Distinguished Lecturers
Mia Bay

Based on her book Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, Dr. Bay tells the history of the African American experience on segregated transportation from the antebellum era to the present day. Traveling Black explores what it was like to travel in Jim Crow cars, ride at the back of the bus, and navigate a myriad of discriminatory travel accommodations—from whites-only service stations to segregated airline terminals. It underscores that blacks bitterly resented these humiliations and resisted them fiercely, recovering an intertwined history of travel segregation and black struggles for freedom of movement.

A discussion of the early life and thought of black journalist Ida B. Wells (also known as Iola), this lecture examines the origins of her political ideas as they emerged within the context of the racial and sexual politics of the New South. Tracing her career up through the beginnings of her anti-lynching campaign in the 1890s, it argues that Wells’ pioneering crusade against racial violence was shaped in in distinctive ways by her gender and her personal experiences.

This talk focuses on African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson from the American Revolution through to the post-emancipation era. An overview of African American commentary on Jefferson in speeches, letters, books, pamphlets and other available testimony, it explores how such works document the connections between early black struggles for freedom and civil rights and African American claims on American nationalism and citizenship.