Tuesday, July 21, 2020 at 5pm EDT | 2pm PDT

This event is produced by CASBS in partnership with the National Humanities Center and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University.
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Racial injustice courses deeply through American history. In 2020, demands for rights and racial equality are at the center of renewed calls for decisive policy action in response to law enforcement brutality and systemic racism. The size, composition, and sustained nature of nationwide protests suggest it’s different this time. Is it? What kind of moment is this?

The social movements of today build on a long legacy of movements dating to the country’s formation, Reconstruction, and twentieth-century civil rights era. How does the current movement compare with those preceding it, and how useful are the comparisons? How have struggles extending from abolition to Black Lives Matter intersected with institutional and electoral politics, the evolving roles of women and youth generations, other contemporaneous social movements, and the prevailing culture? What conditions and alignments will help shift momentum from the status quo to the pursuit of a more equitable, inclusive, and moral political economy?

Join Clayborne Carson, Douglas McAdam, and Brenda Stevenson in conversation with Xavier de Souza Briggs as they explore how insights from America’s distant and near past can inform the possibilities for durable, transformational change in our time.

Questions for the panelists? Send them to casbs-events@stanford.edu.

Panelists

Clayborne Carson

Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor of History; Ronnie Lott Founding Director, Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, Stanford University; CASBS fellow, 1993–94

Douglas McAdam

Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, Stanford University; CASBS director, 2001–05; CASBS fellow, 1991–92, 1997–98

Brenda Stevenson

Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History, Professor of African American Studies, UCLA; CASBS fellow, 2016–17; NHC Fellow, 2015–16

Moderator

Xavier de Souza Briggs

Distinguished Visiting Professor, New York University; Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution; Member, CASBS board of directors