In Class with Carr 

In Class with Carr is a weekly conversation with Dr. Greg Carr and Karen Hunter that uses Africana Studies to connect history, culture, and current events in ways that inform and inspire.
Dr. Greg Carr
The People's Professor

About this Series 

Overview
Instructor
It began, as so many necessary things do, with a question asked almost in passing: “Can I press record?” Karen Hunter, in conversation with Greg Carr, asked that question in February of 2021 while speaking of Ida B. Wells. What she captured that day was not simply an exchange between two people but the ignition of a fire that had been smoldering for centuries.

The world was standing still then. A pandemic had shut the doors of our schools and our sanctuaries, had silenced the streets. In that stillness, people turned toward the screen, toward the possibility of hearing a voice that could break the silence with meaning. And so, Saturday after Saturday, without fail, the voices of Carr and Hunter convened a gathering. What they offered was not a performance, not entertainment, but study—the hard, joyous, terrifying work of remembering who we are.

The genesis of In Class with Carr was not in technology, nor even in the bright light of YouTube where it first lived. Its genesis was older: in the impulse of a people to gather in secret rooms, in brush harbors, in kitchens and church basements, to pass on what must not be forgotten. It was, and remains, a maroon space. A place outside the university gates where knowledge could breathe, where truth could be spoken without the sanction of those who have made a profession of forgetting.

One hundred weeks became one hundred episodes. Then one hundred and fifty. And now, nearly three hundred. Each one an unbroken rhythm, like the work songs of our forebears, holding time, keeping us together. Week after week, Carr insists upon memory—on Ida, on Du Bois, on Woodson, on all the names the textbooks have abandoned. Hunter insists upon the future—asking always, how does this matter for now, for us, for what we must become?

But In Class with Carr is more than a chronicle of loss or a rehearsal of suffering. It is, at its core, an act of creation. Out of a conversation came Knarrative and Knubia, new spaces of refuge where study might take root. Out of this steady gathering has come an institution that refuses to call itself one, for it does not seek permanence in buildings or titles, but in the minds and the spirits of those who gather, week after week, to be changed.

Each Saturday, In Class with Carr tells the truth—terrible and beautiful—and dares to imagine a world more human than the one we have inherited.
Dr. Greg Carr
Greg Carr is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University and Adjunct Faculty at the Howard School of Law. He holds a Ph.D. in African American Studies from Temple University and a JD from the Ohio State University College of Law. The School District of Philadelphia’s First Resident Scholar on Race and Culture (1999-2000), Dr. Carr led a team of academics and educators in the design of the curriculum framework for Philadelphia’s mandatory high school African American History course. These materials are the first to approach African American History using an Africana Studies methodology. He is a co-founder of the Philadelphia Freedom Schools Movement, a community-based academic initiative that has involved over 13,000 elementary, high school and college students. 

Dr. Carr has presented his curriculum work for the Board of Public Education in Salvador, Bahia, and has lectured across the U.S. and in Ghana, Egypt, South Africa, Brazil, France, and England, among other places. His publications have appeared in, among other places, The African American Studies Reader, Socialism and Democracy, Africana Studies, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,The National Urban League’s 2012 State of Black America and Malcolm X: A Historical Reader. 

Dr. Carr is the first Vice President of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and a former member of the board of the National Council for Black Studies. He is a grantee of Howard’s Fund for Academic Excellence, invited lecturer on pedagogy from Howard’s Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Assessment, and has been named Professor of the Year three times by the Howard University Student Association, the College of Arts and Sciences Student Council and the College of Arts and Sciences Honors Association. As one of the faculty participants in the College of Arts and Sciences Summer Study Abroad Initiative, he has led or co-led student study courses in South Africa and/or Egypt six times. Dr. Carr is a member of the COAS Freshman Seminar Leadership Team and served as coordinator of the COAS Mellon Interdisciplinary Research Course Initiative.

He is the co-editor of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations’ multi-volume African World History Project and has represented Howard University as a spokesman in a wide range of print and electronic media, including Ebony Magazine, The New York Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, USA Today, MSNBC, National Public Radio, BBC America, C-SPAN, MTVu, Voice of America, the Tavis Smiley Show, the Dianne Rheim Show, Diverse Magazine and CNN, as well as a range of local radio, television and internet media outlets.
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