Dr. Carl Suddler, Assistant Professor, edited the September issue of The American Historian. The volume features seven articles on “History for Black Lives” contextualize the nationwide protests that occurred in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. The special issue is open for a limited time to the general public, regardless of OAH membership, here.
The Atlanta NPR affiliate WABE recently featured the return of Prof. Hank Klibanoff‘s Buried Truths podcast for its newest season, which is dedicated to investigating the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. The podcast, now in its third season, is an outgrowth of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project, which the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Klibanoff directs. Read an except from the story below and listen to season three of Buried Truths.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Hank Klibanoff runs the class. He told WABE that for months this year, we reverted back to 1950s Georgia.
“When white people, particularly police, could kill Black people with impunity,” Klibanoff said, in response to the fact that no arrests were made for more than two months after Arbery was killed in February.
“They wouldn’t be charged, they wouldn’t be tried. If they were charged, if they were tried, they would be found not guilty uniformly,” he said.
On the one hand, he said, it’s shocking that the Arbery case happened in 2020. On the other, its a long arc of injustice, a pattern that’s clear.
Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently interviewed on the new Vox podcast miniseries By the People? Anderson and host Ian Millhiser discuss the tactics Southern racists used to disenfranchise voters before the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the echoes of those tactics in voter suppression practices today. Read or listen to the episode here: “How the Supreme Court revived Jim Crow voter suppression tactics.”
On Sept. 16 the third season of the “Buried Truths” podcast will launch. The season centers on the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed 25-year-old Black man pursued in February by three armed white men near the coastal city of Brunswick. The seven-episode series is based on research by students and professor Hank Klibanoff, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, director and co-teacher of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project, and the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism. Read the Emory News Center’s recent article featuring the upcoming season: “Podcast based on Emory class focuses new season on Ahmaud Arbery killing.”
Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently featured on Utah Public Radio and in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Anderson was a guest on Access Utah in advance of speaking at the the Voting Rights Symposium at Utah State University on September 17. Anderson was also a prominent contributor to the recent AJC opinion piece, “Trench warfare over the right to vote has arrived in Georgia.” Read an excerpt from the AJC piece below along with the full article here.
“Voter fraud is rare. And Georgia voters faced widespread administrative failures during this primary. Documented failures. What we really need to be having is a conversation about providing reassurance, calm and clarity,” Anderson said.
– Carol Anderson, “Trench warfare over the right to vote has arrived in Georgia.”
Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently published an opinion piece in The Boston Globe. Titled “The Supreme Court’s starring role in democracy’s demise,” the article critiques the Supreme Court’s lack of action to protect Black Americans’ voting rights in the midst of increasing disenfranchisement due to voter suppression tactics and the COVID-19 pandemic. Read an excerpt below along with the full article here.
“In a series of recent decisions imperiling voters’ access to the ballot box, the Supreme Court acted as if COVID-19 barely existed and the laws Republicans passed for absentee ballots were actually about election security and not outright disfranchisement. The first instance was the stunning decision in April that forced Wisconsin voters, in the middle of a pandemic, to make a Hobson’s choice between the right to vote or their own safety. In an unsigned decision by the five conservative justices, COVID-19 was barely mentioned, only that the tens of thousands of requested absentee ballots, which had not yet even arrived in the homes of voters by that night, still had to be postmarked by the next day to count. The result was that many in Wisconsin stood in line, risked their health to vote, and paid the horrible price by contracting the virus.“
– Carol Anderson, “The Supreme Court’s starring role in democracy’s demise,” The Boston Globe
Dr. Ruby Lal, Professor of South Asian Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently wrote an op-ed for The Indian Express. The piece examines connections between the biographies of U.S. vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Mughal Empress Nur Jahan (1577-1645), the focus of Lal’s 2018 book Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan. Read an excerpt from the article below along with the full piece here: “There are parallels between the stories of Mughal Empress Nur Jahan & US vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris.”
Although four hundred years apart, the life story of Senator Kamala Harris, vice-presidential nominee for the 2020 US election, and the Mughal Empress Nur Jahan, resonate deeply. Both leaders are daughters of migrants who went to new countries in search of a better future; both were raised by strong mothers in mixed ethnic and racial cosmopolitan communities. What connects them above all is experience-building, the slow work of accumulation of power — and their rise as strong and compassionate female leaders.
Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in an article published on The 19th, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom reporting at the intersection of gender, politics and policy. Titled “‘We’ versus ‘Me’: Suffrage centennial exposes vote gap in Black and White women,” the piece charts the divergent histories of voting rights activism, organizing, and victories for Black and White women from the movement to pass the 19th amendment through the present. Read an excerpt quoting Anderson below along with the full piece.
In the century since White women won access to the ballot, they have often sided with White men, choosing their race over their gender to maintain an unequal America, says Carol Anderson, Emory University professor and author of “One Person, No Vote.”
“Black women’s political power has been about strengthening the United States,” Anderson said. “For White women, it has been about entrenching White supremacy. It is about the ‘we’ versus the ‘me.’ And it’s that difference in framing that is fundamental.”
Dr. Polly J. Price, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Professor of Global Health, and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently chosen to serve on the Study Committee on Public Health Emergency Authorities of the Uniform Law Commission. The Uniform Law Commission describes the scope of the committee’s work as studying “the need for and feasibility of one or more uniform state laws addressing the authority of state governments to respond to epidemics, pandemics, and other public health emergencies.” Price’s areas of expertise include immigration and citizenship, U.S. legal history, legislation and regulation, public health law. She is currently authoring Plagues in the Nation (forthcoming from Beacon Press), a book about how epidemics have shaped U.S. law and continue to pose challenges for disease control in democratic societies.
Dr. Thomas D. Rogers, Arthur Blank/NEH Chair in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences (2018-2021) and Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History, recently published an opinion piece in Brasil Wire. Titled “Ethanol: Fuel for Corruption,” the article was co-written with Rogers’s collaborator Jeff Manuel (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville). Rogers and Manuel are writing a transnational history of biofuels in Brazil and the United States. The Brasil Wire article situates recent ethanol-fueled corruption in a longer historical arc of biofuel business, policy, and politics within and between the two countries. Read a description of the article below, along with the full piece.
“Ethanol burst into the news cycle again last week with reports that the US ambassador to Brazil had lobbied for the cancellation of an ethanol tariff, arguing that the move would help Trump’s reelection. As historians writing a transnational history of ethanol in Brazil and the United States, we recognize the episode as part of a familiar pattern. Within and between the two countries, corruption has followed the politically-charged fuel and so have battles over its market. This history reveals the irony of the recent attacks on Brazil’s tariff.”