This Poverty, Promise, and Possibility event features Charles Payne, the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor in the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. Payne is the author of Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure In Urban Education (1984) and I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (1995). The latter has won awards from the Southern Regional Council, Choice Magazine, the Simon Wisenthal Center and the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America. He is co-author of Debating the Civil Rights Movement (1999) and co-editor of Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950 (2003).

This public discussion is part of Poverty, Promise, and Possibility, an initiative from the University of Chicago that represents a bold and timely effort to bring together the University’s scholarly resources on issues of poverty in new, more publicly accessible, and more socially relevant ways. The aim is to highlight the useable knowledge available through the University for the purpose of illuminating both the pressing problems of poverty in our area and the practical steps that local communities can take to address such problems.