Dr. George A. Priestley, a father, husband, friend, mentor, role-model, activist and intellectual giant.
It is with great sadness we announce the passing of Dr. George A. Priestley, a father, husband, friend, mentor, role-model, activist and intellectual giant. Dr. Priestley who fought tirelessly for many decades for the rights and dignity of minorities and the disadvantaged throughout the world succumbed to complications from diabetes on Sunday June 28, 2009 after a tough 4 month battle. He was 68 and is survived by his loving wife of over 4 decades Mrs. Marva Wade Priestley and his loving son Amilcar Maceo Priestley.
A Memorial Service will be held on Sunday July 5, 2009 at the Auditorium of Medgar Evers College-CUNY , 1650 Bedford Ave. (entrance located at Montgomery Street bet Bedford Ave and Franklin Ave. in Brooklyn, NY) between the hours of 2pm and 4pm with a repast immediately following, between 4pm and 6pm). In lieu of flowers, the family asks that a donation be made to the scholarship fund which is being established in his honor and which will be announced shortly.
Dr. George A. Priestley graduated from Brooklyn College in 1968; and had received both his Masters as well as his Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University by 1980. He served as Director of the Latin American and Latino Studies program at Queens College, and taught in the Political Science Department at that institution for 40 years. He has also taught for two years as an adjunct Professor in the Department of Pan-African Studies at Barnard College/Columbia University. Dr. Priestley played a significant role in mobilizing grassroots support in the United States for the passage of the 1977 Torrijos Carter (Panama Canal) Treaty which helped to re-establish the national sovereignty of the Republic of Panama following nearly 75 years of U.S. occupation and which called for the return of ownership of the Panama Canal to Panama on December 31, 1999. He was also a key facilitator of the dialogue on race in Panama and its diasporic challenges, as well as Panama's grassroots participation in the World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001.
Dr. Priestley served on a number of academic and seditorial boards, including NACLA (North American Report on the Americas) and Tareas (one of Panama's leading social science journal). He was also a contributing editor of Wadabagei, a Journal of Caribbean Studies and its Diaspora and a senior researcher at the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos, and Justo Arosemena (CELA) in Panama where his research interest included studies in Comparative Politics, Central American Politics, Comparative Racial Formation, and Transnational Identities in the Black Diaspora; He is the author or co-author of several books and monographs and dozens of articles. Some of his better known publications are:
- Ethnicity and Class in Central America
- Military Government and Popular Participation in Panama: The Torrijos Regime, 1968-1975
- Panama's Political Crisis: Is There a Democratic Alternative
- Piel Oscuro: Ensayos y Refleciones al Filo del Centenario published in 2003 and co-written with long time friend and collaborator Alberto Barrow (he also edited and wrote the prologue to Mr. Barrow's 2001 book No Me Pidas Una Foto: Develando el Racismo en Panama).
One of Dr. Priestley's recent research project involved the Transnational Identities of Panamanians of West Indian descent, and a political biography of George Washington Westerman, journalist, diplomat and defender of minority rights in Panama.
Dr. Priestley has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Gulbenkian Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Diversity Initiative Grant, a Mellon Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Humanities/Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Fellow 2002-2003, a 2008 honoree award by the NAACP-NorthEast Queens Branch and numerous grants from PSC-CUNY.
Dr. Priestley served as Executive Director of the City University of New York Association of Caribbean Studies, Program Chair of the 24th Conference of the Caribbean Studies Association-CSA (May 1999 at Hotel Panama, Panama City), was a member of the Executive Council of CSA and was a faculty member of Center for Latin American, Caribbean & Latino Studies at the Graduate Center-CUNY (CLACLS). He was the President of the World University Service (United States National Committee) during the 1980s.
Outside of academia he has held numerous positions including that of President of the Third Congress of Black Panamanians (1988), Co-Coordinator of Panama's National Association against Racism, and Vice-President of the Third Congress of Black Culture of the Americas. Most recently Dr. Priestley through a grant from the Ford Foundation and with the support of Queens College-CUNY founded and served as the Principal Investigator of the The Afro Latin@ Project (www.afrolatinoproject.org), a 501(c)(3) non-profit, which aims to document, promote, coordinate and support the development of Afro-Latin@ studies and grass roots activities in the United States. The most recent initiative of the Afro-Latin@ Project, which Dr. Priestley was actively working on as recently as four days prior to his passing, was the "H.I.V. Project" which seeks to research and document the occurence and impact of H.I.V. infections on the African diasporic community in the Americas starting with Panama, Honduras and the Dominican Republic and ultimately facilitate the development of community and public policy oriented means of education and prevention.
DR. PRIESTLEY WILL BE SORELY MISSED BY THE MANY WHOSE LIVES HE TOUCHED AND INSPIRED.
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