Brown Bag Lecture: A Soul Comes Home to Her Mississippi Roots

Joye Hardiman is a faculty emerita, educational architect, cultural custodian, world traveler, and ancestral storyteller. She served as the executive director of the Evergreen State College’s Tacoma Campus from 1990 to 2008 and is currently the interim director of the Washington Center for Improvement in Undergraduate  Education. She has done substantive research in Africana history, cultural continuity, world contributions  and spirituality ubiquity  in Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Mali, the Gambia, Ghana, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, South Africa, India, the Yucatan, Trinidad, Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, Cuba, and Haiti.

Hardiman will present “A Soul Comes Home to Her Mississippi Roots,” documenting her first return trip to Mississippi. Even though her family left Mississippi during the Great Migration , she was deeply impacted by Emmett Till’s murder. She will place this trip within the broader context of displaced African Americans reconnecting with their roots in the US south.

The Brown Bag Lecture Series takes place at noon on Wednesdays in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted.