Springfield College Hosts Virtual Lecture on Past and Present Fascism and Racism | Springfield College

Springfield College Hosts Virtual Lecture on Past and Present Fascism and Racism

Springfield College welcomed Holocaust Survivor, Author, and Human Rights Activist Marione Ingram on Thursday, April 8, 2021.

Springfield College welcomed Holocaust Survivor, Author, and Human Rights Activist Marione Ingram on Thursday, April 8, 2021.

 

Springfield College welcomed Holocaust Survivor, Author, and Human Rights Activist Marione Ingram on Thursday, April 8, 2021. This event was free and open to the College and local community.

In this lecture, Ingram shared excerpts from her memoirs The Hands of War and The Hands of Peace. She discussed the failure to respond to fascism and racism in Europe in the 1930s and 40s, and the nonviolent responses to those evils in the U.S. in the 1960s. She then related her experiences to the challenges that students face today.

Ingram is a writer, artist, and human rights activist who experienced the Holocaust, Europe’s deadliest bombing, and the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. Throughout the turbulent 60s and 70s, and into the 21st century, Ingram continued to protest racism, war, sexism, Apartheid, and police violence. 

Ingram’s Holocaust memoir, The Hands of War, became a New York Times bestseller in 2014 and was published in Germany in 2016, newly titled: Kriegskind (Child of War). Parts of the book also were published in Russia and the British literary journal, Granta, and in Best American Essays of 2007. A companion memoir published in 2015, The Hands of Peace, celebrates the countless acts of nonviolent defiance that culminated in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.

The evening was sponsored by Springfield College Office of Spiritual Life; Holocaust Remembrance Committee; Department of Literature, Writing, and Journalism; Department of Humanities and Social Sciences; and Department of Visual and Performing Arts.