Chapel Hill, N.C.– The Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will host "The Long Civil Rights Movement: Histories, Politics, Memories" on April 2-4, 2009 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The conference, open to scholars and the public, will bring together academics and activists who are pushing the boundaries of civil rights scholarship and re-imagining the place of civil rights history inside and outside the academy. Participation is free, though registration is required.

The conference is one part of a three-year collaboration, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to experiment with new ways of producing and publishing cutting-edge research on the "long civil rights movement," an approach that re-examines that movement chronologically, demographically, thematically, and geographically. Project partners include the Southern Oral History Program at UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, the University of North Carolina Press, the UNC School of Law Center for Civil Rights, and the UNC Academic Affairs Library.

"The Long Civil Rights Movement: Histories, Politics, Memories" challenges the traditional understanding of the civil rights movement as a 1960s phenomenon, stretching its timeline to include the movement’s origins in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the activism it inspired through the end of the twentieth century. This approach expands the regional focus of the civil rights movement beyond the South, stressing the region's convergences with other parts of the U.S., and around the globe. It also incorporates study not just of the struggles for social justice, but also of the forces arrayed against them.

The conference features an exciting line-up of short papers examining the civil rights movement from a diversity of viewpoints. There will be plenty of time for conversation and audience interaction. Speakers will include Peniel Joseph on the Black Power movement, Zaragosa Vargas on Mexican-American labor activists, and Nancy MacLean on race and education in the modern era, as well as many more cutting edge historians of the long civil rights movement. Thomas Sugrue, Bancroft Award-winning author of _The Origins of the Urban Crisis_ and the newly published _Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggles for Civil Rights in the North_, will deliver the keynote address, "The Civil Rights Movement Up North and Down South," on Friday, April 3, 2009.

To register for this conference or to see our full list of panelists, please visit http://sohp.org.
Email: jcdavis@email.unc.edu
Visit the website at http://sohp.org