Civil rights scholarship: a long history and rich resources at the University of Virginia

Even before Julian Bond’s arrival in 1992, the University faculty included distinguished chroniclers of the struggle for civil rights and of the South in the 20th century. Paul Gaston, professor emeritus of history and a member of the faculty for 40 years, is the author of “The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking” and has written extensively on Southern history and civil rights. In recent years he has produced articles that have helped the University understand its own history of racial discrimination. From 1984 to 1988, he served as president of the Southern Regional Council, which has long sought to promote racial justice, protect democratic rights, and broaden civic participation in the South. In 1970, Gaston taught the first course in black studies at U.Va. and chaired the committee that established the first interdisciplinary black studies program here. He also was on the committee of four that organized the University’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies.

The University also made its mark in this field through the work of William Elwood, an English professor who served as associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences before his death in 2002. He collaborated with 200 students to produce the acclaimed documentary “The Road to Brown,” which recounts the history of school desegregation and the work of Charles Hamilton Houston, the Harvard-educated, African-American lawyer who led efforts to use the courts to fight racial segregation and inequality. “The Road to Brown” won the 1990 American Film Festival Award for Best Film on Black History.

Today this devotion to the study of civil rights is shared by such faculty as Michael J. Klarman, the James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and professor of history. His widely hailed book, “From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality,” won the coveted Bancroft Prize as one of the best works in American history and biography. Recognized as a gifted teacher by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, Klarman has brought into focus the forces that shaped American attitudes toward race and how they came into play in Brown v. Board of Education and other key court decisions.

His colleague Risa Goluboff also focuses her research on this era. Her dissertation, “The Work of Civil Rights in the 1940s: The Department of Justice, the NAACP, and African-American Agricultural Labor,” won the 2004 Law and Society Association Dissertation Prize. She is also author of “The Lost Origins of Modern Civil Rights,” soon to be published by Harvard University Press. In a recent article, she noted the changing tone of letters from farm workers written to the Roosevelt White House. Through the 1930s, the writers complained of their helplessness and looked to the President as a paternal figure. By the 1940s, a sense of entitlement had developed, as service in World War II gave African Americans a sense of citizenship and belief in their rights.

Klarman and Goluboff are among the legal scholars involved in the Law School’s new Center for the Study of Race and Law, which provides opportunities for students, scholars, practitioners, and community members to examine and exchange ideas in this field. The center’s activities include courses, public lectures, scholarly workshops, symposia, and informal discussions.

Kim Forde-Mazrui, Justice Thurgood Marshall Research Professor of Law and director of the center, teaches courses on race and law and has conducted research in race and criminal procedure, race in the child placement process, affirmative action and reparations.

The Explorations in Black Leadership Project, co-sponsored by the Institute for Public History and the Darden Graduate School of Business, invites prominent African-American leaders to Charlottesville to participate in a public program on leadership. Julian Bond, who directs the project with Phyllis Leffler, director of the institute, has interviewed more than 25 people, including Oliver Hill, Dorothy Height, Vernon Jordan, Charles Ogletree, Nikki Giovanni and, most recently, Anthony Williams, mayor of Washington, D.C. Many participants also deliver public addresses, which are available in text and video at the UVA NewsMakers Web site.

A look around the Grounds reveals many others working on various aspects of civil rights studies and the role of race in America. Some examples:

• Craig Barton, associate professor of architecture and director of the American Urbanism program, is helping African-American communities to preserve and interpret their significant cultural resources and to use them to stimulate community development. He edited an anthology of essays titled “Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race,” and he has designed a proposal for a museum and visitors center for the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma, Alabama.
• Charles Marsh, professor of religious studies and director of the Project on Lived Theology, is the author of several books on the role religion in the quest for racial equality. His most recent work is “The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today.” 
• Edward Ayers, dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and the Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History, is one of the leading historians of the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His works make evident the plight of black Americans in this period and the emergence of laws and policies that institutionalized segregation and racial inequality.
• Grace Hale, also a member of the history faculty, heads the graduate program in Southern history and the Southern history seminar. She has taught a number of courses on the South leading up to the civil rights era and is the author of “Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940,” published by Pantheon in 1998. 
• Brian Balogh, professor of history and co-director of the American Political Development Program, teaches the popular undergraduate course “Viewing America: U.S. History Since 1945.” By use of the Web, the course incorporates media clips and other primary sources as its backbone. Balogh is the editor of “Integrating the Sixties: The Origins, Structures and Legitimacy of Public Policy in a Turbulent Decade.” 
• Deborah McDowell, the Alice Griffin Professor of English and a noted authority on African-American literature, is the author of “Leaving Pipe Shop,” a moving memoir of her childhood in an Alabama steel town in the 1950s and ’60s. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, her story is shaped by images of segregation, a declining steel industry, and the strong bonds of kinship both within her family and the community around her.

Digital Resources in Civil Rights Studies

The University’s digital centers offer a rich lode of archival treasures for the study of the civil rights movement and its historical context. The Virginia Center for Digital History, founded by Ed Ayers and Will Thomas, recently created “TV News of the Civil Rights Era,” a digital archive of local coverage of school desegregation in Virginia and the policy of massive resistance, which profoundly affected schoolchildren and their parents across the Commonwealth. Mr. Thomas, who has left the University to join the University of Nebraska faculty, is also co-author and assistant producer of the public television series “The Ground Beneath Our Feet: Virginia’s History Since the Civil War.” The third episode, “Massive Resistance,” was nominated for an Emmy Award by the Washington, D.C., Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

The Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies has produced a wide range of materials that support civil rights studies, including an online pictorial archive titled “Race and Place: An African American Community in the Jim Crow South.” Focusing on Charlottesville in the decades before Brown v. Board of Education, the archive uses photographs, letters, regional censuses, a flash map, and other materials to reveal the lives of African Americans in an era of legalized racial segregation – an era that did not end until the Brown decision of 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Also among the digital resources is the Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, one of the University Library’s Electronic Centers. It contains a wealth of information that can provide perspectives on the development of African American communities and the political and economic forces that have affected housing and settlement patterns. In addition to digital materials, the center offers a map collection, paper copies of many codebooks, software manuals, and reference books pertaining to spatial and statistical analysis.

Library Collections for Civil Rights Studies

Complementing an extensive collection of books and journal articles, the University libraries house incomparable archives of primary source materials for civil rights studies. These include the papers of Harry Byrd, Carter Glass, and other major political figures in Virginia, as well as artifacts of the era, such as the remnants of a cross burned at the home of a local civil rights activist. Housed in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, these items are preserved for use by scholars and members of the general public seeking to learn more about this time in our history.

Books by Alumni

“White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960,” by Lisa Lindquist Dorr (MA, History ’93, PhD ’00)

“The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory,” by Scot French (MA, History ’90, PhD ’00)

“Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861),” by Joshua D. Rothman (MA, History ’95, PhD ’00)

“The House I Live in: Race in the American Century,” “Dixie’s War: The South and World War II,” “The Alabama Story: State History and Geography” and “Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee,” by Robert J. Norrell (BA, History ’74, MA 78, PhD ’83)

“A Way Out of No Way: Claiming Family and Freedom in the New South,” Dianne Swann-Wright (PhD, History ’00)

“Struggle for a Better South: The Southern Student Organizing Committee, 1964-1969,” by Gregg L. Michel (PhD, History ’89)

“The Color of Their Skin: Education and Race in Richmond Virginia, 1954-1989” and “We Shall Not Be Moved” The Desegregation of the University of Georgia,” by Robert A. Pratt (PhD, History ’87)

“Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920-1944” by John Kneebone (PhD, History ’81)

“Civil Rights and the Idea of the Imago Dei,” by Richard Wills (MA, Religious Studies ’03, PhD ’05)

“Long Way to Go: Black and White in America,” by Jonathan Coleman (English ’73). Coleman also was a member of the English department faculty from 1986 to 1993.

Documentaries by Alumni

“Signpost to Freedom: The 1953 Baton Rouge Bus Boycott,” an award-winning public television documentary produced and co-written by Christina Hendrick Melton (English, Religious Studies ’93)

“February One,” an award-winning documentary about four college freshmen who staged a sit-in at a Greensboro, N.C., Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960, written and co-produced by Daniel B. Smith (PhD, History ’77)