Cheryl Greenberg is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of History at Trinity College where she teaches African American history, race and ethnicity, and twentieth-century U.S. history. She has written extensively on these topics including several books: "Or Does It Explode?": Black Harlem in the Great Depression (1991); Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (2006); and To Ask for an Equal Chance (2009), on African Americans during the Great Depression. Her most recent book, 'A Day I Ain't Never Seen Before' (2022) is a collaboration with a civil rights organizer in Mississippi. She also edited A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC (1998). Her current project explores the history of civil rights organizations' attitudes toward hate speech.
#BlackLivesMatter and related campus protests about campus racism have coincided with calls for trigger warnings and greater protection for vulnerable groups on campus. Both have generated a great deal of discussion, support and hand-wringing among faculty and media pundits. This talk examines the claims, roots and challenges of such protests, and ties them to their historic and contemporary social, cultural and political contexts.
