THE Symposium is happening on SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8th from 11:00AM - 5:45PM.

Since the 2015 premiere of “Hypocrisy of Justice,” collaborating artists Dana Hall and Cheryl Lynn Bruce, and Kerry James Marshall have expressed interest in further developing and remounting the project. There has also been an interest expressed by the artists, the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, the Logan Center for the Arts, the University of Chicago Presents, various South Side organizations, and several departments at the University of Chicago in building a convening in connection with the performances to engage in cross-sectoral conversations centering the many structural issues the novel brings forth, particularly intersecting inequities within systems and institutions, along with the lived experience of confinement, redemption, hope, and the idea of home. On Saturday, October 8th, 2022, the Chicago community is invited to participate in four 75–minute moderated discussions and other activations with activist/organizers, scholars, journalists, practitioners, and artists. The convening is free to attend. We encourage you to RSVP. All symposium activities are hosted by the Logan Center.

The symposium is curated and organized by Kate Dumbleton, Executive/Artistic Director of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival in partnership with Dana Hall, the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, the Logan Center, and University of Chicago Presents, with additional support from the Jazz Institute of Chicago Dr. Timuel Black Grant Program, Illinois Humanities Envisioning Justice, and the National Public Housing Museum. Additional thanks to SAIC graduate students in Arts Administration and Policy.

Symposium panels

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Nearly a character in Native Son, the backdrop of oppressive living conditions in the “black belt” on the South Side of Chicago in the 1930s swirls around the novel’s central character, Bigger Thomas, and his family and friends. This discussion will consider both the historical and current state of housing, and include the exploration of discriminatory practices, displacement, eviction, and strategies for change. This panel is presented in partnership with the National Public Housing Museum.

Moderated by: Natalie Moore

Panelists: André Perry, Shana griffin, Tonika Lewis Johnson

TIME: 11:00AM-12:15PM (Logan Center Performance Penthouse)

Natalie Moore. Moderator
Natalie Moore covers segregation and inequality. Her enterprise reporting has tackled race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence. Natalie’s work has been broadcast on the BBC, Marketplace and NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. Natalie is the author of The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, winner of the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction and a Buzzfeed best nonfiction book of 2016. She is also co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang and Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation. Natalie writes a monthly column for the Chicago Sun-Times. Her work has been published in Essence, Ebony, the Chicago Reporter, Bitch, In These Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian. She is the 2017 recipient of Chicago Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award. In 2010, she received the Studs Terkel Community Media Award for reporting on Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods. In 2009, she was a fellow at Columbia College’s Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media, which allowed her to take a reporting trip to Libya. Natalie has won several journalism awards, including a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism. Other honors are from the Radio Television Digital News Association (Edward R. Murrow), Public Radio News Directors Incorporated, National Association of Black Journalists, Illinois Associated Press and Chicago Headline Club. The Chicago Reader named her best journalist in 2017. In 2018, she received an honorary doctorate from Adler University. In These Times gave her the 2017 Voice of Progressive Journalism Award. Natalie frequently collaborates with Chicago artist Amanda Williams. She is a 2021 USA Fellow. The Pulitzer Center named her a 2020 Richard C. Longworth Media Fellow for international reporting. In 2021, University of Chicago Center for Effective Government (CEG), based at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, welcomed her its first cohort of Senior Practitioner Fellows. Prior to joining WBEZ staff in 2007, Natalie was a city hall reporter for the Detroit News. She has also been an education reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and a reporter for the Associated Press in Jerusalem. Natalie has an M.S.J. in Newspaper Management from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a B.A. in Journalism from Howard University. She has taught at Columbia College and Medill. Natalie and her husband Rodney live in Hyde Park with their four daughters.

André Perry. Panelist
André M. Perry is a Senior Fellow with the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, a scholar-in-residence at American University, and a columnist for the Hechinger Report. Perry is the author of the new book “Know Your Price: Valuing BlackLives and Property in America’s Black Cities,” which is currently available wherever books are sold. A nationally known and respected commentator on race, structural inequality, and education, Perry is a regular contributor to MSNBC and has been published by The New York Times, The Nation, The Washington Post, TheRoot.com and CNN.com. Perry has also made appearances on CNN, PBS, National Public Radio, NBC, and ABC. Perry’s research focuses on race and structural inequality, education, and economic inclusion. Perry’s recent scholarship at Brookings has analyzed Black-majority cities and institutions in America, focusing on valuable assets worthy of increased investment. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Perry has documented the underlying causes for the outsized number of coronavirus-related deaths in Black communities. Perry’s Brookings research has illuminated how certain forms of social distancing historically accelerated economic and social disparities between Black people and the rest of the country. Perry also mapped racial inequities in housing, income, and health to underscore how policy discrimination makes Black Americans more vulnerable to COVID-19. Perry’s research has spotlighted the struggles of Black businesses including artists and art institutions, restaurants, and barbershops and beauty salons—as they await federal relief from COVID-19’s economic impact. In education, Perry explained how college campus closings put housing-insecure students at risk during the pandemic. Perry has also written on the unrealized value of teachers’ work that’s been made apparent by COVID-19, and has commented on thepotentiallossofBlackteachersas a result of an impending recession. A native of Pittsburgh, Pa., Perry earned his Ph.D. in education policy and leadership from the University of Maryland College Park.

Shana M. griffin. Panelist
Shana M. griffin (b. 1974, New Orleans) is a feminist activist, researcher, sociologist, artist, abolitionist, and mother whose work engages history and memory as sites of resistance, rupture, and protest. Her practice is research-based and interdisciplinary, existing across the fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, digital humanities, and land-use planning and within movements challenging urban displacement, carcerality, reproductive control, climate impacts, and gender-based violence. She engages in research, organizing projects, and art practices that attend to the lived experiences of the Black diaspora, centering on the particular experiences of Black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, incarceration, polluted environments, reproductive legislation, economic exploitation, and housing discrimination.
Shana is a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee and a Junebug Productions, 2020-2021 John O'Neal Cultural Arts Fellow; and was 2020-2021Visual Artist in Resident at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, where she presented her studio work as part of SOLOS: Exhibitions and New Work Showcases by CAC Artists-in-Residents featuring DISPLACING Blackness: Cartographies of Violence Extraction and Disposability.
She is the founder of PUNCTUATE, a feminist research, art, and activist initiative foregrounding the embodied aesthetics and practices of Black feminist thought; and creator of DISPLACED, a multimedia feminist and public history project tracing the geographies of Black displacement, dislocation, and containment. Shana is also the co-founder of Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, the first community land trust in New Orleans. Shana holds a Master's of Arts in Sociology and two Bachelors of Arts degrees in History and Sociology.

Tonika Lewis Johnson. Panelsit
Tonika Johnson is a photographer, social justice artist and life-long resident of Chicago’s South Side neighborhood of Englewood. She is also co-founder of the Englewood Arts Collective and Resident Association of Greater Englewood, which seek to reframe the narrative of South Side communities, and mobilize people and resources for positive change. Tonika’s art often explores urban segregation, documenting the nuance and richness of the black community to counter media depictions of Chicago’s violence. As a trained photojournalist and former teaching artist, Tonika’s artistic legacy has gained citywide recognition in the last five years. In 2017, she was recognized by Chicago Magazine as a Chicagoan of the Year for her photography of Englewood's everyday beauty. Her Englewood-based photography projects "From the INside," and "Everyday Rituals," were exhibited at Rootwork Gallery in Pilsen, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Harold Washington Library Center and at Loyola University's Museum of Art (LUMA). LUMA also exhibited her Folded Map project in 2018, which visually investigates disparities among “map twins”—Chicago residents who live on opposite ends of the same streets across the city’s racial and economic divides—and brings them together to have a conversation. An excerpt of the project was also displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art within The Long Dream exhibition. Since 2018, Tonika has transformed Folded Map into an advocacy and policy-influencing tool that invites audiences to open a dialogue about how we are all socially impacted by racial and institutional conditions that segregate Chicago. In 2020, she formalized Folded Map into a nonprofit organization, where she serves as Creative Executive Officer. In 2019, she was named one of Field Foundation’s Leaders for a New Chicago andm is not serving her second year as appointed member of the Cultural Advisory Council of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events by the Chicago City Council. Most recently, Tonika was selected as the National Public Housing Museum’s 2021 Artist as Instigator. In that role, she’ll work on her newest project: Inequity for Sale, which highlights the living history of Greater Englewood homes sold on Land Sale Contracts in the 50s and 60s.

Lunchtime Discussion: Cheryl Lynn Bruce & Dana Hall

Moderated by: Kamilah Rashied

Two of the project creators discuss their approach to creating Hypocrisy of Justice and share insights gained from the experience.

TIME: 12:45PM-1:15PM

Cheryl Lynn Bruce
Veteran director, writer, and performer Cheryl Lynn Bruce has staged productions for Victory Gardens Theatre; Teatro Vista Theatre Company; Illinois Humanities; Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Columbia College; University of Illinois; Indiana University; De Paul University; and Creative Arts Foundation. Ms. Bruce developed and directed Sandra Delgado’s La Havana Madrid; developed and directed Delgado’s Para, Graciela and Misty DeBerry’s Milkweed (both solo works); and directed Before the Pop, Pop, Pop for Collaboraction’s inaugural citywide Peace book Festival (2016). She also developed and directed Kerry James Marshall’s Bunraku-influenced urban comic Rythm Master for the Wexner Center for the Arts (2008). She won both the African American Arts and Black Theatre Alliance Best Direction Awards for From the Mississippi Delta and earned a Joseph Jefferson nomination for her direction of Jitney, both Congo Square Theatre productions. Other recognitions include the Illinois Public Humanities Award (2019); Robert Rauschenberg Residency (2015); a Yale Art Gallery residency (2013); and Jane Addams Hull-House Woman of Valor Award (2010). Selected credits: From the Mississippi Delta (Circle in the Square) The Convert (McCarter Theatre, Kirk Douglas Theatre); Death and the King’s Horseman, Nomathemba (Kennedy Center) Gem of the Ocean (Ensemble Theatre); The Story (Milwaukee Repertory); Film/TV: Stranger Than Fiction, Daughters of the Dust, The Fugitive, Prison Break, There Are No Children Here, Separate but Equal, To Sir with Love, 2.

Dana Hall
Dana Hall has been an important musician on their international music scenes since 1992, after having left aerospace engineering for a life in music. He holds professional performance and tour credits on six continents,
and extensive concert, club, and festival experience throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia with the ensembles of others. He has performed, toured, and/or recorded with such luminaries as Branford Marsalis, Nicholas Payton, Curtis Fuller, Joe Lovano, Horace Silver, Benny Golson, Marcus Belgrave, BobbyHutcherson, Michael Brecker, Betty Carter, Roy Hargrove, Joshua Redman, Jackie McLean, Jimmy Heath, Clark Terry, Maria Schneider, andJoe Henderson, among others. Former artistic director of the Chicago Jazz Ensemble and permanent member of the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, Hall has for the last thirteen years been a member of the Terell Stafford Quintet, touring extensively with the group and featured on its last four recordings. He also leads a number of ensembles and projects, including the Dana Hall Quintet; the DanaHall/Nick Mazzarella Duo; Polyglot, a quartet devoted to creative improvised music; Black Fire, a project dedicated to the music of Chicago-born composer and pianist Andrew Hill; Spring, amusical endeavor featuring woodwind specialists Geof Bradfield and John Wojciechowski, acoustic bassist Clark Sommers, and his own drums, cymbals, and mbira; and a projectcalledBlackArk Movement, which was premiered in 2014 at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival. Hall’s debut CD as a leader, Into the Light, featuring his quintet, was released to great critical acclaim. As an educator, Dana Hall is a professor of music and the director f jazz studies at DePaul University, where he teaches courses in jazz studies and ethnomusicology in addition to serving as coordinator of the Jazz Combo program. Hall formerly was on the faculty of the Undergraduate College at theUniversity of Chicago teaching courses in world music; at Columbia College Chicago, teaching private drumset instruction; and an associate professor of music at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, teaching courses in jazz studies and ethnomusicology. Dana Hall uses and endorses Yamaha drums, Zildjian cymbals, Remo drumheads, and Promark drumsticks.

Kamilah Rashied. Moderator
Kamilah Rashied is an arts administrator, educator, writer and artist that has worked from every angle of cultural production with two decades of experience in arts education and outreach, new program development and public engagement in the arts. Cultivating a broad range of experiences for the public from youth initiatives to live events and talks, their work is deliberately itinerant, community centered and socially concerned. Desiring to leave conventional assumptions about fine art, Rashied is more concerned with whom the art is for and what will lead to more dynamic engagement with it. Though the medium changes the endeavor is always the same–using art as a vehicle to bring people together for an earnest conversation about who we really are. Kamilah has contributed to new and ongoing programs at numerous arts organizations in Chicago including: the Art Institute of Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, Illinois Humanities, Hyde Park Art Center, Stony Island Arts Bank, Black Cinema House, Open TV, Young Chicago Authors, Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Victory Gardens Theater among others. Rashied is currently the Director of Education at Court Theatre, the professional theatre of University of Chicago.

The Carceral State

Questions of seeing and being seen in relationship to individual and collective humanness are woven throughout Native Son, as are the structural elements preventing their full consideration. This is particularly acute in the novel’s third section, “Fate,” with which Dana Hall and Cheryl Lynn Bruce engage for this commission. This discussion considers the structural and sociological elements of anti-black violence, as well as remedies-at-scale for addressing them.

Moderated by: Colette Payne

Panelists: Elliot Currie, Jamie Kalven, Brenda Palms-Barber

TIME: 1:30PM-2:45PM (Logan Center Performance Penthouse)

Colette Payne. Moderator
Colette Payne is an organizer, leader, student, mother, and grandmother. Her passion is to educate families to build healthier communities.
In her current role as the Director of the Women’s Justice Institute’s Reclamation Project, Payne helps engage women who have been directly impacted by the criminal legal system to become agents of change and to create solutions to end the incarceration of women and girls. From 2014-2017, she was the Coordinator of the Visible Voices program for CLAIM (Chicago Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Mothers), a Program of Cabrini Green Legal Aid. And in 2015, she joined the delegation to assess women’s prisons in Illinois, becoming the first formerly incarcerated woman in the United States to serve in this role.
Payne frequently speaks at community events on topics including mental health care, reproductive justice, the need for increased programming in prison, the reunification of children and mothers, and reducing barriers to employment for people with criminal records. She has appeared on television and spoken at conferences, churches, and universities, and testified before legislative committees.
Payne has also received numerous awards for her work, including CLAIM’s JoAnn Archibald Award (2013), the Jane Addams Center for Social Policy and Research’s Community Leadership Award (2015), and the Safer Foundation’s Carre Visionary Award (2018). Most recently, she was a recipient of the Chicago Foundation for Women’s 2020 Impact Award, for her dedication to improving the lives of women and girls in the Chicago area.

Elliot Currie. Panelist
Elliott Currie is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine, USA, and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law, School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He is the author of many works on crime, delinquency, drug abuse, and social policy, including Confronting Crime: an American Challenge, Dope and Trouble: Portraits of Delinquent Youth, Reckoning: Drugs, the Cities, and the American Future, The Road to Whatever: Middle Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence, and The Roots of Danger: Violent Crime in Global Perspective. His book Crime and Punishment in America, revised and expanded in 2013, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction in 1999. He is a co-author of Whitewashing Race: the Myth of a Colorblind Society, winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change and a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Heis the co-editor, with Walter S. DeKeseredy, of Progressive Justice in an Age of Repression. His most recent book, A Peculiar Indifference: the Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America, explores the sources of enduring racial disparities in violent death and injury in America and outlines strategies to reduce them. Currie is the recipient of both the August Vollmer Award and the Mentor Award from the American Society of Criminology. Heis a graduate of Roosevelt University in Chicago, and received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Jamie Kalven. Panelist
Jamie Kalven is a writer and founder of the invisible Institute. He is the author of Working With Available Light: A Family’s World After Violence and the editor of A Worthy Tradition: Freedom of Speech in America by his father Harry Kalven, Jr.He has reported extensively on patterns of police abuse and impunity. He was the plaintiff in Kalven v. Chicago, in which the Illinois appellate court ruled that documents bearing on allegations of police misconduct are public information. His reporting first brought the police shooting of Laquan McDonald to public attention; and he co-produced 16 Shots, an Emmy Award winning documentary on the McDonald case. His2016 series “Code of Silence” in The Intercept exposed the criminal activities of a team of corrupt Chicago officers operating in public housing and has contributed to more than a hundred exonerations. Among the national awards he has received are the 2015 George Polk Award for Local Reporting, the2016 Riden hour Courage Prize, and the 2017 Hillman Prize for Web Journalism. The Invisible Institute received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

Brenda Palms-Barber. Panelist
Brenda Palms Barber, Founder/President & CEO of the North Lawndale Employment Network, an urban workforce development agency, and founding social entrepreneur and CEO of Sweet Beginnings, LLC, a social enterprise using urban beekeeping to create jobs for those with significant barriers to employment, has served as President & CEO of NLEN since its founding in 1999.
She launched NLEN’s wholly-owned subsidiary social enterprise, Sweet Beginnings, in 2004 to ensure its hardest to employ clients could get jobs and gain a history of employment. Under Brenda’s leadership, NLEN has grown from two to 53 employees and generates an annual budget in excess of $5.2 million.
Today, NLEN serves more than 2,500 people per year. Sweet Beginnings has expanded from a cottage industry to distribution at more than 43 Mariano stores, both O’Hare and Midway airports, and has been awarded one of the first Benefit Chicago loans for social impact businesses. NLEN has received numerous awards including one of the first MacArthur Foundation Awards for Creative and Effective Institutions (2006) and the prestigious Bank of America Neighborhood Builders Award (2015) and currently 2018 Citi Foundation Community Progress Makers.
Brenda has raised the national profile of NLEN, Sweet Beginnings, and the plight of people with barriers to employment through extensive media coverage including CNN, the NBC Today Show, CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley, a TEDWomen Documentary, and Lifetime. Brenda has published in the Wall Street Journal and appeared on ABC7 Windy City Live as a 4-Star Chicagoan. In recognition of her innovation and commitment to helping those in need, Congressman Danny Davis awarded Brenda the Cardiss Collins Trailblazer Award (2013).
Brenda is a graduate of Harvard’s Strategic Perspectives in Non-Profit Management program and the Chicago Urban League’s next One entrepreneurship program, which included classes at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She holds a Master of Science in Nonprofit Management from the Spertus Institute in Chicago.

Systems of Care: Who is Being Served?

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed many intersecting inequities in public health in the United States, including food insecurity, environmental racism, and lack of access to health care. This discussion considers the current state of activism around community care, food systems, environmental justice, historical and emerging systems of mutual aid, and other transformational ideas for the future.

Moderated by: Sabina Shaikh

Panelists: Maira Khwaja, Trina Reynolds Tyler, Omar Tate

TIME: 3:00PM-4:15PM (Logan Center Performance Penthouse)

Sabina Shaikh. Moderator
Dr. Sabina Shaikh is Director of the Program on Global Environment and a Senior Lecturer in Environmental and Urban Studies in the College, Committee on Geographical Sciences in the Social Sciences Division, and at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. She is the faculty director of Chicago Studies and co-leads the Environmental Frontiers Initiative at the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation. Her research focuses on the relationship of humans to environmental change, related to health, livelihoods and migration. Her collaborative research on water sustainability in the Mekong Basin of Cambodia has been funded by the National Science Foundation and recently by through the Center for International Social Science Research, Social Science Research Center and the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago.

Maira Khwaja. Panelist

Maira Khwaja is director of public strategy at the Invisible Institute, a non-profit journalism organization on the South Side, where she makes information about police misconduct and accountability accessible to populations most affected by government negligence.

As a writer and educator, she works with young people most affected by policing in the South Side to shape new discussions and efforts around public safety. She organizes with community group Not Me We for housing stability and education equity in South Shore, and with Market Box, which delivers critical information and fresh food from local farms to Black and low-income residents in the South Side of Chicago. Her writing on mutual aid, base-building, and policing in Chicago has been published in the South Side Weekly, The Funambulist, and The New York Times.

Maira was named a 2021 Leader for a New Chicago by the Field Foundation and MacArthur Foundation. A daughter of Pakistani immigrants, Maira was raised in Pittsburgh and graduated from the University of Chicago, where she studied history and the relationship between gangs and churches. This is her tenth year in Chicago.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler. Panelist
Trina Reynolds Tyler is a data journalist for human rights, a South Side native and graduate of the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. She joined the Invisible Institute in 2016 as an AmeriCorps member doing outreach and working in the classroom with the Youth/Police Project, which builds long-term conversations with young Black people most affected by policing. Now, she directs the Invisible Institute’s Beneath the Surface project, which utilizes machine learning and narrative justice to identify gender based violence at the hands of Chicago police within complaint data, in close collaboration with Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG).
Trina organizes in South Shore with Not Me We, and serves on the advisory council for Dissenters, an international anti-militarist youth organization and a local school council of a Chicago Public School. As an abolitionist, she is interested in documenting how communities who have historically been unable to depend on the police create safe spaces and find accountability outside of the carceral state.

Omar Tate. Panelist

Omar Tate is a chef, artist, and cofounder of Honeysuckle Projects, a multifacted food company that focuses on the nuanced cultures and cuisines of the Black diaspora. Omar has emerged as a visionary and a leading thinker on the restaurant industry’s cultural development as a whole. He specifically focuses on race and ethnicity to tear down structural barriers through his practice in Honeysuckle, his pop-up cultural concept. In 2020, Honeysuckle was named pop up of the year by Esquire Magazine and in 2021, Time Magazine named Omar as one of the 100 innovators to watch as part of their Time100Next list.

Transforming Conditions (Reimagining Possibilities)

In the 2020 University of Chicago Martin Luther King, Jr. Day talk by journalist/writer Isabel Wilkerson, Wilkerson referenced the “destructive hesitancy of the well-meaning” as it relates to advancing equity and social/racial justice. This discussion considers the challenges of incrementalism; individual and collective freedom; black creativity; and strategies for change across sector and at scale.

Moderated by: Adam Green

Panelists: Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Richard Wallace, Angelique Power

TIME: 4:30PM-5:45PM (Logan Center Performance Penthouse)