Whose Beloved Community? Conference In ATL This Weekend

Those of you in the ATL will have the opportunity to attend this conference at Emory University  from March 27-29 entitled Whose Beloved Community? Black Civil and LGBT Rights..

It brings together TBLG and civil rights scholars activists and other community stakeholders as they spend what promises to be an interesting weekend advancing a more comprehensive and expansive view of justice.

The conference is sponsored by Emory University's  James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, and the Emory Women's Center along with many other university divisions, and the Arcus and Ford Foundations.

Atlanta is the perfect venue for this conference because it is the historic cradle of the African-American civil rights movement combined with the fact that the ATL is considered the mecca of the Black SGL, trans and bi community.   More Black LGBT people live in the South than in any other region of the country, and Atlanta is the hub city for it.      

A keynote conversation to open the conference with longtime civil rights leader Julian Bond, African-American lesbian social-justice activist Mandy Carter, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Project, will take place in Glenn Memorial Auditorium starting at 7:30 PM EDT on Thursday, March 27.   The location is 1660 N. Decatur Road and the keynote event is free and open to the public.

Conference sessions will be held at the Emory Conference Center beginning on Friday, March 28 at 9 AM and will feature panels on topics including religion, scholarship, LGBT and civil rights history, marriage equality, activism and literature. On Saturday, panel sessions begin at 8:30 AM and the conference will conclude with a closing reception from 4-7 PM.