Our Beautiful and Beloved Struggle: Celebrating Anthony Monteiro's 80th Birthday

We invite you to join us in celebrating our friend, mentor, comrade, and brother Anthony Monteiro on the occasion of his 80th birthday on Oct. 31st and Nov. 1st at the Church of the Crucifixion, 807 Bainbridge St, in Philadelphia. This will be a conference addressing political, ideological, and civilizational questions for our common future. All are welcome to participate.

Born and raised in North Philadelphia, Dr. Monteiro is a native son of the city’s Black proletariat. Throughout his life he has remained a fighter in the Black freedom struggle, a partisan in world movements for peace and national liberation. In times of chaos and crisis he has remained true to the vision of his forebears W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Winston, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Paul Robeson, and many others, being a complete intellectual who theorizes new understandings of democracy, the color line, civilization, knowledge, and the American revolutionary process.

Dr. Monteiro has made indispensable contributions to the battle of ideas today, especially the rediscovery of Du Bois as the central thinker of humanity’s future going forward. This rediscovery is best understood in the context of Dr. Monteiro’s own journey through ideas of Black liberation, the Communist Party, anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles, and other people’s movements. In the currents of his life run the rivers of the world: the ideological history of revolutionary thought and politics in our current epoch.

More than this, Dr. Monteiro is a teacher of teachers — one who dedicates his life to the struggle for truth and to the task of educating the people for freedom. Rejecting the elitism of university-trained academics, he chooses to be close to ordinary people. There would be no Philadelphia without its Black proletariat, and Dr. Monteiro has committed himself to the passionate defense of Black folk as a world-historic people and as the principal agents of change who define this nation’s revolutionary possibility.

This ethos explains the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation, which he founded in 2012. In celebrating Anthony Monteiro, the Saturday Free School celebrates the civilizational lifeworld, the Beloved Community that produces revolutionaries like him: human beings whose hearts are made, as King said, for “the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world.”

Please help us make this celebration possible by donating as you are able. All contributions will go toward venue costs, refreshments, performers, and publication of a Collection of Dr. Monteiro's important works.

If you would like to skip the GoFundMe platform fees, you can directly Venmo @Jeremiah-Kim-4 or Cashapp @kimjerm1, and we will log your donation manually.

For more information about this event, visit: https://www.saturdayfreeschool.org/beautiful-beloved.html