As a student at Pitt, Mahmood Mamdani, father of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, was introduced to a \u201cnew world\u201d of activism.<\/p>\n
Mamdani, currently the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, spoke with Africana Studies professor Christel Temple in Lawrence Hall in a discussion organized by the World History Center. Mamdani explained how his interest in humanities and activism developed during his time at Pitt as an undergraduate international student during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Raised in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, Mamdani was one of several hundred students who came to the U.S. through the Kennedy Airlift<\/a> program, which gave students from East Africa an opportunity to study in the U.S. Though he began his time at Pitt studying electrical engineering, Mamdani said he quickly became interested in social sciences.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was already clear to me that improvements needed to be made in the world, even then, and we had to change America,\u201d Mamdani said. \u201cI never took a course on Africa because I said, \u2018I am not going to America to study Africa. I came to study America.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Mamdani said one of his first experiences with activism in the U.S. was with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee<\/a> in 1965. After meeting students in the organization, he immediately decided to hop on a bus to Montgomery, Alabama to join a civil rights march to fight for the \u201csame struggles\u201d he faced at home in Uganda.<\/p>\n \u201cColonial Kampala<\/a> was a highly racialized society. It was arranged in[to] what the British called population groups \u2014 whites, browns, blacks,\u201d Mamdani said. \u201c[As] a kid who came out of that, [I] thought of the world in terms of races.\u201d<\/p>\n At the protest, he listened to speeches from civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. and James Forman<\/a>, and subsequently landed himself in jail for participating.<\/p>\n Mamdani said the warm welcome he experienced in Montgomery from Black community members gave him a new perspective, having come from the highly segregated society of Kampala under British colonial rule<\/a>. In Montgomery, he was welcomed into the homes and churches of Black mothers and doctors.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom then on, it was a new world. The racialized world could not withstand,\u201d Mamdani said.<\/p>\n