Our Vulnerable Democracy: Past, Present, and Future (Virtual Series)
Virtual Program – Our Vulnerable Democracy: Past, Present, and Future
Mondays – April 26, May 3 and May 10 – Program Now Available via Video Links
Working with partner organizations, this three-part virtual program series will explore historical connections to recent events in our country that have revealed vulnerabilities in our democratic framework and offer opportunities for discussion and dialog on how we can move forward together.
Session One: From Red Shirts to Proud Boys – Museum Artifacts, White Domestic Terror and Election Fraud
Mon., April 26 at 6:30 p.m.
Dr. Jennifer Taylor, Assistant Professor of Public History at Duquesne University, will connect recent events such as the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection to the violence and political upheaval that ended Reconstruction and biracial democracy in South Carolina in 1876. Dr. Taylor will invite participants to analyze artifacts from The Museum of the Reconstruction Era at the Woodrow Wilson Family Home and the South Carolina State Museum to build connections and trace the legacy of paramilitary violence. Through exploring this material culture participants will learn how those objects and institutions shape our understanding of the past.
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Dr. Jennifer Whitmer Taylor is assistant professor of public history at Duquesne University, where she specializes in contested commemoration, historic house museums, oral history, and digital history. She earned her PhD from the University of South Carolina, where she was active in the public history community. Her 2017 co-authored article “Reconstructing Memory: The Attempt to Designate Beaufort, South Carolina the National Park Service’s First Reconstruction Unit” explores how historical memory, Confederate flag debates, and changes to interpretation at Civil War battlefields worked in tandem to allow a 2003 campaign by the Sons of Confederate Veterans to derail Congressional and NPS efforts to preserve the “birth place” of Reconstruction. Her current book project traces the transformation of the Woodrow Wilson Family Home in Columbia into the nation’s first museum of Reconstruction.
Session Two: Race and Democracy Today – Roundtable Discussion
Mon., May 3 at 6:30 p.m.
Dr. Bobby Donaldson, Director of the Center for Civil Rights History and Research at the University of South Carolina moderates a lively discussion about race and democracy today. From the anti-racist demonstrations of last summer to the events of January 6th, a roundtable of academics, activists and organizers will discuss white supremacy, voting rights, and the ongoing work to ensure the right of all people to participate in our democracy.
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Panelists:
Dr. Adolphus Belk, Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Winthrop
Marcurius Byrd, Organizing Director of the South Carolina Democratic Party
Jazmyne McCrae, Vice President of Repeal the Heritage Act and Co-Founder of Empower SC
A native of Augusta, Georgia, Dr. Bobby Donaldson serves as an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Center for Civil Rights History and Research at the University of South Carolina-Columbia. He received his undergraduate degree in History and African American Studies from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT and his Ph.D. in American History from Emory University.
Professor Donaldson’s teaching and scholarship examine southern history and African American life and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Presently, he serves as the lead scholar and director for the Columbia SC 63, a documentary project that examines the struggle for civil rights and social justice in Columbia and around the state of South Carolina. Additionally, Dr. Donaldson has participated in a number of Africa American public history initiatives throughout the state of South Carolina.
During the course of Dr. Donaldson’s academic career, he served as a Benjamin E Mays-Andrew Mellon Fellow, as an editorial assistant for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Emory and Stanford universities, as a Thurgood Marshall Dissertation Fellow and visiting Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College, as a Fellow of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and as the Faculty Principal of Preston Residential College at the University of South Carolina. Prior to his tenure at Preston, he held a joint position in the African American Studies Program and served as a founding member of the Institute for African American Research.
Professor Donaldson has received the University of South Carolina’s distinguished Michael J. Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2010, the John N. Gardner Inspirational Faculty Award in 2015, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Social Justice Award in 2016. In 2017, he was awarded the Stephen Morrison Visionary Award by the One Columbia for Arts & History Organization. In 2018, he received the South Carolina Governor’s Award in Historic Preservation and the South Carolina Governor’s Humanities Award. In 2019, Dr. Donaldson’s teaching, research, and community engagement were recognized by the South Carolina House of Representatives. He also was awarded an honorary degree by Benedict College.
Dr. Donaldson’s memberships include the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, the South Carolina Archives and History Commission, the editorial board of the University of South Carolina Press, the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission, the South Caroliniana Society, the NAACP, the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, the Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, and the Wesleyan University Board of Trustees.
Session Three: Democracy Dialogue facilitated by:
Dr. Jennifer Gunter, director of the Collaborative on Race at the University of South Carolina
Kabrina Bass, Executive Director of the Midlands Mediation Center
Mon., May 10 at 6:30 p.m.
According to Vann R. Newkirk in The Experiment podcast, democracy, “is entirely contingent upon not just laws, but the interpretation of laws, and also contingent upon certain actors’ willingness to abide by laws and to uphold norms. That is, you know, a lot of what we think democracy is, is fairy dust.”
This session will allow participants to engage in dialogue with one another to investigate the meaning of democracy and how we might work to protect this fragile concept. This will all be conducted in a space where all are welcome as we begin our journey towards being a more inclusive and welcoming community. To this end, please be prepared to use your camera function so that we can better connect with each other.
Jennifer H. Gunter, Ph.D., is the Director of the Collaborative on Race for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina. She is a facilitator for the Welcome Table process, a tested community trust-building process that began in Mississippi in 2004. With this tool, she works to help communities heal from societal divisions that have been historically embedded. Her knowledge that the key to reconciliation is rooted in an understanding of history fuels this work. She created the South Carolina Youth Collective to help the state grow our own leaders by developing skills and acquiring historic information to increase their ability to change their own communities. The SCYC is two-fold. One part is a social justice book club and the other part is a yearly summer fellow’s program. She also organizes the annual Equity Summit, an interdisciplinary, intergenerational regional discussion of race and equity.
She has earned a B.A. and M.A. in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi and a Ph.D. in History from the University of South Carolina. She is a historian who specializes in the intersections of region, gender, race, health, law, and activism.
Originally from Jackson, Mississippi, she and her husband now proudly call South Carolina home.
