'This is an unfinished world': Charles E. Cobb speaks about Black activism at lecture

Charles E. Cobb said the Civil Rights Movement is usually thought of as a mass protest in public spaces, led by charismatic leaders, in the opening of the African American History Month lecture Tuesday.

But this narrative only partially tells the story, he said.

Cobb, a journalist and activist formerly with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, spoke of various Black leaders and organizations aimed toward challenging the denial of voting rights, segregation, racial discrimination and white supremacy. 

He said this includes the organized resistance of enslavement — best seen as secret railroad routes and schools, gospels of liberation in churches and the songs sung at rebellions, work slowdowns and sabotage.

Cobb said the founding principles of the United States — that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights — lay the contradictions found throughout U.S. history. This most especially applies to the founding contradiction of slavery, he said. 

The fight for equality is still present, as displayed by the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer of 2020.

To reflect this, Cobb recited the first few lines of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask":

"We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties."

“Dunbar’s words help reveal how survival and resistance to white supremacy were enabled and sustained,” Cobb said. “In many ways, we still wear the mask.”

Cobb said talking about the movement is acknowledgement of the ways in which Black people are deprived of basic human rights and dignity.

“It is an acknowledgment that Black poverty and genocide is state violence,” he said. “It is an acknowledgement that Black women continue to bear the burden of a relentless assault on our children and our families, and that assault is an act of state violence.”

Cobb said the Black Lives Matter platform aims to help African Americans live in a better world, all because other people have fought to make it so.

“This is an unfinished world,” he said. “Who will take it up?”

Joseph Jordan, director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, said UNC’s annual Black History Month lecture has become a tradition at the University. He said the history department took it upon itself to make sure the lecture would be held each year without interruption so it could truly become a University-wide celebration of African American history. 

Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said this lecture is central to many of the initiatives present on UNC’s campus, such as the Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward. 

He said programming, research and artistic and cultural work highlight extensive research on African American history and inform UNC’s efforts to achieve greater racial equality on campus.

“At Carolina, we value and encourage civic engagement,” Guskiewicz said. “Being engaged and a thoughtful citizen today requires reckoning with our past.” 

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