"“We are surrounded. We who are in the academy, looking for community, like June Jordan and her students in 1969, are still surrounded. We have also made it inside the gate, but we are now cornered. This place, the university, is the destination, they said. We were told that we had to be inside or else. And now that we are here, they lie to us. Just as they lied to Jordan’s students. Just as they lied to the Black professors they hired when they demanded teachers less likely to lie. Just as they lied to the Black teachers who went to college in order to teach those Black professors long before 1969. They lied about us. About why we are here, how we got here, and what it means to be here. Although they would eventually again shut the gates, some of us made it through and have been here for a long time now. Which means we have listened to these lies for a long time now. The lies have changed. But they are still lies. Every now and then, there is a slip, an exposure, a seam opens. We seize on those moments because the lie that sustains what Jordan called this system’s “exploitation of human life, for material gain” cannot exist forever." What you will hear next is a critical exploration of Chapter 1 – Of Hesitance: WEB Du Bois with Nathalie Frédéric Pierre. For Du Bois, Myers suggests, was a desire to reveal the inadequacy of the prevailing norms of scientific inquiry, both on their own terms as well as their ability to reveal the Truth of the Black experience. His work continued a process of thinking beyond discipline, beyond even interdisciplines, in order to access that, Truth. In that conception, Du Bois would have heirs who would take this further. His example was foundational to how they regarded the world. And just as Of Black Study grapples with Du Bois’s legacy in ways that are different from those texts that seek to exalt him as the founding father of several disciplines, it connects his confrontation with those disciplines to a genealogy of Black thinkers who extended his example in the early days of Black Studies” [9]. Expanding and stretching this premise, you will hear a conversation we had with Nathalie Pierre. Nathalie Frédéric Pierre is an Assistant Professor of History at Howard University. She earned her PhD in the history of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America from New York University. In the classroom and within her research agenda, Professor Pierre highlights the plans and processes people of African descent set into motion in order to sustain sites of autonomy across the Americas. She is currently writing her first book, ‘The Vessel of Independence... Must Save Itself’: Haitian State Formation, 1757 - 1815 which articulates the political thought of Haitian statesmen, who were bound to preserve antislavery and create a government suitable for emancipated citizens of African origin in a revolutionary Atlantic world still reliant on enslaved labor. Her work has been published in The Journal of Haitian Studies, Cultural Dynamics, Remembrance: Loss, Hope, Recovery after the Earthquake in Haiti, and other forums. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Graduate School of the City University of New York in the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC), a Black Studies Dissertation Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Ronald E. McNair Scholar at Howard University. Public engagement is a critical part of her work; and, after surviving the 2010 Haitian earthquake, she became board chair (2011 - 2017) of the Flanbwayan Haitian Literacy Project, an immigrant education advocacy group serving migrant Haitian teens and their families. She has given lectures in Haitian Creole and English to community organizations; while also participating in the Digital Library of the Caribbean’s online exhibit “Haiti: An Island Luminous.” She is on the board of the Haitian Studies Association. Image: Lisa Larson-Walker