OAH Southern Regional Conference in Atlanta

Lee W. Formwalt

Historians fidgeted in the pews at Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church waiting for Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) and the Albany Civil Rights Museum Freedom Singers. They talked to each other in hushed tones--although this was a National Park Service facility with uniformed rangers, it was still a church. Soon the congressman slipped into a front pew and the Freedom Singers in bright purple regalia and head covering filed into the deacon bench perpendicular to the congressman’s seat. Longtime OAH member Earl Lewis, the brand new provost and vice president for Academic Affairs at Emory University, got up and welcomed the crowd to his new city and within minutes, Ruth Harris and her colleagues belted out the powerful freedom song, “Woke up this Morning with My Mind on Freedom.” Raising the roof and electrifying the crowd (getting a number of the staid white academics in their pews clapping their hands and tapping their feet), the Freedom Singers inspired John Lewis, who went on to move the audience with his oratory. Preaching to the choir, the former civil rights worker reminded us of the importance of telling the story as he told us his own. It was a fitting capstone to an OAH gathering of history practitioners in the heart of the Deep South.

Earlier that day, UNC-Charlotte historian David Goldfield explored at a plenary luncheon why southerners “are still fighting the Civil War.” A discussion ensued as a number of lunch guests shared their encounters with twentieth-century Civil War combatants. But the conference covered much more than the Civil War and civil rights and it was not limited to southern history by any means. Although the vast majority of the nearly four hundred conference attendees were from southern states, the Southern Regional Conference had an international dimension with participants from as far away as Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, and Samoa in the South Pacific.

Conference cosponsors Georgia State University and the Georgia Association of Historians worked hard with the meeting program committee, chaired by Glenn T. Eskew and Lee Ann Caldwell, to present an exciting program designed to meet the needs of conference attendees. At each session time conference participants had a choice of state of the field sessions, teaching sessions, Screening History sessions, and sessions on southern and American history. At the opening night reception, members had the opportunity to view the impressive Atlanta History Center, while the following night the plenary session moved to the Georgia State Capitol. In addition to Atlanta historian Tim Crimmins’s tour of the grounds and the recently restored building, participants listened to Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox encourage them to make their voices heard by their elected officials.

The regional conference took advantage of its location in the metropolis of the Deep South with a neighborhood tour of Auburn Avenue between Georgia State and Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church and with a concluding session on the Carter Post-Presidency at the Carter Center.

The OAH Southern Regional Conference also served as a venue for a group of individuals in Georgia who wanted to create a state Council for History Education affiliated with NCHE. Several Georgia members who are history education leaders in the state expressed concern to OAH that social studies and certain social studies areas like economics and geography had state organizations but that precollegiate history teachers had no such organization. So the OAH executive office organized a session with leadership from NCHE, the Georgia Council for the Social Studies and project directors from Teaching American History projects in Georgia. The result was a dialogue that looks promising for the establishment of a state council, or a GCHE within a year.

The idea for regional conferences began with an executive board retreat in 1998 and the realization that many OAH members could not attend the OAH annual meeting either because of their work schedule or the cost. As a result, OAH experimented with a smaller regional conference held during the summer of 2000 at Iowa State University. We learned from that experience that it was not just precollegiate teachers, community college professors, and public historians who missed out on the annual meeting, but also many four-year college professors with heavy teaching loads. Once again in Atlanta, we had a number of college professors and graduate students who participated. OAH has now established a regular biennial schedule for the regional conferences. Our next one in the summer of 2006 will be in Nebraska.

The OAH conference staff, led by Meetings Director Amy Stark, did a magnificent job in Atlanta. They barely had time to catch their breath after the annual meeting in Boston before making last minute preparations for the Southern Regional Conference. We thank them and the program committee, under Glenn Eskew’s and Lee Ann Caldwell’s leadership, for all their hard work in making this conference the success that it was. We also wish to thank the sponsors of various events during the conference (Center for the Study of the American South; Southern Historical Association; Lord, Aeck & Sargent Architects; Emory University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, History Department, and Program of African American Studies; South Atlantic Humanities Center; and Georgia Humanities Council), especially the Liberty Legacy Foundation whose substantial gift supported the travel grant program, the extensive promotional publicity, and the printing of the conference program.