Monday, February 19
6:00 – 9:00 pm
Indianapolis Liberation Center
We are remarkably excited to engage the people of Indianapolis in a groundings with D. Musa Springer and Erica Caines, who are visiting us from Atlanta and Baltimore respectively. Both special guests are remarkable organizers, intellectuals, and popular educators.
Springer, a longtime member of the Walter Rodney Foundation, is the International Youth Representative for Cuba’s Red Barrial Afrodesendent, host of the Groundings podcast series, assistant editor of the journal, Pamoja, and author of Alive & Paranoid (Iskra, 2024).
Caines, a member of the Black working-class-centered Ujima People’s Progress Party in Maryland, is Coordinating Committee Vice-Chair of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and Co-Coordinator of the BAP Haiti/Americas Team. Erica founded Liberation Through Reading and is Co-Editor of the Revolutionary African blog, Hood Communist.
Caines and Springer will be joined by local organizers TOO BLACK, THEKINGTRILL, and Riley Park in a groundings about revolutionary Pan-Africanism and anti-imperialism (bios below).
What are groundings?
As a form of popular education, Walter Rodney learned about “groundings” as part of his work to cross the divisions between the academy and the streets while teaching in Jamaica. Put simply, Rodney describes groundings as the act of “sitting-together to reason, to ‘ground’ as the brothers say,’ or “to ‘ground together'” (Rodney, The groundings with my brothers, 67). As Springer writes, groundings concerns:
“democratizing knowledge and the tools of knowledge production, which are traditionally tied up with the capitalist academy. He empowered communities to tap into their own histories, oral and written, to generate knowledge and research amongst themselves based on their interests and needs, to place European history and Eurocentric frameworks as non-normative, and to hold African history as crucially important to the process of African revolution.”
About our guests
D. Musa Springer is a cultural worker, community organizer, and journalist from Atlanta. They are the International Youth Representative for Cuba’s Red Barrial Afrodescendant and a longtime member of the Walter Rodney Foundation. As a journalist they have reported on the prison and other grassroots struggles, and produced several documentaries, including, Parchman Prison: Pain & Protest (2020). They host the Groundings podcast and are assistant editor for peer-reviewed journal Pamoja. Springer’s book, Alive & Paranoid, will be published spring 2024 through Iskra Books.
Erica Caines is the Coordinating Committee Vice-Chair of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), serves as Co-Coordinator of the BAP Haiti/Americas Team, and as the Coordinator of the BAP-Baltimore Citywide Alliance. Erica is a member of the Black working-class-centered Ujima People’s Progress Party in Maryland, and founded Liberation Through Reading. Erica is Co-Editor of the Revolutionary African blog, Hood Communist, her writings featured in publications like Black Agenda Report, Orinoco Tribune, Monthly Review, and the Hampton Institute, as well as, the anthology, Sanctions: A Wrecking Ball In A Global Economy, a project of the “Sanctions Kill” campaign.
THEKINGTRILL is a few years removed from incarceration and is the Director of FOCUS Initiatives LTD – Abolitionist Prison Re-Entry, a project of IDOC Watch and a member-organization of the Indianapolis Liberation Center, and Co-Director of The Pendleton Two: They Stood Up. He is also the director of Human Rights Held Hostage, a documentary about New Afrikan political prisoner Shaka Shakur.
TOO BLACK is Co-Director and Narrator of The Pendleton Two: They Stood Up and host of The Black Myths Podcast. He is co-author of Laundering Black Rage (Routledge, 2014) and his published words appear in publications like Black Agenda Report, Left Voice, and Blavity.
Riley Park is an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation in Indianapolis, a graduate student at the University of Indianapolis, and a part of the international Korean peace and reunification movement. Along with Cambria York, Park is co-editor of Socialist Education in Korea: Selected Writings of Kim Il–Sung (Iskra Books, 2022).