Voting rights after fifty years: the more things change, the more they remain the same
William Chafe is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History emeritus at Duke University, and a preeminent historian of post-1945 American history. Much of Chafe’s scholarship reflects his long-term interest in issues of race and gender equality.
In this lecture, Chafe will reflect on the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark achievement of the civil rights movement, and he will examine recent attempts by American conservatives to undo this legislation.
Chafe is the author of twelve books, including most recently Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal (2012). His book on the origins of the sit-in movement in North Carolina, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (1979), helped to re-orient scholarship on civil rights toward social history and community studies. Civilities and Civil Rights won the first annual Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, for the book that ‘most faithfully and forcefully reflects’ R.F. Kennedy’s concerns for justice and human rights. Chafe is also a coeditor of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (2001), an oral history monograph that won the Lillian Smith Book Award. Chafe’s The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II is a noted survey of postwar American history that is currently in its eighth edition.