Henry Louis Gates Jr.
The Legacy of Reconstruction and the Rise of Jim Crow
Virtual event: 5:30-6:30 p.m. Feb. 9
A free webinar featuring the literary scholar and filmmaker in conversation with UNC faculty member Karla Slocum
Registration required—registration link coming soon!
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic and institution builder, Gates has authored or co-authored 25 books and created 23 documentary films, including the popular PBS genealogy series Finding Your Roots. His latest series, The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song, will air on PBS in February 2021.
His recent book, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (Penguin Random House, 2019) has been described as “a profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them.”
The recipient of more than 50 honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998, he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. He was named to Time’s 25 Most Influential Americans list in 1997 and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999. He earned his B.A. in English Language and Literature, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1973, and his M.A. and Ph.D.in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge in 1979.
Karla Slocum
Karla Slocum is the Thomas Willis Lambeth Distinguished Chair of Public Policy, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Institute of African American Research at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is also co-founder and co-chair of Black Communities: A Conference for Collaboration, which facilitates community-engaged research partnerships and exchanges.
Slocum specializes in studies of place, race, history and black rurality, for which she has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the School for Advanced Research. She is the author of Free Trade and Freedom: Neoliberalism, Place and Nation in the Caribbean (University of Michigan Press, 2006) and Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West (UNC Press, 2019). Her published articles and book chapters have appeared in such journals and edited volumes as American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Transforming Anthropology, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, and the Routledge Companion on Inter-American Studies.
Most recently, Slocum is the co-creator of #TulsaSyllabus, a resource guide centering sources on and relevant to the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. Currently, she is pursuing a collaborative, interdisciplinary project, Mapping Black Towns, to digitally visualize the story of U.S. Black settlements in their social, geographical, political, and material contexts.
