In its early history, in conjunction with the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the UW (Seattle) and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 23 (Tacoma), the Center hosted speakers and music programs on labor, ethnic and gender studies at the old Longshoreman’s hall, which for a time served as a community center called the Ernie Tanner Center for Labor and Ethnic Studies. We brought in numerous academic and social movement leaders, including Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union, and nonviolence leader Rev. James Lawson.
We published a periodic newsletter and one volume of a full journal of interdisciplinary urban studies, South Sound, which is available in the University of Washington Tacoma library.
The Center also hosted history programs at African American and other churches in the Hilltop neighborhood, including performances by civil rights singers Jimmy Collier, Bettie Mae Fikes, and the Total Experience Gospel Choir. The Center hosted a production of Professor Clayborn Carson’s play on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, held at Allen AME Church, co-sponsored by the UW graduate school.
The Center co-hosted famed African American UCLA Professor Robin D.G. Kelley as a visiting lecturer sponsored by the Graduate School and the Simpson Center for the Humanities, along with NYU Professor Nikhil Pal Singh and long-time civil rights organizer Jack O’Dell, filling Philip Hall.
More recently, in the winter quarter of 2013, the Center sponsored another large forum on the future of social security with economist Dean Baker from Washington, D.C. In the spring quarter, we sponsored China scholar and humanities philosopher Henry Rosemont of Brown University speaking on “Individual Freedom, Human Rights and Social Justice: A New (and Very Old) Confucian Perspective for the 21st Century.”
We also hosted “Native American Voices,” keynoted by Masters of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences student Cecelia LaPointe-Gorman, attended by Puyallup Nation and others in the Native American community who have supported our Tacoma Community History Project