The Ware Lectureat this year’s UUA General Assembly will be given by Imani Perry. Dr. Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton. She is the author of many acclaimed books including Breathe, the 2020–2021 UU Common Read, and Looking for Lorraine, both published by Beacon Press, and most recently, South to America, winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it anew. Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry of the South unlike any other.
Emotionally raw and deeply reflective, Breathe by Imani Perry issues an unflinching challenge to society to see Black children as deserving of humanity. She admits fear and frustration for her sons in a society that is increasingly racist and at times seems irredeemable. However, as a mother, feminist, writer, and intellectual, Perry offers an unfettered expression of love—finding beauty and possibility in life—and she exhorts her children to find the courage to chart their own paths and find inspiration in Black tradition. A meditation on race, gender, and the meaning of a life well lived. The 2020–2021 UU Common Read.
Lorraine Hansberry was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now. A revealing portrait of one of the most gifted and charismatic, yet least understood, Black artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century.
