DECEMBER 4, 2025
6:30PM – 8:00PM ET
A Live Virtual Event
Scholars, organizers, and teachers discuss teaching and documenting Black History in this online program.
This virtual event will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the publication of Charles M. Payne’s groundbreaking history of the Mississippi movement, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Payne will be joined in conversation by SNCC veteran Charlie Cobb, radical teacher Tess Raser, and historians of the Black freedom movement Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Emilye Crosby. 30 years after it was first published, this history remains a critical text for new generations of organizers carrying forward the struggle for freedom and justice
Watch the event at https://www.youtube.com/live/8IZksfHPqLA
PANELISTS
Charles Payne, Rutgers University – Newark
Charles M. Payne is the Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Rutgers University Newark and the Director of the Joseph Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Research. His research and teaching interests include urban education and school reform, social inequality, social change and modern African American history, particularly the Black Freedom Struggle. His books include So Much Reform, So Little Change, which examines the persistence of failure in urban schools, and a co-edited anthology, Teach Freedom: The African American Tradition of Education For Liberation, which is concerned with education as a tool for liberation from Reconstruction through Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools. He is also the author of Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure In Urban Education and I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. He is co-author of Debating the Civil Rights Movement and co-editor of Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850 -1950.
Emilye Crosby, SUNY Geneseo
Emilye Crosby has been a member of the Geneseo faculty since 1995. Prof. Crosby studies and teaches African-American history and the modern Civil Rights Movement. She has received numerous awards for her teaching, scholarship, and service. These include the Chancellor’s Award for Teaching, the Harter Mentoring Award, the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service, and the President’s Award for Research and Creativity. Her first book, A Little Taste of Freedom, won the McLemore Prize and was awarded an honorable mention for the Organization of American Historians’ Liberty Legacy Prize.
Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Ohio State University
Dr. Jeffries is Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University. He specializes in 20th century African American history and has an expertise in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. He is the author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York University Press, 2009). Bloody Lowndes tells the remarkable story of the local people and SNCC organizers who ushered in the Black Power era by transforming rural Lowndes County, Alabama. He is also the editor of Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, a collection of essays by leading civil rights scholars and teachers that explores how to teach the Civil Rights Movement accurately and effectively.
Charlie Cobb
Charles E. Cobb Jr. is a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and has taught at Brown University. An award-winning journalist, he is an inductee of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. He is the author of a number of books including This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books, 2014). Cobb lives in Jacksonville, Florida.
Tess Raser
Tess Raser, originally from Chicago, lives in Brooklyn. She has worked in education and community organizing for the past 13+ years and has taught kindergarten, 5th, 6th and 7th grade both in Chicago and in NYC. She currently is the Senior Manager of Academic Interventions and Programs at New Alternatives for Children but hopes to return to the classroom someday. Tess also writes curriculum for several organizations including Everyday Democracy and for Crooked Media’s podcast on the history of NYC policing, Empire City. In the past, she has written curriculum on the Black Panther Party for the Huey Newton Foundation. Tess writes curriculum that is project-based and loves creating opportunities for students to be creative and revolutionary in the classroom. She is passionate about teaching movement history and frequently collaborates with SNCC veterans for meaningful classroom experiences. She has brought several SNCC mentor/friends into her classroom. In Chicago, Tess was a member and leader in the abolitionist organization, Assata’s Daughters, where she participated in direct action organizing, in leading weekly radical youth programming for Black girls on the South Side of Chicago and in creating meaningful programs like a free Black Women’s Library and a Radical Kids Collective, in partnership with youth from Organized Communities Against Deportation (OCAD).
