About Social Justice CALL
Social Justice CALL is a reading group built on the practices of collective study for collective liberation. We sponsor public study groups with the aim of strengthening the community’s understanding of Citizenship, Activism, Law, and Literacy.
Whether we are reading The United States Constitution, The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, the Black Panther 10-Point Program, the poem, “For My People” by Margaret Walker, On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, or selected works by Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Frederick Douglass, our mission is the same—to educate to achieve self-determination, liberation and democracy.
We encourage participants to use the histories that we study to inform their activism aimed at improving the lives of people in our communities. We sponsor history projects that invite participants to share what they have learned in public forums, and we collaborate with local and national organizations to expand the public’s knowledge of history.
Who We Are
Lisa A. Monroe
Lisa A. Monroe is a writer and educator, having taught college-level composition during a period of two decades in Baltimore, Maryland and New Haven, Connecticut. Beyond the classroom, Lisa has directed her passion for reading and education into public humanities work, as founder of BookTalk, a popular citywide reading group at the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore in the 1990s, and co-founder of Social Justice CALL, a collective study group focused on Black history education in New Haven beginning in 2004.
Her writing has appeared in Black Perspectives, The Crisis, and the Hartford Courant newspaper, among other publications. Currently, Lisa is a doctoral student in the History and Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research project examines the influence of U.S. public school curricula in the nineteenth century on constructed notions of American citizenship, national identity, and the American narrative. Her ongoing research also examines the self-education activities within the Black women’s club movement, specifically the Women's Twentieth-Century Club, the first known Black women’s club formed in New Haven, as she discovered, with the assistance of suffragist and Black club woman advocate, Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
Susan Marcia Monroe
Susan Marcia Monroe, co-founder of Social Justice CALL, has worked and taught in higher education for 30 years in Maryland, Connecticut and Virginia. Outside of that important work with first-generation college students, she has worked in popular education efforts like BookTalk at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, MD, and her own School 29 Project in New Haven, CT., which offered study skills workshops to parents of public school students.
Social Justice CALL continues her drive to place history and literacy education in the hands of the community.