Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy's America in Black and White  with Patricia Sullivan

Thursday, October 14, 2021 • 7:00 pm
​Byrd Center Auditorium
History, race, and politics converged in the 1960s in ways that indelibly changed America. In Justice Rising, a landmark reconsideration of Robert Kennedy’s life and legacy, Patricia Sullivan draws on government files, personal papers, and oral interviews to reveal how he grasped the moment to emerge as a transformational leader.

​When protests broke out across the South, the young attorney general confronted escalating demands for racial justice. What began as a political problem soon became a moral one. In the face of vehement pushback from Southern Democrats bent on massive resistance, he put the weight of the federal government behind school desegregation and voter registration. Bobby Kennedy’s youthful energy, moral vision, and capacity to lead created a momentum for change. He helped shape the 1964 Civil Rights Act but knew no law would end racism. When the Watts uprising brought calls for more aggressive policing, he pushed back, pointing to the root causes of urban unrest: entrenched poverty, substandard schools, and few job opportunities. RFK strongly opposed the military buildup in Vietnam, but nothing was more important to him than “the revolution within our gates, the struggle of the American Negro for full equality and full freedom.”
On the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination, Kennedy’s anguished appeal captured the hopes of a turbulent decade: “In this difficult time for the United States it is perhaps well to ask what kind of nation we are and what direction we want to move in.” It is a question that remains urgent and unanswered.

This lecture will be held in-person at the Byrd Center on Thursday, October 14, 2021 at 7:00 pm. Seating is limited, please register to attend by clicking on the button below. 
Patricia Sullivan specializes in modern United States history, with an emphasis on African American history, race relations, and the history of the Civil Rights Movement. Professor Sullivan teaches courses in twentieth century U.S. history. Areas of interest include African American history; the South since the Civil War; race, reform and politics in the United States; and the history of the Civil Rights Movement. She teaches graduate courses on modern American history, African American history and on civil rights struggles in the twentieth century. Her book, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement, is the first history of the formative decades of the nation's oldest civil rights organization. Henry Louis Gates Jr. described the book as "a major contribution to our understanding of the political and cultural history of African Americans-indeed of America itself." 
Sullivan's other books include: Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era; Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years; New Directions in Civil Rights Studies, co-edited with Armstead L. Robinson, and Civil Rights in the United States, a 2-volume encyclopedia, coedited with Waldo E. Martin Jr. She and Waldo Martin are editors of the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture, published by the University of North Carolina Press. Since 1997, Professor Sullivan has codirected an NEH Summer Institute at Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute with Waldo Martin on "Teaching the History of the Civil Rights Movement."
​This event is sponsored by the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education in partnership with Shepherdstown's Four Seasons Bookstore.