The Panopticon Review: FASCIST AMERICA 2025: The Great Sherrilyn Ifill, Extraordinary Legal scholar, Legendary Attorney, Groundbreaking and Pioneering Teacher and Activist, Formidable Public Intellectual, and Inspiring Leader Gives A Typically Brilliant And Compelling Speech at the 'Mecca Of African American Higher Education', Howard University in the Name Of Our Always Glorious Collective Struggle For True Liberation and Self Determination In All Aspects of Our Lives In A Direct National Response To A Raging Fascist Movement (and Federal Government) in the U.S. Today

Tuesday, October 14, 2025

FASCIST AMERICA 2025: The Great Sherrilyn Ifill, Extraordinary Legal scholar, Legendary Attorney, Groundbreaking and Pioneering Teacher and Activist, Formidable Public Intellectual, and Inspiring Leader Gives A Typically Brilliant And Compelling Speech at the 'Mecca Of African American Higher Education', Howard University in the Name Of Our Always Glorious Collective Struggle For True Liberation and Self Determination In All Aspects of Our Lives In A Direct National Response To A Raging Fascist Movement (and Federal Government) in the U.S. Today

Sherrilyn Ifill Delivers Keynote Address at Howard University's 2025 Opening Convocation Ceremony—VIDEO +

The 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy

September 29, 2025

VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98-P7McwUnA

Howard University leaders opened the academic year September 19 with its 158th Opening Convocation ceremony that acknowledged the weight of changing times. Convocation keynote speaker Sherrilyn Ifill, a Howard School of Law professor, cited the “heaviness in the land” but urged students to see the moment as time for democratic renewal. You can watch Ifill's full remarks.

Nina Simone (1933-2003)

"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."

Editor's Bio

Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.

The Panopticon Review

Tuesday, October 14, 2025

Malcolm X (1925-1965)

W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

Nina Simone (1933-2003)

Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)

Angela Davis (b. 1944)

Duke Ellington (1899-1974)

Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)

Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)

Ella Baker (1903-1986)

Paul Robeson (1898-1976)

John Coltrane (1926-1967)

Miles Davis (1926-1991)

C.L.R. James (1901-1989)

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)

Edward Said (1935-2003)

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

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