First Monday Lecture with Dr. Harold D. (Hal) Weaver, Jr. and Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge

Further details about this program will be shared soon. 

If you would like to join us for dinner before the event,
please sign up at least 24 business hours in advance.  

This and our other First Monday Lectures are streamed live and available
as recordings on our YouTube channel.

Leaders

Dr. Harold D. (Hal) Weaver, Jr. is the Founder and Director of the BlackQuaker Project (BQP), a ministry celebrating the lives and contributions of Quakers of Color worldwide and documenting and addressing their concerns. It is an outreach and in-reach ministry of his Wellesley Friends Meeting. Hal has spent his life confronting the cancer of white supremacy throughout the world, drawing upon the Quaker testimonies of Truth, Peace, Equality, Community, and Justice. Through the BQP, Hal has produced several publications relevant to Quakers: the Beacon Hill Friends House pamphlet of Hal’s 2008 Weed Lecture, “Facing Unbearable Truths;” Black Fire: African American Quakers on Spirituality and Human Rights (2011) through FGC Press; the 2020 Pendle Hill pamphlet Race, Systemic Violence, and Retrospective Justice: An African American Quaker Scholar-Activist Challenges Conventional Narratives (PHP #465); and the January 2021 Friends Journal article, “A Proposed Plan for Retrospective Justice.” 

Hal’s Quaker governance roles have included serving with the Quaker United Nations Office, American Friends Service Committee, Pendle Hill, Friends General Conference, Friends World Committee for Consultation, and the Haverford College Corporation. The founding Chairperson of the Department of Africana Studies at Rutgers University during the early days of the Black Studies movement, Hal is currently an Associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and was honored in 2022 with the Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from Haverford College. Hal lives in Newton, Massachusetts, and Oaxaca, Mexico, with his life partner, Anne Steere Nash, and attends Wellesley Friends Meeting and the Oaxaca Quaker Worship Group that he co-founded more than a decade ago. 

Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge is a Quaker and social justice activist from Southern Africa. In 2021 she was the first person of colour from the global south to be appointed as QUNO Geneva director. Prior to that she taught a 2020 Spring Semester Course on South Africa’s Peaceful Transition at Haverford College, to a diverse group of students from the Tri-Colleges (Haverford, Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore Colleges).  

She was one of few women at the negotiations for South Africa’s transition as part of CODESA (the Convention for a Democratic South Africa), a multi-party negotiations platform of all political stakeholders, which negotiated South Africa’s transition from apartheid. She then worked as Managing Secretary of the Transitional Executive Council’s Sub council on the Status of Women. In 1994 Nozizwe was on the African National Congress proportional representation party list to Parliament in South Africa’s first non-racial, democratic election, which installed Nelson Mandela as the country’s first black president. From 1999 to 2004 she served as a Deputy Minister of Defence, a Quaker and the first woman to serve in this role. She also served as Deputy Minister of Health from 2004 – 2007. In 2008 she was elected Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly. In 2009, she left Parliament and cofounded Embrace Dignity with her husband, Jeremy Routledge. She is a recipient of the Tanenbaum Peacemakers Award and honorary doctorates from Haverford College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Bradford, United Kingdom. She has a Bachelor of Social Science honours degree from the University of Cape Town.

Thanks to the generous support of the Friends Foundation for the Aging, we’re able to make this and other free, online programs accessible to f/Friends of all ages.