Symposium on the History of Race and Racism at the University

This event was held on Sept. 29, 2020.

• Symposium Recording

• Symposium Chat Transcript(includes links to resources discussed in the chat)

UD now joins other universities who have participated in the Universities Studying Slavery project by launching a campus-wide discussion of the legacies of slavery, segregation and racism at UD and in Delaware from 1743 to the present, as well as the unacknowledged displacement of indigenous peoples from their lands. The symposium is part of the UD Antiracism Initiative, a new multiyear collaborative project with a variety of faculty, staff, andstudents across the university working to grapple with and repair racism at the University of Delaware and in the state of Delaware.

Please consider joining the UD Antiracism Initiative.

The four invited guest scholars were professor Alyssa Mt. Pleasant (University at Buffalo), who works on indigenous land dispossession in relation to college and university campuses, as well as professors Hilary Green (University of Alabama), Jody Allen (a UD alumna who leads the Lemon Project at the College of William and Mary), and Rhondda Thomas in English (Clemson University), who have been participating in the national Universities Studying Slavery project at their own institutions.

Alyssa Mt. Pleasant (Tuscarora descent) works at the intersection of American Indian history and Native American and Indigenous Studies. She is Assistant Professor of Native American Studies in the Department of Transnational Studies at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). Mt. Pleasant also serves as founding Program Director of the Native American Scholars Initiative at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. She is completing a book about Haudenosaunee people in the post-Revolutionary War period that focuses on the history of the Buffalo Creek Reservation near today's Buffalo, NY and working on a related project about public memory of the Sullivan Campaign. In 2020-21 she will co-convene a symposium on the topic “Campuses and Colonialism.” Sponsored by the Clements Center for Southwest Studies and UNC-Chapel Hill, this symposium will bring together scholars from multiple disciplines and geographic locations to initiate dialogue that centers contemporary Indigenous communities as long-standing stakeholders within universities, rather than objects of remembrance for scholars to study. 

​Dr. Hilary N. Green is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at The University of Alabama. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in 19th Century African American history, the American Civil War Era, Reconstruction Studies, Civil War Memory, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016) as well as articles, book chapters and other scholarly publications. In January 2015, she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project which explores slavery, memory and its legacy at the University of Alabama. She is currently at work on a second book manuscript examining how everyday African Americans remembered and commemorated the Civil War.

​Jody Lynn Allen, Ph.D. is a native of Hampton, VA, and an Assistant Professor of History at William & Mary. Her research interests cover the U.S. Civil War through the Long Civil Rights Movement focusing on black agency. Her current manuscript, Roses in December: Black Life in Hanover County, Virginia During the Era of Disfranchisement, considers the consequences of and responses to the 1902 Virginia constitution revisions that disfranchised most African American males. Allen is also the director of The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation, which is uncovering, making public, and addressing William & Mary’s 327-year relationship with African Americans on the campus and in the Williamsburg and Greater Tidewater area. During the 2017-2018 academic year, Allen was a visiting assistant professor of History at the University of the South at Sewanee, TN where she taught and consulted with Sewanee’s Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation.

​Rhondda Robinson Thomas is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University where she teaches early African American literature and American literature. She has published Claiming Exodus: A Cultural History of Afro-Atlantic Identity, 1770-1903 and co-edited The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought. Dr. Thomas is the faculty director of the Call My Name: African Americans in Clemson University project for which she has been awarded a Whiting Foundation Public Engagement Fellowship, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, South Carolina Humanities, and Clemson University's Office of the Provost, and gifts from the Clemson University Foundation. Additionally, she served on the Clemson University History Implementation Team.