A four-week institute for twenty-five college and university faculty on African-American struggles for equality and rights from Reconstruction to the 1960s.
The institute is co-directed by Waldo Martin (history, University of California, Berkeley) and Patricia Sullivan (history, University of South Carolina). It investigates the following, in four weekly segments: 1) the significance of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era for understanding the evolution of civil rights in the United States, including black political action and the impact of African-American migration to the North; 2) further developments during the Jim Crow period, including the founding of the NAACP and the impact of World War I, the Depression, and World War II; 3) postwar issues, including the desegregation of the armed forces, connections between the U.S. civil rights movement and Cold War anti-colonialism, the impact of Brown v. Board of Education, and women and religion in the movement; and 4) civil rights in the 1960s, including cross-racial alliances, direct action in the South, the nature of black leadership, the year 1963 as a crossroads, and the rise of Black Power. Visiting faculty include Eric Foner (history, Columbia University), Leon Litwack (history, University of California, Berkeley), Bettye Collier-Thomas (history, Temple University), Raymond Gavins (history, Duke University), Gerald Early (English, Washington University), Peter Guralnick (writer-in-residence, Vanderbilt University), Peniel Joseph (history, Tufts University), Blair Kelley (history, North Carolina State University), Kimberley Phillips (history, Brooklyn College, City University of New York), and Stanley Nelson (filmmaker). The institute features panel discussions, oral history sessions with movement veterans, and work on curricular projects. Readings consist of major scholarly works, including writings by institute faculty members, such as Steven Hahn's A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, Leon Litwack's Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, Blair Kelley's Right to Ride: Street Car Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Aftermath of Plessey v. Ferguson, and Kim Phillips's new book, War, What is It Good For? Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from World War II to Iraq. They are supplemented by music and documentary films. The team intends to create a comprehensive project website based on work done in past and present institutes.