Eugene Puryear calls for a living wage and justice for Mike Brown as protesters storm Walmart in Washington, November 25, 2014. (AP/Carolyn Kaster)

As an ongoing uprising for Black Lives continues to sweep the country the questions of how we got here and what it portends for the future remains. Over time, the struggle around the right to education, the content of educational curriculums, and who is doing the teaching have been central to the broader Black Liberation Movement. In our current moment, the struggle over historical memory has reinforced these themes and reminds us of the pivotal role of education, in the broad sense, around the struggle for Black Lives.

Join the SJSU Lurie College of Education’s EdD Leadership Program and Dr. Derek Ford, Assistant Director of Education Studies at DePauw University, on Fri., Sep. 4, at 6pm on Zoom at sjsu.zoom.us/j/96722887679 for a conversation with Eugene Puryear – twitter.com/EugenePuryear – who is a longtime journalist and community organizer currently-based in New York City. As a high school student in Charlottesville, Va, Eugene organized a walkout when the war in Iraq began in 2003, and helped to organize a number of the large-scale demonstrations that took place against the continuing U.S. war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. He was a key leader In the struggle to free the Jena Six in 2007, was a founder of the anti-gentrification group Justice First as well as the Jobs Not Jails coalition, DC Ferguson Movement and Stop Police Terror Project-D.C. Puryear is the author of the book Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America, and worked for the past four years as the lead host of “By Any Means Necessary” a public affairs radio program in Washington D.C. Currently, he is the lead host of the News on BreakThrough a social justice media project.

If you are not able to access the event on Zoom, you should be able to view it live on the Lurie College of Education YouTube channel at bit.ly/lurie-youtube.