ONLINE: This lecture-based course is about the contested fight for racial justice at Duke University from the enrollment of the first Black undergraduates in 1963 to the takeover of part of the central administration building less than six years later. The course will look at the background of Duke’s first Black students, how racial attitudes shaped the way these students were received at the school and the immense challenges the university faced in comprehending — and responding to — their needs. We will explore the crucial role Black and white students' activism played in Duke’s struggle for racial justice. Students will see that Duke could not pursue national prominence until it began to confront its Jim Crow past. Focusing on Duke, the course will expose dynamics present at other historically white schools as they pursued racial change. Guest speakers will include Professor William Chafe as well as key Duke activists from the 1960s. | Lecture + Q&A.
Max enrollment: 200.
Class sessions are recorded.
Ted Segal is the author of "Point of Reckoning: The Fight for Racial Justice at Duke University," published by Duke University Press in 2021. He first studied 1960s Black and white students' activism at Duke when he was briefly in graduate school studying history in 1978, returning to the topic upon retiring from corporate law practice in 2016. A Duke alum (T ’77), Ted has been an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School and is on Duke's Library Advisory Board and OLLI's board.