What happened to the NAACP? It’s odd to think that the venerable and historic National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has been reduced to a talking point in the national media cycle this week. They received national attention in June when the Los Angeles chapter lodged a protest against a Hallmark card with [...] Read more »
Septima Clark, Freedom’s Teacher
It is night. A lone black woman walks through a cornfield in South Carolina. The stars wink above her. Crickets and cicadas grow quiet as she passes and then resume their orchestral humming, now punctuated by the sound of rustling leaves a little farther off. She moves toward an unpainted one-room building. When she gets [...] Read more »
Today’s Segregated Schools
A federal judge Tuesday ordered a rural county in southwestern Mississippi to stop segregating its schools by grouping African American students into all-black classrooms and allowing white students to transfer to the county’s only majority-white school, the U.S. Justice Department announced. (read the whole story here) When I saw the story yesterday headlined “Miss. county [...] Read more »
Up to Date in Kansas City
We welcome a guest post today from Joshua M. Dunn, author of Complex Justice: The Case of Missouri v. Jenkins. Dunn’s book explores the 1987 case that became the federal court’s most expensive attempt at school desegregation: Judge Russell Clark mandated tax increases to help pay for improvements to the Kansas City, Missouri, School District [...] Read more »
The Long Civil Rights Movement conference videos now online
Last summer Rachel blogged about a new Mellon-funded project aimed at sharing scholarship on the civil rights movement. Last month, Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement (LCRM) sponsored a wildly successful conference here at UNC to discuss the project and possibilities for scholarly collaboration. LCRM director Sylvia Miller described the conference this way: All of [...] Read more »
Baby/bathwater proposal, or a much-needed revolutionary idea?
As an interesting follow up to Friday’s post, in which I talked about publishing as one of those industries going through major shifts right now, Mark C. Taylor’s op-ed from Sunday’s New York Times, “End the University as We Know It,” proposes a BIG shake-up for universities in general. Taylor, chair of the religion department [...] Read more »
Snips and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails
That’s what little boys are made of. So what are fraternities made of? Nicholas Syrett, author of The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities, will be talking about the long and secretive history of male fraternities on WUNC’s The State of Things at noon (and 9pm) today. You can listen live online [...] Read more »
New Project Aims to “Publish the Long Civil Rights Movement”
Cool activist-esque things to do through the years: early 1960s: register African American voters in the South; late 1960s: protest Vietnam War/attend large-scale concert in upstate New York; 1970s: burn bra while reading Erica Jong; 1990s: wear a red ribbon on an expensive tuxedo; 2008: get involved in the electoral process. Considering the upcoming election [...]
