Holding the Moment: A Speaker Series
Rainier Arts Center
3515 S Alaska Street
Seattle, WA 98118
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In the face of rising censorship and cultural erasure, storytelling is resistance.

Mirror Stage, in collaboration with Humanities Washington, is launching Holding The Moment: A Speaker Series—a bold new series for voices fighting to be heard. Every other month, we host artists, educators, journalists, and activists who challenge systems of silence and invisibility through the power of story.

These interactive events explore identity, memory, politics, and art—connecting personal truth to collective liberation. From confronting anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric to exposing cultural appropriation and reclaiming erased histories, each talk invites us to resist oppression and build belonging.

Free and open to all ages, each 90-minute talk includes time for Q&A. Come listen. Speak up. Take part.

Across the country, efforts to suppress Black history in libraries and classrooms have taken root. Anger against “critical race theory” and “wokeness” has led to new laws prohibiting what can and cannot be taught to students of all ages, and what books can remain in libraries. Why are there efforts to limit this knowledge? Are some ideas just too dangerous? If so, how do we decide what those are as a society? Shouldn’t we have the freedom to think, to know, to aspire?  

To counter some of these efforts, professor Luther Adams – Free Man of Color, uses Black thought, images, and poetry, as well as local history, to create an open space to ask questions about Black history and why it matters to all of us. 

Luther Adams – Free Man of Color (he/him) is an associate professor of ethnic, gender, and labor studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma. As a student and teacher of Black history and culture, his work brings together the interdisciplinary study of urban, southern, labor, and religious history to understand Black culture and life. He is following up his first book, Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970, with a history of African Americans’ long struggle with and against police brutality. Adams lives in Tacoma.