No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice
Monday, Sept. 30, 4 – 5 p.m. | Crosland G120, Wilby Classroom
Karen L. Cox, professor emerita of history at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, explains what Confederate statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning.
Her talk will highlight the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that anti-monument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In recent years, monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back.
Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South
Monday, Nov. 4, 4 – 5:30 p.m. | Crosland G120, Wilby Classroom
Kylie Smith, associate professor at Emory University, will discuss her upcoming book Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South, which examines the treatment of Black patients in Southern psychiatric hospitals during the Jim Crow era.
Her talk will highlight how racist psychiatric practices were exposed and challenged by Black communities, activists, and legal efforts.
For more information, please contact Germán Vergara or Todd Michney.