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Join us for an afternoon with Modibo Kadalie. Kadalie has spent over six decades as an activist, organizer, teacher, and scholar in the civil rights, Black power, and Pan-African movements. He will be discussing his new book titled: "Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Moses, The Great Dismal Swamp, and the Human Quest for Freedom"

Modibo Kadalie's latest book is a critical reexamination of the history and historiography surrounding two sites of African maroonage in North America: The Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina; and Fort Mose in Florida.

Kadalie argues that maroon communities like these were actually ethnically diverse sites where freedom-seekers fleeing oppressive societies established communites of resistance through socially intimate forms of democracy. In these communities, directly democratic traditions carried by enslaved peoples from West Africa converged with those of indigenous North Americans as the struggle against slavery and settler colonialism grew and evolved over hundreds of years, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

Kadalie will be in conversation with Andrew Zonneveld, a historian and naturalist from Atlanta, Georgia. Zonneveld is a co-founder of On Our Own Authority! and the Atlanta Radical Book Fair, and a council member of the Autonomous Research Institute for Direct Democracy and Social Ecology in Midway, Georgia.

We will have books from Burdock's Collection for sale and discussion about the local social justice movement in Birmingham!

Burdock Book Collective is an intersectional feminist bookstore that aims to center and uplift literature written by authors of different identities and life experiences, especially voices that are often marginalized by mainstream society. At Burdock, we foster radically inclusive organizing and community building space through our event programming, artist workshops, political education groups, author talks and book clubs.

We hope to see you there!