PAUL ORTIZ

An African American and Latinx History of the United States

WHEN: NOVEMBER 12, 2019 @ 7:30 PM

WHERE: ST. JOHN’S PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 2727 COLLEGE AVENUE, BERKELEY, CA

“An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a gift. Paul Ortiz wields the engaging power of a social historian to bring vividly to life so many Black and Brown fighters for human rights in the Americas. Ambitious, original, and enlightening, Ortiz weaves together the seemingly separate strivings of Latinx and Black peoples into a beautiful tapestry of struggle.”—Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning

“An epic, panoramic account of class struggles in the Western Hemisphere.” —Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “global south” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz shows how placing African American, Latinx and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism. Drawing on deep narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links the struggles of African American civil rights activists fighting Jim Crow laws with Mexican labor organizers warring against capitalism with abolitionists and Latin American revolutionaries to reveal the radically different ways people of the diaspora have addressed crucial issues still plaguing this country today.

Paul Ortiz is the author of Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920, and co-editor of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South.