Oakton Library will welcome author Alondra Nelson as a guest speaker Thursday for a talk on her latest book, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination.
Body and Soul focuses on the the history of the Black Panther Party's health activism, which sought for freedom from medical discrimination.
"Although the Party's activities were exhaustively documented in the mainstream and alternative media of the time, and continued to be accounted for in both memoirs and scholarship of subsequent years, little of this coverage treated health-related activities in any detail," Nelson writes in the preface of her book. "This oversight was likely because of preoccupation with other, more sensational matters."
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Nelson is a professor of sociology and gender studies at Columbia University and received the Poorvu Family Award for teaching excellence when she worked as a professor at Yale University.
The Friends of Oakton Library is sponsoring the visit, which begins 7:30 p.m. Thursday. Click here to register for the event.
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