When Darnell Moore was fourteen years old, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they assumed he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn't the last time he would face death.
Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer and activist, a leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and a tireless advocate for justice and liberation. In No Ashes in the Fire, he sets out to understand how that scared, bullied teenager not only survived, but found his calling. Moore traces his life from his childhood in Camden, New Jersey, a city scarred by uprisings and repression; to his search for intimacy in the gay neighborhoods of Philadelphia; and, finally, to the movements in Newark, Brooklyn, and Ferguson where he could fight for those who, like him, survive on society's edges.
Darnell Moore will be in conversation with Hashim K. Pipkin.
Darnell L. Moore is an editor-at-large at CASSIUS (Urban One), a columnist at LogoTV.com and NewNextNow.com, and a contributor at Mic, where he hosted their widely viewed digital series The Movement. He writes regularly for Ebony, Advocate, Vice, and Guardian. Moore was one of the original Black Lives Matter organizers, organizing bus trips from New York to Ferguson after the murder of Michael Brown. Moore is a writer-in-residence at the Center of African American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice at Columbia University, has taught at NYU, Rutgers, Fordham, and Vassar, and was trained at Princeton Theological Seminary. In 2016, he was named one of The Root 100, and in 2015 he was named one of Ebony magazine's Power 100 and Planned Parenthood's 99 Dream Keepers. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Atlanta.
Hashim K. Pipkin is a content strategist and educator. He has led communications and engagement strategy for DC Government, the United Negro College Fund, and several start-ups in Silicon Valley. He is also a researcher who is interested in the interplay between sexual politics and social ethics in Black culture and the theological "slippages" in American political discourse. His writing has been featured in Mic, HuffPost, The Feminist Wire, and Ebony. He began his career as an elementary reading teacher. He is an honors graduate of Georgetown University and Vanderbilt University and recipient of the Robert W. Woodruff Fellowship at Emory University. He is at work on his first collection of essays, Surely Free: Courage and Black Love.
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Recorded On: Tuesday, June 05, 2018