Road Scholars Speakers Bureau

Katherine Mellen Charron, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of History, NC State University

Durham, NC

W: (919) 513-1420

kmcharron@ncsu.edu 

Travel Region: Statewide 

About Katherine Mellen Charron:

Native North Carolinian Katherine Mellen Charron received her B.A. in Literature at the University of North Carolina-Asheville; her M.A. in Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and her Ph.D. in History at Yale University. Her teaching and research interests include 20th Century U.S. political and social, southern, women/gender, and African American history. Her publications include Recollections of My Slavery Days by William Henry Singleton, which she co-edited with David S. Cecelski, and the forthcoming Teaching Citizenship: Septima Poinsette Clark and the Black Freedom Struggle, which will be published by UNC Press in 2009. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of History at North Carolina State University.

Septima Clark, Citizenship Education, and Women in the Civil Rights Movement 

Civil rights activist Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987) is best known for her role in developing the Citizenship Schools. During the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of disenfranchised African Americans passed through Citizenship School classes in which they learned to read and write in order to pass the literacy tests required by southern states to register to vote. Beyond preparing adults to gain access to the voting booth, Clark’s curriculum taught students how to wield the power of the ballot to transform everyday life. Initially sponsored by the Highlander Folk School, the program spread throughout the South after the Southern Christian Leadership Conference adopted it in 1961. Septima Clark brought four decades of practical experience as a public school teacher and civic activist to bear as she designed the Citizenship Schools. This talk focuses on three moments in Clark’s life to show that the roots of the program lay in the organizing tradition forged by black women educators in the segregated South. Given that education had long been perceived as “women’s work,” it also highlights the degree to which the Citizenship Schools represented an important site of black women’s activism and leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. 

Requirements: lectern, microphone, LCD projection system

William Henry Singleton’s Recollections of My Slavery Days: a North Carolina Slave’s View of the Civil War and Its Legacies

In 1922, the former slave and Union Army veteran William Henry Singleton published an autobiography that provides a fascinating glimpse of life in a North Carolina coastal city and rural neighborhood. His Recollections of My Slavery Days vividly reminds us how slavery impacted black and white families, the church, and the marketplace in the antebellum South as well as the upheaval that accompanied the Civil War. The talk explores what Singleton’s narrative reveals about a place and the people in it, about slavery and freedom, and the bridge between the two. For Singleton, that bridge was built in the crucible of the Civil War and rested on the militant black political self-assertion that emerged early in the war in coastal North Carolina. Considering the fifty-seven years between the war’s end and Singleton’s writing, this talk also takes up the question of memory, of what we choose to remember, how we remember it, and why that matters.

Requirements: lectern, microphone, LCD projection system