Holocaust Memorial Lecture: The Greatest Outrage of the Century: White Violence and Black Protest in America
This talk 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, Crystal 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 is associate professor in the Department of African American Studies and the American Studies Program at Yale; and she is also affiliated with both the History Department and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. As a scholar of 19th and 20th century U.S. women’s history and African-American history, her research and teaching interests bridge the fields of social and political history. Feimster’s research focuses on racial and sexual violence, social movements, war, law, and citizenship. She interested the everyday lives of those relegated to the margins of power and the opportunities that they make for themselves despite terrible circumstances. Exploring absences and asymmetries of evidence in the archival record, her scholarship draws on the resources of gender studies, critical race theory, literary scholarship, and psychoanalysis to analyze some of the most elusive and traumatic facets of human experience. Her publications include "Not So Ivory: African American Women Historians Creating Academic Communities," in Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower, edited by Deborah Gray White (2008), "General Benjamin Butler & the threat of sexual violence during the American Civil War," Daedalus (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Spring, 2009), and Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard University Press, 2009). She is currently working on a project on rape and the American Civil War.
More information is available here.
This lecture is supported by the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement and Institutional Diversity and American Culture Studies.