Austin Community College Fall 2017 Commencement ceremonies on Thursday, December 14, 2017 at the Frank Erwin Center.

Affirmative Action: Foundations and Key Concepts

...adoption occurred in the early 1960s, by colleges in the North that were inspired by the nonviolent civil rights protests occurring in the South. The second wave of adoption emerged...
Yorktown Victory Monument, Colonial National Historic Site, Yorktown, Virginia

Whitewashing American History

...the Revolutionary War site of Yorktown, Williamsburg (capital of Virginia from 1699-1780), and Jamestown (the first permanent English settlement in North America, 1607) via a connecting scenic parkway. The impetus...
Kimpa Vita and a map of Kongo

Did Kongolese Catholicism Lead to Slave Revolutions?

...slaves on the shores of North America. They were former subjects of the Christian Kingdom of Kongo, founded by Nzinga a Nkuwu, who was baptized in 1491. Nkuwu “rebranded” himself...
Employment of Negroes in Agriculture by Earle Richardson

Racial Violence as Impetus for the Great Migration

...control as whites sought to keep blacks in their subservient and impoverished position in southern society…Many blacks responded to this threat by fleeing to less violent surroundings. It’s hardly surprising...
Seymour Hersh

Seymour Hersh on the Future of American Journalism

...because the white working class walked away from them. And by the way, blacks didn’t come out for Obama as much as the public thinks they would, because they got...
Obama commencement speeches

Who Gets to Make Commencement Speeches (and Why)?

In December 1996, the communications scholar Michael Eric Dyson, then at the University of North Carolina, delivered the commencement address to fall graduates and their families. A “hip-hop intellectual” and...
Reconstruction Richmond

Revisiting Reconstruction

...but inevitable, it is equally certain that Reconstruction transformed the lives of southern blacks in ways unmeasurable by statistics and in areas unreachable by law. It raised blacks’ expectations and...
Memphis bridge

The People’s Grocery Lynching, Memphis, Tennessee

...Civil War, racial tensions in the South remained high. As blacks began to rid themselves of debt, white Southerners turned to racial violence, targeting blacks who they perceived as having...
black power salute olympics

The Uneasy History of Integrated Sports in America

...also delves into this history. Before World War II, those few blacks on otherwise all-white teams in the north led a “dual existence,” as figures simultaneously loved and hated, or...
charlottesville syllabus: history of hate in america

Charlottesville Syllabus: Readings on the History of Hate in America

...entrepreneurs were capable of creating vast wealth. For those who supported Black subjugation, witnessing Blacks thrive and defy the stereotypes of Black inferiority was too much. The Lasting Fallout of...