Black History & Culture Intelligence Squared

Created in partnership with Sotheby's, in a debate that spans the centuries, Peabody Award-winning spoken word performer George the Poet and Booker Prize-winning author Howard Jacobson go head-to-head over which form of cultural expression best resonates now and forever. Does hip-hop and slam poetry speak more to society than historical texts that require background knowledge to be fully understood? Or does the lasting appeal of Shakespeare and other great figures from the canon show that some works have a universal value that stands the test of time?
This event was recorded on the 9th of June 2022, at Sotheby's in London and produced by Executive Producer Hannah Kaye and Audience Development Producer Yosola Olorunshola
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Between 1500 and 1866, 12.5 million enslaved Africans were transported by ship from Africa to the Americas as part of the Middle Passage crossing. Some 1.8 million of them died, their bodies thrown into the Atlantic, while the others who survived undertook journeys of misery and terror – chained together, starved, and surrounded by disease, to be sold into slavery and forced to work in brutal, dehumanising conditions. The slave mutinies that took place on these ships were the beginning of a long history of Black resistance.
In February 2022, the World Monuments Fund in partnership with Intelligence Squared brought together a panel of experts to explore key sites in Black history and illustrate the pivotal role heritage can play in teaching us about underrepresented narratives from the past.
We began our journey by examining buildings connected to slavery across Africa and the Caribbean, focusing on the ports, trading posts, and slave forts that were the starting points of the transatlantic slave trade. Moving forward in time we then discussed the struggle for emancipation, highlighting lesser known sites where newly freed slaves took refuge. Our trajectory ended with the landmark places in Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma and across the Black Belt in the U.S. that stood at the heart of the civil rights movement. These include churches and a barber shop where historic meetings took place between representatives of the Black and white populations of Montgomery in the beginning of the civil rights era.
Our panel unlocked the stories associated with these historic buildings and their importance in ensuring that the long struggle for racial equality is never forgotten.
CHAIR: 
Yassmin Abdel-Magied - Writer and broadcaster
Panel:
Alberta Whittle - Barbadian-Scottish artist, researcher, and curator
Bonnie Greer OBE - Playwright, author, broadcaster and former Deputy Chair, British Museum
John Darlington - Executive Director at WMF Britain
David Harewood MBE - Actor, director, author, and activist

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Samira Ahmed speaks to the novelist and author of An American Marriage, Tayari Jones. They speak about her life and career from growing up in Atlanta and taking a stand on ethical issues as a child to developing her voice as a writer, the role that children's author Judy Blume played in her life, and being selected for President Barack Obama's summer reading list and Oprah's Book Club.
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Black Lives Matter began as a hashtag when Alicia Garza wrote what she calls ‘a love letter to Black people’ on Facebook, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of fatally shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, in 2013.
In November 2020 Garza came to Intelligence Squared to recount how she and her co-founders built Black Lives Matter into the most influential movement of recent times. The phrase she coined was chanted by millions of people around the world this year in protests against the brutal killing in May of George Floyd by a police officer. But, as she pointed out, hashtags don’t build movements, people do. The work was done not through celebrity influencers or a (usually male) leader swooping down from on high, but by people at the grass roots knocking on doors, building a base, and acting collaboratively to fight the persistent message that Black lives are of less value than white lives.
Drawing on the themes of her new book, The Purpose of Power: How to Build Movements for the 21st Century, Garza set out her commitment to bring real change to those whose economic opportunities have been blighted by racism. She explained how these goals will ultimately be achieved not through protest alone but by ensuring that Black people have power in their lives and in politics. And she asked us to think about our privileges and prejudices and consider how we can all contribute to the change we want to see in the world.
Our chair was writer and broadcaster Yassmin Abdel-Magied.
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The history of Africans in Europe may seem recent – a result of migration in the 20th and 21st centuries – but in her new book, African Europeans, historian Olivette Otele tells a very different story – a story of African presence in Europe that stretches back centuries. 
Otele writes of African Europeans through the lives of individuals both ordinary and extraordinary. She has uncovered a forgotten past, one that features the Libya-born Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, a Medici duke believed to have been born to a free African woman and enslaved Africans living in Europe during the Renaissance. By exploring a history that has long been overlooked, she sheds light on questions very much alive today: What can movements like Black Lives Matter learn from the long history of Black activism in the UK and Europe? Why are Black Britons such as the Windrush generation often treated as if they aren’t full British citizens? And how can remembering the silenced narratives of our past help us understand the present and lead to a better future? 
On November 23 2020, Otele will came to Intelligence Squared to reveal this untold story of European and African history. She was in conversation with author and BBC Radio 4 presenter Kavita Puri.
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A great reckoning is taking place in the wake of the brutal killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed his death. Companies and organisations are looking afresh at how they can do a better job of combatting institutional bias and racism. Employees are increasingly speaking out about their experiences and calling for change.

In this special event recorded on Thursday June 25 2020, Intelligence Squared brought together two leading voices from the arts, Kwame Kwei-Armah, artistic director of the Young Vic, and Idris Elba, star of The Wire and Luther, to discuss what should happen and is likely to happen in the world of culture as we move forward. Given all the promises made and broken over the years, will things be different this time? Will there be deep structural change so that we see more Black and Brown people – not just on the stage or screen – but in positions of real power and decision-making? And once lessons have been learned, what do people actually need to do?
Our chair for the evening was writer and broadcaster Yassmin Abdel-Magied.
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