{"id":1279,"date":"2022-03-23T14:44:34","date_gmt":"2022-03-23T18:44:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/billie-holiday\/?page_id=1279"},"modified":"2025-03-24T12:21:53","modified_gmt":"2025-03-24T16:21:53","slug":"donald-bentley-memorial-lecture","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/billie-holiday\/events\/donald-bentley-memorial-lecture\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald V. Bentley Memorial Lecture"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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5th Annual Donald Bentley Lecture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

RSVP<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Donald Bentley Annual Memorial Lecture is the Billie Holiday Center\u2019s annual capstone public lecture. Each year, the Center invites a distinguished arts practitioner and intellectual to address topical, historical, or philosophical issues connecting the work of the arts to the renewal and revitalization of civic life. The event is named in honor of one of Baltimore\u2019s promising young leaders who lost their life in the violence crisis that has been endemic to the city for more than thirty years. Through rich dialogue and intentional engagement, guests will be pushed to contemplate the necessity of art and creation to a positive public sphere. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Donald Bentley Annual Memorial Lecture is a unique platform to drive debate and critical reflection on the role of the arts in our everyday lives and in our imagining of a future just world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

History of the Lecture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI created the Donald Bentley Memorial Lecture to commemorate the life of my good friend Donald Bentley, murdered in 1989. Donald was gregarious and charismatic, and he always talked about running for public office to help to implement dynamic change in a city that we both loved.  Donald joined a group that I started called The Oxfords and we created recreational activities designed to have a good, safe time in the public spaces available to us in Baltimore during the 1980s.  Along with dozens of our mutual friends, I was devastated by Donald\u2019s death, a widespread tragedy throughout Baltimore, then and now, for at least 40 years.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Recognizing that the crisis of deadly street violence in the city was owed to structural inequality, I founded the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts to begin a regular process of sharing resources from the arts and sciences of the Homewood Campus with other portions of the city.  Each year we are sponsoring a free public lecture that is designed to assist in our work to stimulate a new civic commons in Baltimore, a cohort that recognizes the profundity of Baltimore\u2019s human resources and emphasizes the values of reciprocity, mutual recognition, sharing, collective responsibility and hard work to promote reparative equity and safeguard the youth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

–Lawrence P. Jackson, founding director of the Billie Holiday Center for the Liberation Arts <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Donald-V.-Bentley\"<\/figure>
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Donald V. Bentley<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Donald V. Bentley was a rising sophomore at Morehouse College in the summer of 1989 when he was shot during an armed robbery on Maryland Avenue. The murder remains unsolved to this day. A popular, charismatic young man, Donald had graduated from the Gilman School for boys, where he excelled at public speaking, track, and football.  He was the son of Helen Ellen and Robert Bentley, a schoolteacher and steel foundry foreman, respectively, and he grew up in a tight-knit community on Wilvan Avenue in Northwest Baltimore. He and his family attended First Baptist Church on Liberty Heights Avenue. Donald\u2019s inquisitive nature, his commitment to improving the fortunes of the downtrodden, and his interest in Pan-Africanism have been memorialized in many different endeavors since his passing, but particularly in the Donald Bentley Food Pantry<\/a>. He was an inspiration to everyone who knew him.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

2023 Memorial Lecture, The Birth of Jazz: Billie Holiday\u2019s Baltimore featuring Robert G. O’Meally, Candice Hoyes & Sean Jones<\/h2>
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Photo Credit: Photographer unknown, circa 1938. Victorine Q. Adams papers, Box 12-14 folder 26, Beulah M. Davis Special Collections, Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n

This luxuriant evening of jazz history and the performing arts features a lecture by Robert O\u2019Meally, Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Columbia University and author of an acclaimed biography of Billie Holiday, followed by a showcase of archival images curated by Lawrence P. Jackson, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of History and English at Johns Hopkins and Director of the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts and co-curated by Dr. Raynetta Wiggins-Jackson, the Inheritance Baltimore and Billie Holiday Center Curatorial Fellow for Africana Collections.<\/p>\n\n\n

The showcase reveals new information about Billie Holiday\u2019s girlhood in Baltimore, the early twentieth century jazz scene in the city, and the ongoing connection between Holiday and the historic Black arts district of Pennsylvania Avenue in West Baltimore, with maps, archival photographs, and recently acquired new materials from the Sheridan Libraries. A sublime visual and intellectual experience of the earliest archives that reveal the foundation of Baltimore jazz. The event will be laced throughout with a cabaret-style concert of Billie Holiday\u2019s songbook, performed by vocalist, Candice Hoyes, and Peabody Jazz Studies Chairman, Sean Jones.<\/p>\n\n\n

Schedule<\/h3>\n\n\n