PROGRAM

Please join us at Roosevelt House as we begin our fall season of public programs with a special appearance by Joy-Ann Reid, National Correspondent for MSNBC. Ms. Reid will discuss her new book Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide, which analyzes the historical divide between black and white America, including the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore, the mass murder in a Charleston church, and other recent episodes of racially charged violence across the country. Reid explores the history of the Democratic Party over the last fifty years, including the 2008 primary fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and their subsequent relationship, and how the issue of race will affect the 2016 presidential election.

Ms. Reid looks at key political figures, including Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Al Sharpton, and explores such questions as: will Hillary Clinton’s campaign represent an embrace of Obama’s legacy or a repudiation of it? How is Hillary Clinton’s stand on race both similar to and different from Obama’s, or her husband’s? How do minorities view Mrs. Clinton, and will they line up in huge numbers to support her? What will happen if they don’t?

Melissa Harris-Perry calls Fracture “a profoundly necessary text.” Michael Eric Dyson calls the book “an instant classic of political journalism by one of the nation’s most gifted public intellectuals.”