“‘The Greatest Outrage of the Century’: White Violence and Black Protest in America”

---

This lecture will revisit the 1917 East St. Louis Race Riot and Ida B. Wells-Barnett's campaign for racial justice. Highlighting the racial and sexual politics of the riot, Feimster explores the role of black women in the long struggle against white supremacist violence and for racial equality in 20th century America.

 

Crystal N. Feimster, a native of North Carolina, is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies, the American Studies Program and Department of History at Yale University, where she teaches a range of courses in 19th- and 20th-century African-American history, women’s history and Southern history. She has also taught at Boston College, UNC-Chapel Hill and Princeton. She earned her master's degree and PhD in history from Princeton University and her bachelor of arts in history and women’s studies from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her manuscript, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching  (Harvard University Press, 2009), examines the roles of both black and white women in the politics of racial and sexual violence in the American South. She is currently working on two book projects: "Sexual Warfare: Rape and the American Civil War" and "Truth Be Told: Rape and Mutiny in Civil War Louisiana."

 

Cosponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement and Institutional Diversity, the Department of African and African-American Studies, the Program in American Culture Studies and Partners in East St. Louis