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9/22/21

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This is not a manifesto for digital theatre. Theatre has used digital technology on- and offstage for over a century, so can we please move on? This is a manifesto for the future of anti-racist, anti-oppressive, accessible theatre with the assistance of creative digital practices. The emergence of digital platforming over the pandemic provides us the opportunity to redefine and recontextualize space, gathering, inclusion, and connectivity that tears at the fabric of gatekeeping. Not all of these practices are effective, but they are irrefutably expansive.

Jared Mezzocchi performs “Someone Else’s House.”

You see, the term “digital theatre” does not propose a new form of theatremaking. It instead refers to a vision of technological extensionism that can aid the dismantling of white supremacy and oppressive practices that the industry is now belatedly reckoning with. Can we, the theatre industry, allow these newly discovered digital resources to expand our audiences, democratize our processes, create a sustainable discipline amid climate change, and revitalize our gatherings and civic duties as theatre practitioners in a (hopefully) post-pandemic, technologically saturated culture?

That is the question digital theatre asked our industry over the last 18 months of this multifaceted plague. In March 2020, the live theatre industry shut down due to COVID-19. It was a moment of subtraction and erasure for those who were currently working in the field. It also was a great equalizer, as those who once could create theatre were suddenly just as shut out as those who never could. In this moment of pause, technologists stepped forward with innovative opportunities to create, collaborate, and connect once again. They took a technologically foreign, ever-expansive frontier and helped define it into an accessible, site-specific platform: the digital online. Their work raised the question: Does theatre need an in-person venue to maintain its identity as theatre?

Answers came in many forms. Geffen Playhouse produced seven fully digital online shows (including my show, directed by Margot Bordelon, Someone Else’s House) as a part of their Stayhouse Series, which brought in live audiences to nightly performances who were mailed a package as a participatory element that was interactive. Joshua Gelb’s Theater In Quarantine produced several livestreams from a closet in his apartment (winning a Drama League Award). Fake Friends’ This American Wife and Circle Jerk (a Pulitzer finalist!) were live, studio-style experimental performances, blending livestream and Twitter as means of engaging their audiences in real time. In addition to Someone Else’s House, I helped create live works like Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm (co-directed with Elizabeth Williamson through Theatreworks Hartford, TheatreSquared Arkansas, The Civilians), Caryl Churchill’s What If If Then (co-directed with Les Waters through NAATCO), and Manic Monologues (an interactive web portal with performances by 20-plus actors, directed by Elena Araoz through Princeton University and McCarter Theater). Many of these experimented with live performance, live design, live audiences both visible and hidden, and with various forms of interactivity. Many more offered on-demand streaming, allowing audiences to view the work in an asynchronous way as well. 

As these digital works were shared, a debate began. Many argued that the identity of theatre inherently belonged to a live, in-person engagement among gathered audiences and storytellers within a shared space. Many argued that digital theatre was not that.

Taking these one by one: If liveness is the essence of theatre, the digital can maintain this identity by livestreaming. If gathering is the essence of theatre, the digital can maintain this identity through myriad softwares and forums: Zoom, Twitch, Discord, Unity, Virtual Reality, Vimeo, Twitter, TikTok, etc. 

Mia Katigbak in ‘Russian Troll Farm.’

The argument that shared space is essential to theatre is closer to the heart of what splinters the theatre community. Many feel that theatre is defined by bodies—those of artists and audiences—occupying the same physical space. This argument is centered around the importance of the ability to experience a live event in the same room as others. In 2017, the University College of London published a study presenting that when we witness a live event together, our heartbeats synchronize, and everyone in the room is, in a sense, feeling the same thing together. This powerful phenomenon is often referred to as “sacred” and “vital.” As a theatregoer myself, I agree: It is very much sacred and vital to share a space with other heartbeats that become synchronized with my own heart as actions play out in front of our eyes in the same room at the same time. It is profoundly moving.

But digital theatre does not refute that, nor does it threaten to diminish that profundity with its own unique existence. The question for live, in-person theatre, though, is this: If theatre’s identity has mostly to do with bodies in the same physical space, what of those who are prohibited from or unable to share that space at any given time for various reasons? Inaccessibility takes many forms: the lack of availability, affordability, physical ability, cultural reference, proximity. What is the answer of the theatre field to this challenge? Theatre venues can lower the barriers to that physical space by complying with ADA requirements, hosting “relaxed” performances, pay-what-you-can evenings, etc.

Theatre venues can also embrace digital. In October 2020, JCA Arts Marketing published findings that digital theater attracted 43 percent new audiences to theatre. Nearly half of the audiences who clicked on events were distinct from those who regularly attend in-person performances. This is a very powerful discovery. Moreover, the demographics of these clicking audiences have shown a wider diversity in class, race, gender, and age. By liberating ourselves from the location of a venue at a specific time with often prohibitive ticket prices, digital accessibility has the potential to crack open a wider demographic of theatre patrons in a profoundly expansive way. 

Another overlooked equity unique to online performance is in the audience’s live response to the work. Digital performance allows some viewers to be verbal and active, others to be silent, some to watch in groups and others alone. This allows the work to meet the viewers in individualized ways simultaneously, without compromising the experience of other audience members. The audience member who likes to actively talk back to the stage with their lights on won’t disrupt the experience of the audience member who seeks silence and darkness when consuming live theatre. And while some in-person theatres offer sensory-friendly performances, ASL, and closed-captioned performances, digital platforms allow these viewing preferences to be offered simultaneously, which diminishes the “othering” effect of specially set aside in-person performance dates.

This accessibility is not only liberating to the viewer, but to the artists’ ecosystem as well. Over the last 18 months, many underrepresented artists were able to mobilize globally to share and develop their stories in immediate ways. With a demand for new work that could speak to the current cultural climate, online platforms not only made this immediacy possible, but responsive, efficient, and sustainable. Without the pipeline of annual season planning, digital platforms revealed how quickly we can gather when no longer limited by highly unsustainable means of travel and lodging. 

We also saw budgets dramatically adapt to the needs of each unique project, as well as sliding ticket sales that opened up dialogue around pay-what-you-can ticket pricing. In this way digital theatre became a speculative model for in-person performances. Organizations were able to experiment with ideas in a venue-decentralized manner, which in turn have inspired new budgeting and pricing structures for in-person performance as it returns. 

Haskell King and Mia Katigbak in ‘Russian Troll Farm.’

As this dialogue evolves, however, some would clearly prefer to shut it down. As theatres have begun to eye a return to in-person, venue-centric theatre-making, many would seek to erase the progress we saw during the pandemic. Indeed, some seem to associate digital innovation with the pandemic itself, and now that the emergency is (almost) behind us, they’re openly relieved to see digital recede.

“Thank goodness it’s over!” they say.

“We can let go of the placeholder!” they say.

“We’re back!” they say.

This perspective is steeped in the comparison, instead of extension, of digital to in-person theatre. What this rhetoric exposes is the way able-bodied, well-off audiences take for granted the option to go to a venue. As we saw in statistics during the pandemic, there is an entire community holding a different comparison: digital theatre vs. no theatre at all. This blind spot has effectively created a Theatre of the Able as our default, on the assumption that everyone has this choice. Closing the proverbial door on digital theatre for those unable to attend in-person events shuts out an entire artistic ecosystem that we have glimpsed over the past 18 months, and may never encounter again without further investment. This does the opposite of protecting our discipline; it instead freezes an opportunity for contemporary growth.

From our venue-centric vantage point, where we assume in-person theater is theatre for all, we assess digital theatre as “lesser than,” in a way that dangerously erases these communities, artists, and stories for audiences who may experience the digital differently than us. For some, digital is the only means to gather. And yes, I said gather: Digital technology can no doubt appear isolating to some, but it is also unquestionably a shared space for many. Keeping this door open may uncover and share entirely unique perspectives, told in digitally original ways. Joining this potential with the statistics around diverse new audiences, we can see that this is one form of inclusivity and allyship for which we should be fighting.

Clearly this isn’t the catch-all solution, but it helps move the needle into a more equitable position. Digital theatre, it should be said, still struggles with its own inaccessibility issue: broadband and wifi connectivity aren’t universal or free. In September 2020, Vox published a report showing that, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 21 million Americans don’t have access to quality broadband internet. While still a substantial issue, it is not comparable close to the high gates of inaccessibility erected by in-person-only performance. In fact, if the live performance community put its muscle behind the cause of equity in broadband access, they could help an entirely new audience and market form. Vox’s report tracked efforts in cities like Chattanooga, Tenn., where, in 2010, the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga, the city-owned utility known as EPB, “began offering ultra-high-speed internet to all of its residents after building out fiber to the city for a smart grid.” As theatre continues its discussion of accessibility, the nationwide conversation about broadband access should be central. As live performance advocates, we could be the powerful voice of change and equity that this movement needs.

Through these efforts, we can connect new audiences and inspire new artists worldwide. These efforts do not need to remain exclusively online, but can become a conduit to new processes and collaborations for in-person hybrid experiences as well. Inviting more voices with diverse perspectives serves the vitality of theatre. Theatre practitioners had been in an artistic rhythm for decades, broken by the last 18 months, which forced a fresh examination of what we all took for granted and assumed was unchangeable. As this wider net of artists join our ecosystem, it will be crucial to welcome them into a neutral gathering forum, uncontaminated by the hierarchical structures of long-standing in-person practices. The only way to make radical change in these structures is by neutralizing the power relationships within assumed processes.

Digital platforms have already shown they can be part of this solution. As disembodied creative ensembles, we witnessed how our disparate environments influenced the ways we communicate, collaborate, and progress. Thrown off balance from our usual way of working, digital theatremaking has demanded authentic patience, empowered every participant to hold space in their own ways, and allowed for a democratization in creative problem-solving without a hierarchical power structure. Working in digital required us to ask each participant about their individual experience; it required us to literally meet each of us in our intimate living quarters and truly listen to everyone’s needs. These needs and requirements are no less relevant for in-person theatre, but working in a digitally disembodied way taught us to communicate less hierarchically, and to be more honest with our experiences, since there were no other participants experiencing the work from our unique location. These conversations led us to realize something we should have always had in mind, including for in-person performance: that everyone experiences the world uniquely.

The future of theatre is at a fraught intersection as we prepare for reentry. We have the choice to move forward or to go back. This is a plea for us to join forces and embrace the remarkable progress digital theatre has made in dismantling hierarchical assumptions, able-bodied biases, and the racism and classism that in-person theatre perpetuates by its gatekeeping. Digital theatre is not a symbol of the plague. It is a symbol of the resilience of artists. The past 18 months required us to use our bodies in a disembodied space to engage in risky, innovative, inclusive, democratized experiments. And when we celebrate the work of digital theatremakers, we encourage the theatrical community to hear this as extensionism, not replacement; addition, not subtraction. We can be allies, not rivals.

So as many return to venue-centric performance making, let’s also celebrate and incorporate the necessary strengths of the digital world we unlocked in the last 18 months. Let’s divorce these discoveries from the trauma of the pandemic and expose the strengths we unearthed in the experimental processes we just experienced online. Because these experiences, to many, were also sacred.

Jared Mezzocchi is an Obie-winning multimedia theatre director and designer. He is an associate professor of multimedia and projections at the University of Maryland, and is producing artistic director of Andy’s Summer Playhouse.

12/1/20

By Sydney Trent

Daryle Williams was emotionally torn, pushing the decision right up against deadline. As a history professor at the University of Maryland, Williams had been researching the slave trade in 19th-century Brazil when he came upon two newspaper ads featuring runaway Africans. One mentioned a mother, Sancha, escaping with her two sons — Luis, 9, and Tiburcio, 4 — in 1855. The other referenced a young woman, Theresa, who fled with her nursing daughter, in 1842.

Tasked with entering his findings into what has become part of a groundbreaking new public slavery database, Williams was unsure about what to do. Should he create a separate line for the baby, even without a name?

“From one database perspective, I could have erased her” from the record, Williams said. And yet, even anonymous, the baby ”was part of the lived historical experience. … She was important for Theresa. She should be important for us as well.”

In mid-November, Williams carved out a spot — an act of hope that over time and with the labor of others, the baby’s identity might one day be revealed.

That infant girl, one tiny dot in the vast constellation of Africans swept into the transatlantic slave trade, is included in a massive project aimed at illuminating the lives of the 12.5 million Africans, and their descendants, sold into bondage across four continents.

Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade, a free, public clearinghouse that launched Tuesday with seven smaller, searchable databases, will for the first time allow anyone from academic historians to amateur family genealogists to search for individual enslaved people around the globe in one central online location.

It launches four centuries after the first enslaved Africans arrived on the shores of the English colony of Virginia in 1619. By then, the transatlantic slave trade was already more than a century old.

CLICK HERE for full article.

 

12/1/20

By Dan Novak M.Jour. ’20

Kidnapped from home. Sold as chattel. Separated from loved ones. Worked to death. Written out of national history. The unimaginable horrors experienced by enslaved Africans and their descendants might suggest that bondage erased names, identity and personhood.

But for decades, historians and genealogists have combed through the archives, piecing together millions of documents that trace slave voyages, sales, baptisms, marriages and other events that form the life histories of named slaves. However, much of that research has been compiled in isolation at separate institutions, making it more challenging to follow the threads of individuals and families. 

Daryle Williams, a University of Maryland historian and associate dean in the College of Arts and Humanities, is working to address that as one of the leads on a massive new online database that will be an invaluable research and discovery tool: Enslaved.org: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade.

“We have lots and lots and lots of different kinds of sources that include named individuals,” said Williams, who specializes in slavery in 19th-century Brazil. “Our goal in part is to be able to provide a platform to record and recover those people.”

The new database, housed at Michigan State University (MSU) and supported by a $2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will provide educational resources for K–12 classrooms as well as peer-reviewed datasets for university-level students and scholars. The project launched a new phase today to welcome contributions from the public and academic researchers.

Before, researchers might find a property record of a deceased plantation owner, listing the enslaved by name, but be unaware of the same individuals appearing in a separate baptismal record. Enslaved.org will allow researchers to cross-reference those datasets simultaneously using linked-open data to construct biographies, trace familial lineages and see broader trends to understand the personal experience of enslavement.

“Personal history is complex, much like the way data was collected during the slave trade era. While we continue to digitize records, such as those that are handwritten, to preserve them, we know there is more to each person’s story. We hope this database will grow and evolve over time,” said Walter Hawthorne, a project co-investigator, professor of history and associate dean of academic and student affairs in MSU’s College of Social Science. 

From the removal of Confederate memorials, to the debate over reparations, to the successful (and controversial) 1619 Project from The New York Times, the United States is among many nations facing a reckoning with slavery and its historic and modern consequences. Enslaved.org seeks to humanize those most directly impacted, while inviting all to see human bondage as part of our history.

“People are interested and troubled and compelled and grappling with slavery and its many legacies,” Williams said. “Slavery is really, really important to the foundations of America. And slavery is really, really important to America today.”

MSU’s University Communications office contributed to this article.

8/28/20

Despite the development of largely effective warning systems, people routinely die from severe weather like tornadoes. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency recently awarded Drs. Anita Atwell SeateBrooke Fisher Liu, and Ji Youn Kim a $368,675 grant to improve how forecasters communicate severe weather threats.

Along with Co-PI Mr. Daniel Hawblitzel from the National Weather Service (NWS) Nashville, the UMD communication faculty will conduct workshops with NWS forecasters and their broadcast media partners to co-construct messages to test in experiments with members of the public. The experiments will identify the most effective communication strategies to increase publics’ tornado literacy, message source trust, satisfaction with their weather forecast office, and appropriate protective action taking. In the final project stage, the research team will work with the NWS Training Center to develop new risk communication training modules for forecasters across the nation.

7/31/20

By Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil and Kimmy Yam

Arvin Shao's family had run China King Buffet in Woodbridge, Virginia, for almost two decades before it was forced to shut its doors last month. Shao said loyal customers who had eaten there every week and were friendly with his family abruptly stopped coming.

He said he believes that anti-Asian, pandemic-related racism and "fear-mongering" prompted many to abandon his family's establishment.

"It seemed like nobody wanted anything to do with us. Some of them were really close with my dad, always asked about my dad, knew my dad by his name, shook his hand every single time," Shao said in an interview. "Those people were the last people I would ever think would stop coming and just believe whatever was going on in the news, and stop coming because they have a fear or whatever it may be."Alvin SThe restaurant closed at a time when two new reports show that both anti-Asian bias and unemployment among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, or AAPI people, are surging.

A new study from UCLA reports that since the start of the pandemic, 83 percent of the Asian American labor force with high school degrees or lower has filed unemployment insurance claims in California — the state with the highest population of Asian Americans — compared to 37 percent of the rest of the state's labor force with the same level of education.

At the same time, new research shows that discrimination against Asian Americans is surging. More than 2,300 Asian Americans had reported bias incidents as of July 15, according to the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, or A3PCON, which hosts the self-reporting tool Stop AAPI Hate.

For some, like Shao's family, the two issues might be related.

An intersection of race and economics

The UCLA report, published last week, examined the impacts of the coronavirus on the Asian American labor force in California. It revealed that disadvantaged Asians working in service industries have been "severely impacted."

Researcher Paul Ong, who worked on the report, said that beyond pervasive service industry struggles, he believes people are abandoning Asian establishments because of biases.

"This is why racializing COVID-19 as 'the China virus' has profound societal repercussions. We have seen this in the increase in verbal and physical attacks on Asians and in material ways in terms of joblessness and business failures," he said in an interview.

Donald Mar, another researcher on the UCLA report and a professor at San Francisco State University, said many Asian Americans work in sectors that have been heavily affected by the pandemic. Almost 1 in 4 employed Asian Americans work in hospitality and leisure, retail and other services, including repair shops, hair-cutting and laundries, according to the report. Ong said the disadvantaged groups that are affected are mostly immigrants, many of whom worked in establishments that began to struggle before shelter-in-place orders were enacted, so they have experienced a longer period of losses.

"These are predominantly immigrants, who even before the crisis faced economic hardship because of low wages and long hours," he said. "They are the reason why Asian restaurants are cheap, Vietnamese nail salons low-price and Cambodian doughnut shops have to rely on family help."

Discrimination continuing to surge

Lisa Lee was at a grocery store in Philadelphia near the end of March when, she said, an older white man saw her and started shouting, "Go back to China!" When she told him that she wasn't from China, the man responded, "Then go back to the Philippines or wherever you came from."

Lee, a Philadelphia-based artist, said she now leaves the house only if she has a white male friend to accompany her. "After the pandemic, I felt like can I really survive here? Can I really work here?" said Lee, who is originally from South Korea.

While hate against Asian Americans first spiked at the outset of the pandemic, it's continuing to rise. That includes more than 500 new reports of microaggressions, bullying, harassment, hate speech and violence from mid-June to mid-July.

Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University who has been tracking the data for Stop Hate, said the group hit its peak in reported incidents the week President Donald Trump first used the term "Chinese virus."

"When Trump began to insist on the term 'Chinese virus,' we saw a spike in the number of anti-Asian hate incidents," he said. "When he uses those terms, people began to see the virus as Chinese and Chinese as having the virus. So his words have shaped the racial consciousness of Americans. Even non-Trump supporters are buying into that."

He said Stop Hate can't state that there was a direct causation based on its data, but "this keeps on going up."

"It's not surprising, because the president is still using terms that dehumanize Asians in America," he said.Trump began using the term "Chinese virus" in March, and he has also repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as "kung flu," including at a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 20. In last week's White House coronavirus briefing, he said the "China plague [was] coming in, floating in, coming into our country."

In addition to A3PCON's data, other surveys have also captured the surge in anti-Asian racism. Nearly one-third of Asian Americans report having been the target of slurs or jokes because of their race or ethnicity since the pandemic began, according to the Pew Research Center, while one-third of all people — including 60 percent of Asians — have witnessed someone blaming Asians for the pandemic, according to a Center for Public Integrity/Ipsos poll. Meanwhile, more than half of Republicans and more than a quarter of Democrats have said they're not at all or not very concerned about the discrimination.

While experts point to Trump's rhetoric as one of the main drivers of bias against Asian Americans, they also point to other factors. The soaring COVID-19 death toll — which topped 145,000 this week — and the emergence of U.S.-China relations as a central presidential campaign issue are also factors, and the reopening of states has provided more opportunity for hate incidents. Experts and community leaders fear a spike in anti-Asian bullying as schools reopen.

Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of A3PCON, said she expects hate incidents to climb, comparing it to the racism Muslims, Arabs and South Asians faced after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"If 9/11 provides any lesson, this is going to continue for a very long time," she said.

Bipartisan calls for federal officials to issue guidelines unmet

But as the number anti-Asian bias incidents rises, so, too, do calls for action.

Last week, a bipartisan group of about 150 members of Congress, led by Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., called on the Justice Department to condemn the racism and provide regular updates on what it is doing to combat hate incidents. Previously, more than a dozen Senate Democrats, led by Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Cory Booker of New Jersey, sent letters demanding that the Justice Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention come up with a plan to address acts of racism against Asian Americans.

And while Eric Dreiband, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, committed to "prosecute hate crimes and violations of anti-discrimination laws against Asian Americans, Asians, and others to the fullest extent of the law" in an opinion piece for The Washington Examiner in April, advocates say that doesn't go far enough, and they have questioned why the Justice Department and the CDC haven't set guidelines on racism and xenophobia they way they did after 9/11 and the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Stewart Kwoh, founder of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles, said he wants federal, state and local agencies to do more to track racist incidents directed at Asian Americans — including developing new techniques to track online incidents — because having more data would help combat hate.

"It's very important, because we need to figure out where the hate is happening," he said. "Is it concentrated in a certain spot? Is it spread all around? What kinds of incidents are there? Are there actual threats to the verbal altercations? We have to figure it out, because we don't want this to escalate. If there's a hot spot in some area, we need to figure out if the authorities need to look at it more closely or be vigilant about possible hate crimes."

But Kwoh said it's going to take a broader approach to quell the hate. He and Advancing Justice are working on several strategies, he said, including bystander training, coalitions with a variety of non-Asian American groups that are standing up to racism, use of public service announcements to elevate the stories of AAPIs fighting the coronavirus and development of a curriculum about Asian Americans that can be used in schools nationwide.

"All of them need to be employed, because who knows what can happen next?" he said.

Continuing to break down the model minority myth

Ong said the findings pull back the curtain on the model minority myth, exposing how Asian Americans are not only disproportionately hurt in crisis but are also weathering the added layer of pandemic-related racism.

"Xenophobic and racist behavior is not just limited to harassments and physical attacks but also spills into the economic sphere," Ong said. "Unfounded fears and prejudices have hurt Asian American businesses and workers. What is surprising is the substantial magnitude of this phenomenon."

Mar said research from previous pandemics has pointed to a greater degree of struggle during and after the health crisis among minorities, households with lower incomes and other disadvantaged groups. But the report also reflects existing disparities and diversity among Asian Americans. Janelle Wong, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland who has researched the working lives of AAPI people in California, echoed Mar's thoughts. She said the overall financial stability of the Asian American population has obscured specific economic struggles among subgroups, even before COVID-19.

Research released in November, before the pandemic, found that roughly a quarter of AAPI people in California were working and struggling with poverty. The groups with the highest proportions of poverty were the Hmong community, at 44 percent, and the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander community, at 36 percent.

"The UCLA report makes clear that the stark inequalities that existed before the pandemic have only deepened and widened," she said. "Policies must recognize the ways in which racial discrimination and economic vulnerabilities are intertwined and address both."

 

 

 

4/14/18

By Morgan Politzer | Stories Beneath the Shell

"National Public Radio political correspondent Mara Liasson led a discussion Wednesday night about dealing with hate, bias and the changing world of political reporting under Trump.

"Liasson has been a political correspondent for NPR for over 30 years. She discussed how the political landscape has changed since President Trump took office, as well as the impact his actions have had on both a national and international scale."

Read the complete article in Stories Beneath the Shell.

Photo by Morgan Politzer via Stories Beneath the Shell.

2/2/18

By Jillian Atelsek | The Diamondback

"As he arrived at the podium to deafening applause and a standing ovation, Bobby Seale raised his hands, stepped back and chuckled.

"'Reminds me of the '60s,' he said.

"Seale, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, a political activist and a cultural icon, spoke at the University of Maryland on Thursday night about organized resistance and strength in the face of discrimination and oppression.

"'I don't believe in riots,' he said. 'I believe in organizing. I believe in putting my machine together.'"

Read the complete article in The Diamondback.

Photo: Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale addressed University of Maryland students and faculty on Thursday, Feb. 1. (Richard Moglen/The Diamondback)

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