Schedule of Events

In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women’s movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own.

John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement’s most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina.

This plenary focuses on the critical role women have and can play in government elections.

This is the inside story of how a movement founded by a preacher’s daughter from Birmingham who worked in the Obama White House assembled a team and strategy to send a Democrat to the Senate from Alabama for the first time in 25 years—and then helped to restore voting rights to 1.4 million ex-felons, the most significant expansion of voting rights since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As one of the sites in America’s Civil Rights Crossroads, Alabama helped draw international media attention to the need for change in America. This panel presents the insights of some of Alabama’s greatest gifts to the world, social justice activists and human rights champions.

In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women’s movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own.

This plenary connects with the cries of current protests to reimagine new ways of being for our communities, while decentering authoritarian models of policing that create risk and harm for Black and Brown bodies.

This plenary will commemorate and explore the contributions of pioneering women’s historian, author, mentor, teacher and organizer Dr. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, author of African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (1998).

Duty beyond the Battlefield demonstrates that from the 1870s to 1920s military race men laid the foundation for the “New Negro” movement and the rise of Black Nationalism that influenced the future leaders of the twentieth century Civil Rights movement.