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice. She is the author of eleven books, including Abolition.Feminism.Now, co-authored with Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth Richie, and a new edition of her Autobiography. Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without carceral systems and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.
Fania Davis is a leading international voice on the intersections of racial and restorative justice. She is a long-time social justice activist, civil rights trial attorney, author, and educator with a PhD in Indigenous Knowledge. Davis came of age in Birmingham, Alabama during the social ferment of the civil rights era. These formative years, particularlly the murder of two close childhood friends in the 1963 Sunday School bombing, crystallized within Fania an enduring commitment to social transformation. For the next decades, she was active in the Civil Rights, Black liberation, women’s, prisoners’, peace, anti-racial violence, economic justice and anti-apartheid movements. Apprenticing with African indigenous healers catalyzed Fania’s search for a healing justice, ultimately leading her to serve as Founding Director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth and Co-Founding Board Member of the National Association of Community and Restorative Justice. Her numerous honors include the Lifetime Achievement award for excellence in Restorative Justice, the Black Feminist Shapeshifters and Waymakers’ award, the Tikkun (Repair the World) award, the Ella Jo Baker Human Rights award, and the Ebony POWER 100 award. The Los Angeles Times named her a New Civil Rights Leader of the 21st Century. She recently received the Open Society Foundations Justice Rising Award recognizing 16 Black movement leaders working towards racial justice in the United States. Among Davis’ publications is the Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice: Black Lives, Justice, and U.S. Social Transformation.
Margaret Burnham is University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University. Trained in law, Professor Burnham teaches, writes and practices in the field of historical injustice. She began her career in civil rights law at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. From 1970 to 1972 she represented Angela Davis, a life-long friend, in the California criminal prosecution. She was appointed to the bench in Massachusetts by Governor Michael Dukakis. She was designated to investigate human rights violations charged against the African National Congress by President Nelson Mandela. Professor Burnham is founder and director of Northeastern University’s Civil Rights & Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), a teaching, research and legal services program. CRRJ published the Nation’s leading online archive, the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, on anti-Black killings during the Jim Crow era. Burnham’s book, By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners, Norton Press has won wide acclaim.
Master of Ceremonies
Lindsay Ruck is a mother, author, and Coordinator of Africentric Learning and Resource Management with the Delmore “Buddy” Daye Learning Institute in Halifax. Lindsay lived in Ottawa for over a decade and studied journalism at Carleton University’s School of Journalism before returning home to Nova Scotia to continue her writing career. Lindsay hopes to educate, celebrate, and inspire through the art of storytelling. Her first book, Winds of Change: The Life and Legacy of Calvin W. Ruck, was a biography of her grandfather, and was nominated for a Dartmouth Book Award. She had the honour of acting as guest editor for a special issue of Understorey Magazine, which featured a talented group of African Nova Scotian female writers and artists. Her most recent book, Amazing Black Atlantic Canadians: Inspiring Stories of Courage & Achievement, is shortlisted for the 2022/2023 Hackmatack Children’s Choice Book Awards.
Narrators
Kai Butterfield, OCT, MT is pursuing their PhD in the Social Justice Education department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Their work as a research assistant on the Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation project (DOHR) informs their interest in the critical examination of restorative justice and its role in education. Kai’s current research focuses on the ways that restorative justice has been co-opted by the Ontario education system and weaponized against Black and Indigenous students. They contend that there is an immediate need to address settler colonialism, white supremacy, and carcerality as structural issues that drive the appropriation and misuse of restorative justice in education.
Jake MacIsaac is Assistant Director, Security Services at Dalhousie University where he focuses on promoting restorative approaches within campus security and with other campus stakeholders. Previously, Jake worked at Nova Scotia’s largest restorative justice agency, overseeing case work staff and managing 700+ youth justice referrals from police, the prosecution service and the courts annually. Jake was part of a three-person facilitation team overseeing the restorative justice process at Dalhousie’s Faculty of Dentistry in 2015 addressing climate and culture within the faculty.
Panel Moderator
Jennifer Llewellyn is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and the Chair in Restorative Justice (with funding support from the Donald R. Sobey Foundation) at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University. She previously held the Yogis and Keddy Chair in Human Rights Law and the Viscount Bennett Professorship in Law, at the Schulich School of Law.
Q & Α VIDEOS
Eni Oguntona of the Indigenous Blacks and Mi’kmaw Initiative at the Schulich School of Law
Patricia Whyte of the Elizabeth Fry Society of Mainland Nova Scotia
Megan Rahme of the Criminal Justice Coalition at the Schulich School of Law
Randolph Riley of the East Coast Prison Justice Society
Tony Smith and Gerry Morrison of VOICES (Victims of Institutional Child Exploitation Society)
Collaborating Parnters
The Restorative Lab is proud to host this event in partnership with the Elizabeth Fry Society of Mainland Nova Scotia, the Black Cultural Centre of Nova Scotia, the Indigenous Blacks and Mi’kmaw Initiative at the Schulich School of Law, VOICES (Victims of Institutional Child Exploitation Society), and the Criminal Justice Coalition – Schulich School of Law.
Event Sponsors
