Scholars@Hallwalls is a monthly series featuring talks by Humanities Institute Faculty Fellows. Please join us in the cinema space at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center!

Complimentary wine and light fare will be served for a brief, pre-talk mingling session at this free and open-to-the-public event.

“‘A History Worth Cherishing’: Race-ability and the Complexities of School Desegregation”

Triumphalist histories of Brown v. Board of Education depict the desegregation of public schools as a difficult but necessary step in the United States’ inexorable march toward progress, overcoming the racism of a supposed minority of white citizens until justice prevailed. In this lecture, historian Jenifer L. Barclay centers the experiences of former students of doubly segregated southern schools for the deaf and blind and the 1952 Miller v. Board of Education of the District of Columbia case to explore the ways that a Black disability perspective disrupts and nuances this historical narrative.

This event will be simultaneously live-streamed via the Hallwalls website. The talk will begin at ~4:15pm.

About Jenifer L. Barclay, Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Center for Disability Studies

A scholar of race and disability, historian Jenifer L. Barclay is the author of The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (University of Illinois Press, 2021) and her work appears in publications such as Slavery & Abolition, Women, Gender, and Families of Color, and The Oxford Handbook of Disability History. She is working on her second monograph, Between Two Worlds: A Black Disability History of Southern Education from Emancipation to Integration and co-editing a forthcoming collection with Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Cripping the Archive: Disability, History, and Power.