UTICA – A decorated author and historian on race and class issues in U.S. history will address the next installment of the [tweetable alt=””]Holtzclaw Lecture Series[/tweetable], sponsored in part by the Humanities Department at ²’s Utica Campus.
Jacqueline Jones
Jacqueline Jones, chair of the History and Ideas Department at the University of Texas, will speak at 7 p.m. Oct. 27 at the Gore Art Gallery at Mississippi College on a chapter of her 2013 book, “A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America.” The chapter is dedicated to William H. Holtzclaw, who founded the Utica Normal and Industrial Institute in 1903 that is now the Utica Campus. The lecture itself is titled “A Dangerous Thing: Black Schooling in William Holtzclaw’s Mississippi.”
Jones will be signing copies of the book at 6:30 p.m., before the lecture.
The Holtzclaw Lecture Series is designed to bring nationally recognized scholars and experts on African American education in the South for public lectures in a variety of venues around the state. This lecture is co-sponsored by ², the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mississippi Humanities Council, the Mississippi College School of Humanities, with major funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Jones’ has penned eight books on American social history with emphases on race, class and gender. A Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History at UT, she won a Bancroft Prize for her 1985 work, “Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present.” The prize is awarded annually by Columbia University for books about diplomacy or history of the Americas. That book and “A Dreadful Deceit” were finalists for a Pulitzer Prize. In 1999, Jones was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, awarded for exemplary creativity in a wide array of disciplines.
The series is part of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant announced in 2015, “The Black Man’s Burden: William Holtzclaw and the Mississippi HBCU Connection,” that highlights the work of Holtzclaw in African-American education. The project will contribute to a growing body of research and interest in the “Little Tuskegees” as important forerunners of the Civil Rights Era in the Deep South.
This two-year research program is designed to equip faculty and student-scholars to explore themes in Holtzclaw’s writing in humanities courses, combined with the development of a Summer Teachers’ Institute and teaching resource kit that will be used by other institutions (both on the high school and community college level) to extend the work beyond the institution.