Dr. Martia Goodson

MMPCIA welcomes Oral Historian, Researcher, Author & Publisher Dr. Martia Goodson, as its speaker for Black History Month at Mount Morris Talks! Thursday, February 10, 6:30 PM.

Dr. Goodson’s involvement in the Harlem community has spanned many decades. She has conducted oral histories of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and is currently writing about the women who observed and advised Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. during his career as the United States Congressman representing Harlem.

She is excited about her most recent effort to bring to life the history of African contributions to the Americas in Black Bones: Africans in Old New York, a new study of lives of enslaved Africans in colonial America.

African Burial Ground National Monument

In it she poses the question “What was it like to be an enslaved African in Old New York?” She fictionalizes stories of four Africans who lived in New York and died in 1774. The stories will bring to the public the political climate of that time and the scientific findings of the decade-long African Burial Ground Project, where researchers probed the Lower Manhattan cemetery site and studied over 400 burials to unlock the secrets of that cemetery holding 15,000 Africans buried between the late 1690‘s and the late 1700s.

The African Buriel Ground was rediscovered in 1991 and is now a National Monument. This book is to be published in the summer of 2011.

Her other publications include the Pulitzer Prize nominated Chronicles of Faith: The Autobiography of Frederick D. Patterson, the founder of the United Negro College Fund as well as numerous articles in academic and popular publications, including Western Journal of Black Studies and The Journal of the National Medical Association, and monographs.

Dr. Goodson has also contributed to the reference series, Notable Black American Women and Notable Black American Men and is the founder of StillEye Press, publishing books about African-descended people in the Americas. As an oral historian she has conducted oral histories of The Abyssinian Baptist Church, the South Bronx and the United Negro College Fund.

Currently Dr. Goodson has expanded her research interests to photography, particularly in Brazil and Ethiopia, and to international mathematics education.

A graduate of Antioch College, Rutgers University and the Union Graduate School, Professor Goodson retired from the Department of African American and Latino Studies at Baruch College-City University of New York in 2007.

Please join us on Thursday, February 10, from 6:30 – 8:00 PM at the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library, Community Room 3rd floor, 9 West 124th Street. This will be a unique opportunity to meet Dr. Martia Goodson and get the inside perspective on her work, challenges, rewards and inspiration.

Mount Morris Talks! is a series of conversations between the community and leaders, news makers, artists, authors and thinkers who live in the Harlem area. MMPCIA is proud to sponsor this series and offers it free of charge to the community.