On October 10, 2026, the Wilmington Public Library will open its doors for a day of conversation about something that rarely gets named as a public-health matter at all: breath. The 2026 James Newton Symposium, titled Reclaiming Our Breath: Black Health, Healing, and Wellness, runs from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at 10 East 10th Street, and admission is free.
The symposium is organized by the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware, in partnership with the library. Its framing statement is unusually direct for an academic event. It names the compounding pressures on Black communities — lack of access to safe housing and neighborhoods, healthy food, health care, quality education and job opportunities — and sets them alongside what it calls the everyday microaggressions, the failing policies and politics, and the carceral violence that fall disproportionately on Black lives. These, the organizers write, are generational traumas in the afterlife of slavery, and they make the prioritizing of Black health and wellness not a luxury but an imperative.
That language is deliberate. The symposium's subtitle, Reclaiming Our Breath, reaches for the oldest and most literal measure of whether a life is being allowed to continue. To talk about breath in this context is to talk about the difference between surviving and thriving, between the ability to exhale in one's own neighborhood and the constant vigilance that makes rest impossible.
The event is built on the legacy of Dr. James E. Newton, one of the founding directors of the program in Black Studies that became today's Department of Africana Studies. Newton died on May 24, 2022, at the age of 80, just days before the University of Delaware was to award him an honorary degree. He had spent more than three decades on the faculty, and by the time he arrived in 1972, the university was a place where Black students could go a week without seeing another face like their own.
Tony Allen, who would go on to lead Delaware State University, was one of those students in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He described Newton as "chicken soup for the beleaguered soul" — the person who made it possible for Black scholars to thrive rather than merely survive on a majority-white campus, and who delivered the tough love that reminded them to excel there. Allen put it plainly: very few Black students under Newton's tenure would have gotten through the University of Delaware so successfully without him.
Newton's story began in South Jersey. He became the first African American to graduate with a Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and later earned a doctorate in education. He was a painter and printmaker of real distinction, a public intellectual, and a professor of African American history and art. When he wasn't mentoring students, he was making work that carried the same journey forward.
His reach extended well beyond the classroom. Newton helped found the Mitchell Center for African American Heritage in Wilmington, and served as a Wilmington leader on the boards of the YWCA and the Delaware Art Museum. In early 2024, three Delaware institutions — the Delaware Art Museum, UD's Mechanical Hall Gallery, and UD's Morris Library — mounted exhibitions celebrating his artistic life, including a DelArt show titled The Artistic Legacy of James E. Newton: Poetic Roots, which traced his early works from his graduate student years at Chapel Hill through his explorations of abstraction. "It is an honor to join in the celebration of Dr. Newton's legacy and the many ways his spirit shaped the artistic landscape of Delaware," said Margaret Winslow, the museum's chief curator and curator of contemporary art.
The symposium itself began in 2024 as the inaugural James E. Newton Symposium, subtitled The Future of Africana Studies. That first gathering, held on October 12, 2024, at the same Wilmington library, featured sessions including "Generations and Genealogies: Black Feminist Bonds and Binds," with a keynote from Charlene A. Carruthers, the writer, filmmaker, community organizer and Black Studies doctoral candidate at Northwestern University. It was free and open to the public, with walk-in attendance welcomed and pre-registration offered only to guarantee a complimentary lunch.
The 2026 edition keeps that open-door spirit. The event is free and open to the public, with advance registration requested. The library that hosts it has its own long history: the Wilmington Public Library was originally incorporated in 1754, its service interrupted by the Revolutionary War, and reopened in 1788 with the help of John Dickinson, Jacob Brook and Gunning Bedford — three signers of the U.S. Constitution. The current building came about through the philanthropy of Pierre S. du Pont in 1922. For more than two centuries, then, this has been a place where the city's residents have come to find information and each other.
That the symposium happens in Wilmington rather than on the Newark campus is not incidental. Newton was a Wilmington figure as much as a university one — a board member, a founder of a heritage center, a presence in the city's cultural life. Bringing the conversation downtown places the academic work of Africana Studies back into the community it studies and serves.
The stakes the organizers describe are contemporary and concrete. The symposium's own framing notes that the stress of insecure housing, food and health care does not operate in isolation; it compounds. It accumulates across generations. In that light, the day's agenda — health, healing, wellness — is less a retreat from politics than an argument about where the political actually begins: in the body, in the breath, in the capacity to keep going.
Newton's legacy, as the organizers frame it, is one of activism and people-centered scholarship. The symposium is meant to build on that by asking new questions and testing new methodologies, defining the field of Africana Studies against evolving historical, social, cultural, political and environmental realities. It is, in other words, an attempt to do what Newton did for three decades: to insist that Black study and Black life are the same project, and that both require room to breathe.
The event runs from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 10, 2026, at the Wilmington Public Library, 10 East 10th Street, Wilmington, Delaware. It is free, open to the public, and registration is requested in advance.