Remembering the Civil Rights Movement and Discussing the Right to Vote and Access to Quality Education, 50 years after Freedom Summer
On February 26th the African American Studies program at the College of Charleston will welcome several Freedom Summer participants, Civil Rights activists and historians to participate in a panel discussion on the events of the past 50 years since the Freedom Summer. This public lecture, including activists who risked their lives during this historic event, will commemorate the 1964 Freedom Summer, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and interrogate the meaning of this history today. The events are free, open to the public and all are welcome to attend.
The panelists are:
DAVID J. “Dave” DENNIS, Sr., interrupted his collegiate experience during his freshman year in 1961 at Dillard University in New Orleans LA to work in the 60s civil rights movement in the South, particularly Mississippi and Louisiana, where he was arrested over 30 times in relation to his activities to register disenfranchised voters. He was on the first freedom bus ride from Montgomery AL to Jackson MS in 1961. He served in both states as field secretary for CORE (Congress on Racial Equality). He was a codirector of COFO (Council of Federated Organizations) and of the effort to organize Freedom Summer 1964. More recently, he has been working with Bob Moses (a fellow veteran of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi) to pursue “quality education as a constitutional right.” The current climate in which the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is under assault underscores that citizens must be ever vigilant in our efforts to maintain safeguards to our citizenship already hard-won and to continue the pursuit of those necessary elements for full citizenship that are yet to be secured.
MARK LEVY served in 1964 as the coordinator of the Meridian, Mississippi, Freedom School and returned to Jackson, MS, for the summer of 1965. He is a born, bred, and schooled New Yorker who worked at two careers after graduation from Queens College/CUNY. First, he taught social studies in junior high school and then Third World Studies in the Queens College SEEK Program. He later left classroom teaching to work as an organizer in the electrical manufacturing and health care industries. After retiring, he became involved in civil rights archival and preservation work. During 2013-14, he served as Special Assistant to the President of Queens College for the Civil Rights Movement 50th Anniversary Commemoration Initiatives. He writes for and regularly speaks to high school, college, and teacher groups about teaching the Movement from the bottom up, about civic involvement, and about the Movement’s continued relevance to today’s issues.
WILLIAM STURKEY is an historian of Modern American, African American, and Southern History with a particular research focus on race in the American South, working-class African American communities, and the Civil Rights Movement. He received his PhD from Ohio State and is now postdoctoral fellow at University of North Carolina, where he will be assistant professor of history starting July 1, 2015.
Dr. Sturkey’s first book, scheduled for publication in February of 2015, is an edited collection of the newspapers, essays, and poems produced by young black Freedom School students during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer: To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies) University of Mississippi Press. His second book, under contract with Harvard University Press, examines the impact of modernization on Southern Jim Crow and explores the organic origins of the Civil Rights Movement. Sturkey’s next book project will tentatively examine working-class African American life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the decades before World War II.
Benjamin Hedin’s fiction, essays, and interviews have been published by The New Yorker, Slate, The Nation, The Oxford American, The Chicago Tribune, Poets and Writers, Salmagundi, and The Georgia Review. He is the editor of Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader, widely regarded as one of the finest collections of music writing, and the producer and author of a forthcoming documentary, The Blues House. His nonfiction chronicle, In Search of the Movement: The Struggle for Civil Rights Then and Now, will be published in March of 2015 by City Lights Books.
If You Go:
Thursday, February 26, 2015
6-7:30pm
Addlestone Library, Room 227, College of Charleston, (125 Calhoun Street, Charleston SC)
Admission: Free
Contact: Jon Hale, 843-953-6354 (day)
Conseula Francis, 843-870-9514 (daytime, evenings)
African American Studies @ CofC: Events
