Join Us In Person or Online
Date/Time
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
5:30 PM EST – 7:00 PM EST
Location:
In Person or Online (Hybrid event)
Event Title:
Library Salon #45: Uncovering Our Past:
Dr. Annie Mae Walker – Her Life and Legacy
Description:
A Presentation by Dr. Abena Ampofoa Asare, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at Stony Brook University. Using the records from the Bank Street College Archives, this presentation probes the throughline and tension between Bank Street’s mid-century vision of progressive teacher training and the Black Studies movement in higher education of the late 1960s and 70s.
In 1945, the young Mrs. Annie Mae Tooks traveled from Bethune-Cookman College and her home in Daytona Beach, Florida to attend the Bank Street Cooperative School, a progressive teacher training program that stressed the importance of educating “the whole child” and building a more humane, just, and rational world.
Dr. Annie Mae Walker went on to become the first director of Stony Brook University’s Black Studies program (1969). In this role she navigated the demands of Black and Puerto Rican student organizers and the directives of university administrators to establish an educational unit that has persisted for almost six decades. From 1969 to 1975 Stony Brook’s newly formed Black Studies Program (now Africana Studies), established by and supported by Dr. Annie Mae Walker, was decidedly internationalist, unapologetically political, and closely connected to local communities beyond the university’s walls.
About our Presenter
Dr. Abena Ampofoa Asare is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Truth Without Reconciliation: A Human Rights History of Ghana (UPenn, 2018) and When Will the Joy Come?: Black Women in the Ivory Tower (UMass, 2023). As a historian of human rights and historical justice in Africa and the African Diaspora, she is currently exploring whether and how telling the truth about the past, in community, can lead to social and political transformation. Asare’s writing is recently published in The Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Bokutani: The Journal of the African Studies Association of Africa. Asare is also a co-convener of the ongoing June Jordan/ Stony Brook University project On Call: June Jordan, Palestine, and the Black Radical Tradition at Stony Brook.
About Bank Street Library Salons
Bank Street Library Salons are a series of informal lectures and group discussions held in the Bank Street Library or online. #BankSteetLibrarySalon
Cost:
Free
Contact:
Kristin Freda
kfreda@bankstreet.edu