ROCK HILL, SOUTH CAROLINA – Notable Winthrop University alumnus and renowned educational
and intellectual historian Derrick Alridge ’88, ’92, will speak at the 18th Annual Dorothy Perry Thompson Colloquium on April 2.
In his lecture “Hip-Hop and the Black Intellectual Tradition: Philosophizing a Movement,” Alridge examines the music genre’s intellectual development in the post-Civil Rights era. He argues that music of Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Parliament/Funkadelic and the Afrocentric academic work of Chancellor Williams, Ivan Van Sertima and Cheikh Anta Diop created the environment in which early hip-hop established its sense of black history and consciousness.
The lecture builds upon his wildly successful essay, “From Civil Rights to Hip-Hop: Toward a Nexus of Ideas.”
A native of Rock Hill, Alridge earned a bachelor’s in history and a master’s in secondary education, both from Winthrop, and a Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University. He currently serves as a professor of education in the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and as director of the university’s Center on Race and Public Education in the South.
During his career, Alridge established Teachers in the Movement (TIM), a civil rights oral history project focused on interviews with elementary, secondary and university teachers and educators about their participation in and efforts during the civil rights movement. He’s also authored “The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History.”
The talk begins at 7 p.m. in Dina’s Place. It is free and open to the public.
The annual colloquium honors the late English Professor Dorothy Perry Thompson, the founder of Winthrop’s African American Studies program. The colloquium also offers the opportunity to "bring in nationally- and internationally-renowned writers and scholars to talk about different aspects of the African American experience."
For more information on Winthrop’s African American Studies program and the colloquium, visit the website.
