American Civil Rights Movement
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, challenging legal barriers to voting at the state and local levels. The following year, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a powerful speech in Kingstree, South Carolina, urging a crowd of 5,000 citizens to “March on Ballot Boxes” and exercise their right to vote in pursuit of social and economic justice.
As we reflect on the impact of pivotal civil rights legislation and court decisions this year, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Center for Civil Rights History and Research at the University of South Carolina invites you to our inaugural conference, “Where Do We Go From Here?”: Interpreting and Preserving the African American Civil Rights Movement.
This conference, created in partnership with the National Park Service, explores the connections between academic scholarship and public history engagement. Conference sessions and tours will focus on the representation and legacy of the Civil Rights Movement in museums, scholarly research,
historic preservation, education, and public history interpretations.
We are thrilled to announce Dr. Peniel Joseph as our keynote speaker. Dr. Joseph holds a joint appointment at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founding director of the LBJ School’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.
Dr. Joseph has authored the award-winning books Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, Stokley: A Life, and The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century. Joseph’s book The Sword and The Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X (@and)Martin Luther King, Jr., provided the narrative content for the acclaimed Nat Geo and Disney+ series Genius: MLK/X.
The conference will be held October 17-19, 2024. To register, visit civilrights.sc.edu/ conferen=3257a43ae6&mc_ eid=88677d5a9c
