| Reaching
out |
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Photo
Courtesy of Nursing Students Without Borders
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| Former
U.Va. student Lisa Ross, who received her B.A. in Spanish this
May and now attends Duke Medical School, put her second language
to use this summer. She went with the group, Nursing Students
Without Borders, to El Salvador in July and helped educate the
people about health topics. See Nursing student group serves Salvadorans and migrant workers.
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Project aims to preserve
lessons taught by civil rights figures
By
Dan Heuchert
 It
has been nearly 50 years since the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas outlawed racial segregation
in public schools and helped to usher in an era of social transformation.
In the years that followed, many leaders emerged from the black
community -- locally, regionally and nationally -- to reshape American
society.
A new
oral history project, co-sponsored by the University's Institute
for Public History and the Darden School, is reaching back to examine
the nature of that civil rights leadership. "Explorations in
Black Leadership" will bring key civil rights figures to the
Grounds over the new few years, where they will participate in public
forums and two-hour videotaped interviews conducted by history professor
Julian Bond, who is himself a long-time civil rights leader and
is currently the national chair of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People.
The
first visits of the series, featuring noted Virginia civil rights
lawyers Oliver Hill and Henry Marsh, will take place Sept. 13 and
14, and will include a public forum Sept. 13 at 7:30 p.m. in the
Law School's Caplin Auditorium. The session, during which Bond,
law professor Michael Klarman and audience members will ask questions,
is free and open to the public.
Committed
for future visits are Elaine Jones, president and director of the
NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (Nov. 1); civil rights lawyer
Julius Chambers, chancellor of North Carolina Central University
(Nov. 8-9); and Mary Futrell, dean of the Graduate School of Education
and Human Development at George Washington University and former
president of both the Virginia Education Association and National
Education Association (Nov. 29-30).
Project
organizers are lining up additional guests, and the effort could
go on for several years, said history professor Phyllis Leffler,
director of the Institute for Public History.
Bond,
who served for many years in the Georgia state legislature, said
"Explorations in Black Leadership˛ is unique in its ambition.
"I
am not aware of any similar project whose reach is as broad,"
he said. "There are projects with a more narrow focus, but
none I know of with this reach.
"This
project represents an attempt to examine the lives and achievements
of a wide variety of black leadership -- in education, civil rights,
business -- and to try to determine from in-depth study the forces
which shaped them. It promises to give us invaluable resources that
will be useful for generations yet to come."
According
to Leffler, the project has two key objectives.
Full story.
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