Civil Rights in the American Story

Speaker List

David W. Blight is Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Blight is the author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, (Harcourt, 2007). This book combines two newly discovered slave narratives in a volume that recovers the lives of their authors, John Washington and Wallace Turnage, as well as provides an incisive history of the story of emancipation. In June, 2004, the New York Times ran a front page story about the discovery and significance of these two rare slave narratives. Blight is also the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), which received eight book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize as well as four awards from the Organization of American Historians, including the Merle Curti prizes for both intellectual and social history. Other published works include a book of essays, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); and Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (LSU Press, 1989). Blight is the editor of and author of six books, including When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Bedford Books, 1993); co-editor with Robert Gooding-Williams, W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Bedford Books, 1997); co-editor with Brooks Simpson, Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era (Kent State Univ. Press, 1997); and Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator (orig. 1797, NYU Press, 1997), the book of oratory and antislavery writings that Frederick Douglass discovered while a youth. The edited volume, Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory, was published by Smithsonian Press in 2004 and is the companion book for the opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. Professor Blight has a Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and did his undergraduate degree at Michigan State University. He has also taught at Harvard University, at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and for seven years was a public high school teacher in his hometown, Flint, Michigan. He was also senior Fulbright Professor in American Studies at the University of Munich in Germany in 1992-93.

Mark Brilliant is assistant professor of History and American Studies at UC-Berkeley. In 2010, Oxford University Press published his first book, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941-1978. In March 2011, it received honorable mention from the Organization of American Historians for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for the best first book dealing with some significant phase of United States history. He is currently conducting research for two new books, the first on the history of school finance reform and the second on California’s Proposition 13.

Richard Thompson Ford is George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. An expert on civil rights and antidiscrimination law, Richard Thompson Ford (BA ’88) has distinguished himself as an insightful voice and compelling writer on questions of race and multiculturalism. His scholarship combines social criticism and legal analysis and he writes for both popular readers and for academic and legal specialists. His work has focused on the social and legal conflicts surrounding claims of discrimination, on the causes and effects of racial segregation, and on the use of territorial boundaries as instruments of social regulation. Methodologically, his work is at the intersection of critical theory and the law. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1994, Professor Ford was a Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School, a litigation associate with Morrison & Foerster, and a housing policy consultant for the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has also been a Commissioner of the San Francisco Housing Authority. He has written for the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor and for Slate, where he is a regular contributor. His latest book is The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse.

Susan Sturm is the George M. Jaffin Professor of Law and Social Responsibility and the founding director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School. She has published numerous articles, case studies and books on “the architecture of inclusion,” institutional change, transformative leadership, workplace equality, legal education, and inclusion and diversity in higher education. Her recent publications include: Scaling Up (2010); Negotiating Workplace Equality (2008); Conflict Resolution and Systemic Change (with Howard Gadlin, 2007); The Architecture of Inclusion: Advancing Workplace Equity in Higher Education (2006); Law’s Role in Addressing Complex Discrimination (2005); Equality and the Forms of Justice (2004); Lawyers and the Practice of Workplace Equity (2002); Second Generation Employment Discrimination: A Structural Approach, (2001); and Who’s Qualified? (with Lani Guinier, 2001). “The Architecture of Inclusion” was the focus of a symposium issue published in the June 2007 issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender. Sturm is the principal investigator for a Ford Foundation grant awarded to develop the architecture of inclusion in higher education. She has worked with numerous research and educational organizations and networks seeking to build the knowledge and capacity needed to advance full participation and exercise leadership in addressing important problems. She is currently co-chairing a working group on Transformative Leadership, as part of a Ford Foundation funded project on Building Knowledge for Social Justice. Her research on strategies for facilitating constructive multi-racial interaction in police training is featured on the Racetalks website, www.racetalks.org. Professor Sturm was one of the architects of the national conference on The Future of Diversity and Opportunity in Higher Education. In 2007, she received the Presidential Teaching Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia.