The New Yorker Festival | A More Perfect Union: Obama and the Racial Divide

With Congressman Keith Ellison, Alicia Garza, Margo Jefferson, and David Levering Lewis. Moderated by Jelani Cobb.

Congressman Keith Ellison is the U.S. Representative for Minnesota’s Fifth District, where he has served since 2007; a chief deputy whip for the Democratic Party; and the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He is the first Muslim to be elected to Congress. He has served on the House Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Alicia Garza is an activist, a writer, and the special-projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance. In 2013, she contributed to the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement. Her writing has been featured in Rolling Stone, the Guardian, and The Nation, among others. She is widely recognized for her activism around issues of labor and police brutality, and was named on The Root’s 2015 list of the top hundred African-American influencers between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five.

David Levering Lewis is the Julius Silver University Professor and a professor emeritus of history at New York University. His successive biographies of W. E. B. Du Bois won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 and 2001.

Jelani Cobb has contributed to The New Yorker and newyorker.com since 2012, and became a staff writer in 2015. He writes frequently about race, politics, history, and culture. His most recent book is “The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.” A professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, he won the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize for opinion and analysis journalism, for his columns on race, the police, and injustice.

Acura at SIR Stage37
508 West 37th Street

Tickets $45