Kevin Gaines
Kevin Gaines is the Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice at the University of Virginia. He is a member of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies and the Corcoran History Department. His interests include U.S. and African American intellectual and cultural history; race and gender politics in post–World War II America; African American cultural production; and global dimensions of the African American freedom movement. He is the author of Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture during the Twentieth Century (1996), winner of the American Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Publication Prize; American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates in the Civil Rights Era (2006); and the forthcoming book, "The African American Journey: A Global History." He is also a past president of the American Studies Association.
OAH Lectures by Kevin Gaines
During the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. civil rights movement transformed American society by ending state-sanctioned racial discrimination in the U.S. South, in what were the former Confederate states. In what contemporaries called the second Reconstruction, Americans of all backgrounds marched, practiced nonviolent civil disobedience, filled jails, aroused the conscience of many fellow Americans, and often did so in the face of hostile mobs and vigilante terror. These gains were achieved at great cost. Many lives were lost to the violent deeds of the enemies of change. Acts of brutality waged by segregationists against nonviolent demonstrators demanding basic human rights garnered national and international headlines. Civil rights campaigns in the South unfolded during the Cold War, and coincided with liberation movements in Africa, linking U.S. events to international affairs.