Chavis Symposium

James T. Patterson, PhD., Brown University
Author of Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy

Constance Curry, J.D., Emory University

William Darity, Jr., PhD., University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Department of Economics

Michael J. Klarman, J.D., D. Phil, The University of Virginia School of Law

(CANCELLED)Daryl Scott, PhD., Howard University, History and African American Studies

(ADDED SPEAKER) Kevin Crotty, J.D., Ph.D., Washington and Lee University

Kara Miles Turner, PhD., Morgan State University

Speaker Biographies

James T. Patterson is a renowned expert on politics and public policy in the 20th century U.S., he completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University and then spent eight years at Indiana University. For the next three decades he taught at Brown University in Providence, R.I., where he rose to Ford Foundation Professor of American History. Patterson held three prestigious visiting professorships at the University of Oxford, University of Amsterdam and at Cambridge University. He is the author of many articles and books including Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974, which won the 1997 Bancroft Prize for the best book on U.S. history; Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft; and Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy.

Constance Curry grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia and served as Student Body President. During her college years in the 1950s, she became involved in the U. S. National Student Association (NSA) and their work for integration. After studying abroad as a Fulbright scholar and at Columbia University Graduate School, she returned to Atlanta in 1960 to work for NSA in human relations, and was the first white woman appointed to the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

From 1964 until 1975, as Southern Field Representative for the American Friends Service Committee, worked with black families in school desegregation and with community groups in voter registration and economic development. 1984 Law degree from Woodrow Wilson College of Law. Director of Human services for the City of Atlanta 1975-1990, left to write award-winning Silver Rights, published 1995,which records the story of the Carter family of Sunflower County, Mississippi, black sharecroppers whose eight children integrated the Drew public schools in 1965. Seven of them graduated from Ole Miss. Fellowship to the Carter Woodson Center for Civil Rights at the University of Virginia and fellow at Emory University's Women's Studies Division.

Second book The Fire Ever Burning, about Mississippi civil rights leader, Aaron Henry, published by the University Press of Mississippi,2000. Collaboration in book, Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement, University of Georgia Press fall 2000. Mississippi Harmony with Mrs. Winson Hudson on Hudson autobiography, published by St. Martin’s Press in fall, 2002.

Advocate for prison and criminal justice reform issues---for her, the current cutting edge of the civil rights movement today. Also, producer/researcher for documentary The Intolerable Burden, on failure of public education and fast-track to prison, particularly for young black men.

William Darity, Jr., is the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Director of the Institute of African American Research. His research interests include racial and ethnic economic inequality, North-South models of trade and growth, interpreting Mr. Keynes, the economics of the Atlantic slave trade, and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment. He has published over 100 articles in professional journals and authored or edited 7 books. His most recent publication, coauthored with Samuel Myers, Jr., is “Persistent Disparity: Racial Economic Inequality in the United States Since 1945" (1998). His avocations include playing blues harmonica, reading science fiction, and coaching youth sports in Durham, N.C.

Michael J. Klarman is the James Monroe Professor of Law and a Albert C. Tate Jr. Research Professor of History. He joined the Virginia faculty in 1987. He teaches criminal law, constitutional law, constitutional theory, and constitutional history. He held the Class of 1966 Research Professorship from 1993-96 and received the first Roger and Madeleine Traynor Faculty Achievement Award for Excellence in Legal Scholarship in 1996. In 1997 he received a University of Virginia Harrison Achievement Award, a State Council of Higher Education Faculty Award, and the All-University Teaching Award, one of the University's highest honors for excellence in teaching, research, and service. He currently serves on the editorial board of the Law and History Review.

At Stanford Law School, Klarman won numerous awards and served as senior articles and symposium editor of the Stanford Law Review; he also is a member of the Order of the Coif and Phi Beta Kappa. After graduation, Klarman clerked for Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He then completed his doctoral thesis in legal history as a Marshall Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Kara Miles Turner was born in Norfolk, Virginia and grew up in Richmond, Virginia. She received the Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1992. She earned a Master of Arts degree in History in 1995 from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Writing her dissertation on the black educational struggle in Prince Edward County from 1865-1995, she received the Doctor of Philosophy degree from Duke University in 2001. From 1996-2002, she taught history at Virginia State University, Petersburg, Virginia. She is currently Assistant Dean for Administration in The College of Liberal Arts, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland.

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Daryl Scott was born and raised on the Southside of Chicago, coming of age in the late 1960's. He attended Catholic schools until he volunteered for the military, serving during the peaceful years of Jimmy Carter's presidency. After his military service, Scott attended Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, receiving a doctorate in history in 1994. For nearly a decade, he has taught history, specializing in modern U. S. History. His first book, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996, won the 1998 James Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Presently he is Professor of History at Howard University, working on a history of white nationalism in the American South, 1865 to present. He resides in Prince Georges County, Maryland.

Professor Scott will be unable to attend the Symposium. Professor Kevin Crotty, Washington and Lee University will replace him in the Symposium.