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Anderson in ‘The Guardian’: “The US supreme court is letting racist discrimination run wild in the election system”

Charles Howard Candler Professor Dr. Carol Anderson recently published an opinion piece in The Guardian. Titled “The US supreme court is letting racist discrimination run wild in the election system,” the article draws important parallels between contemporary voting restrictions that target minority populations and historical disenfranchisement practices, especially those in the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow United States. Read an excerpt below along with Anderson’s full piece here.

“This assault on African Americans’ right to vote was an assault on American democracy aided and abetted by the highest court in the land. The results were devastating. By 1960, there were counties in Alabama that had no Black voters registered, while simultaneously having more than 100% of white age-eligible voters on the rolls. In Mississippi a mere 6.7% of eligible Black adults were registered to vote.“

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Lesser Awarded Fulbright for Research in Brazil

Congratulations to Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Director of the Halle Institute for Global Research, for being awarded a Fulbright Research Grant in Brazil. Lesser’s project is titled, “Structural Health: Immigrants, the State, and the Built Environment in São Paulo, 1870-2020.” Luis Ferla at the Federal University of São Paulo and Fernando Cosentino of the Bom Retiro Public Health Clinic will host Lesser while he conducts archival research and fieldwork with the Brazilian National Health Service medical team. Read more about the project here.

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Anderson Quoted in ‘Reuters’ Piece about Arbery Hate Crime Case

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in a Reuters article about the federal hate crime trial against the three men who killed Ahmaud Arbery. Anderson discusses the significance of the hate crime trial in advancing racial justice for Arbery’s family and the nation as a whole. Read an excerpt quoting Anderson below along with the full article: “Family of Ahmaud Arbery wants racial justice as murderers face new trial.”

Carol Anderson, an Emory University professor of African American studies who has watched the case closely, said the trial was “absolutely necessary” even though the men had already been convicted of murder.

“We must be clear, it was his blackness that put him in the crosshairs of these men,” Anderson said. “And that makes this a hate crime. This is part of the truth telling that society must have.”

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Brandeis Awards Anderson the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize

Brandeis University has awarded Dr. Carol Anderson the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize, given to those who have “made outstanding and lasting scholarly contributions to racial, ethnic and religious relationships.” The prize, which comes with a medal and $25,000, recognizes Anderson’s leading work on how racial inequality intersects with public policy in the United States, past and present. Anderson’s books include White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016), One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021). Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor, Chair of African-American Studies, and Associated Faculty in the History Department. Read more about her work at the Emory News Center here.

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SlaveVoyages Featured, Eltis Quoted in ‘NYT’ Article

The digital memorial and database project SlaveVoyages, spearheaded by Emeritus Professor David Eltis and maintained by numerous Emory faculty and alumni, was recently featured in an article in The New York Times. The piece, “We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was,” provides an overview of the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans as well as the history of SlaveVoyages itself. Originating in the 1960s, the database was recently expanded with a new section titled “Oceans of Kinfolk” that includes information on trafficking within North America in the first half of the nineteenth century. The New York Times columnist, Jamelle Bouie, situates this expansion in the context of a broader reflection about how data on slave trafficking can provide access to or, alternatively, obscure the lived experiences of the enslaved. The Steering Committee of SlaveVoyages includes the following Emory History faculty and alumni: Allen E. Tullos (Professor, Emory History Department), Alex Borucki (PhD 11, Associate Professor, UC-Irvine), and Daniel B. Domingues da Silva (PhD 11, Associate Professor, Rice University). Read Bouie’s article here: “We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was.”

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Major Bryn Walker (20Ox and 22C) Featured Among Emory’s ‘Best and Brightest’

Emory Magazine recently featured undergraduate senior history major Bryn Walker in a profile of 16 flourishing students across all schools and levels at the university. The feature highlights Walker’s numerous academic accolades – including the John and Ouida Temple Scholarship, Oxford College American History Award, the Woodruff Dean’s Achievement Scholarship, and a prestigious Library of Congress internship – along with her active support for fellow members of the Emory community throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Read more about Walker and 15 other thriving Emory students: “With a Flourish.”

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‘NYT’ Article on Anniversary of Wannsee Conference Quotes Lipstadt

A recent article in The New York Times, titled “80 Years Ago the Nazis Planned the ‘Final Solution.’ It Took 90 Minutes,” quotes Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty member Deborah E. Lipstadt. The piece centers on the 80th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference in Germany in 1942, when Nazi bureaucrats planned the systematization of the Holocaust of European Jews. Read an excerpt from the article quoting Lipstadt below, along with the full piece here.

“Eighty years after the Wannsee Conference and 77 years after the end of World War II, the witnesses of Nazi atrocities are dying.

“When Dr. Lipstadt, 74, the Dorot professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, first started teaching about the Holocaust more than three decades ago, it was easy to find survivors to talk to her students.

“‘When I wanted a survivor to come to my class, I would say, ‘Do I want a survivor of a camp or in hiding? Do I want someone from Eastern Europe? Do I want a German who lived under the laws for eight years before deportation? Do I want someone from the underground’? she recalled. ‘Now I hope I can find someone who is healthy enough to come at all.'”

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Lipstadt in ‘NYT’: “For Jews, Going to Services Is an Act of Courage”

Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently published a piece in The New York Times. In the guest essay Lipstadt addresses increasing anti-Semitic violence in the United States, including at synagogues such as the Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, where a gunman took three hostages last month. Read an excerpt from Lipstadt’s piece below along with the full article: “For Jews, Going to Services Is an Act of Courage.”

“I have not walked through the main entrance to my synagogue since October 2018, after the shootings at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue. For over three years now, that door has remained locked. When I asked why, I was told, “It’s too wide open; it can’t be made secure.” I understood. You won’t find wide-open doors at any synagogue in Europe or North America. It is only after you get past the guards that you find welcome, though welcome is still there for those who seek it.

“It is not just the large synagogues that fear for security. I hear from students that they think twice about going to Hillel services, the campus Jewish chaplaincy. Some out of fear for physical safety. Some out of worry about the slings and barbs that might come from other students in the dorm. I met parents whose child had been accepted to a very selective college. He wears a kipa and was struggling with whether to replace it for the next four years with a baseball cap. Increasingly I hear: Jews are contemplating going underground.

“We are shaken. We are not OK. But we will bounce back. We are resilient because we cannot afford not to be. That resiliency is part of the Jewish DNA. Without it, we would have disappeared centuries ago. We refuse to go away. But we are exhausted.“

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Anderson Appears on MSNBC’s ‘Ayman’ and ‘All In With Chris Hayes’

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African-American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently a guest on two MSNBC programs. Anderson discussed contemporary politics, including on issues relating to voting rights, in historical perspective on the shows ‘Ayman’ and ‘All In With Chris Hayes.’ She is author, most recently, of The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021). Watch the MSNBC segments featuring Anderson here: ‘Ayman‘ and ‘All In With Chris Hayes.’

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‘Jewish Review of Books’ Reviews ‘Jews and Booze’ by Marni Davis (PhD ’06)

The Jewish Review of Books recently reviewed the 2012 book Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition (NYU Press), written by PhD alum Marni Davis. Currently Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University, Davis received her PhD in U.S. and Jewish history in 2006. Allan Arkush, the senior contributing editor of the Jewish Review of Books and professor of Judaic studies and history at Binghamton University, reviewed Davis’s book in honor of New Year’s Eve 2021. Read Arkush’s piece here: “Lechaim!“