Race-Making and Law-Making in the Long Civil Rights Movement
2008-09 Fellowship

The Charles Warren Center, Harvard's American history research center, announces the 2008-09 Warren Center Felows, participating in a workshop on Race-Making and Law-Making in “the Long Civil Rights Movement” – a term originally put into academic discourse by the noted historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. As its title indicates, the workshop invites scholars to question and rethink the conventional time period during which the movement for racial equality in America is believed to have taken place, including the extension of that period beyond the bounds of the twentieth century. It also invites a rethinking of the movement's geographic scope, both within and outside the United States . Finally, participants are invited to consider the long civil rights movement in relation to organizational strategies and leadership, personnel and successes in claims-making within state apparatuses such as courts, war and wartime contexts, and the processes of racial and cultural formation that were associated with the push for equality. The workshop will focus less on the origins, successes and failures of the modern movement than on discontinuities, disruptions and ironies that attended the creation of equal citizenship in America.

Warren Center Fellows, 2008-2009

Clarissa Atkinson – Independent Scholar. “Claudia Jones and the Long Civil Rights Movement.”

Zoë Burkholder – School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University. “'Racism is Vulnerable': Anthropological Efforts to Destabilize the Race Concept in American Public Schools, 1939-1948.”

Matthew Countryman – Department of History, University of Michigan. “'Who Needs the Bullet When You've Got the Ballot': The Political Logic and Racial Iconography of African-American Mayors During the 1970's and 1980's.”

Rachel Devlin – Department of History, Tulane University. “Girls on the Front Line: Gender and the Battle to Desegregate Public Schools, 1940-1954.”

Thomas Guglielmo – American Studies Department, George Washington University. “Race War: World War II and the Crisis of American Democracy.”

Peniel Joseph – Department of African and Afro-American Studies, Brandeis University. “Stokely Carmichael: Race, Democracy, and Postwar America, 1941-1969.”

Scott Kurashige – Department of History, University of Michigan. “From Civil Rights to a Revolution of Values.”

Kevin Mumford – Department of History, University of Iowa. “Brother Redeemers: Race, Sexual Revolution, and Black Gay History.”