Keeping the Red Record: Archiving Racial Violence
March 29, 2017 at 7 p.m.
UNCW, King Hall Auditorium
Geoff Ward, professor of criminology, law & society, University of California, Irvine
Over a century of effort to document racial violence demonstrates its importance to critical analysis, social movements, and other remedial
effort. Represented most notably by Ida B. Wells’s 1895 pamphlet “A Red Record,” which proved key to the crusade against lynching, these
data gathering, analysis, and leveraging efforts have clarified and countered threats to African Americans’ and others’ life chances. Yet there
are great challenges to measuring racialized violence, interpreting impacts, and translating insights into remedial effort. “A Red Record” is
a contested empirical account, inevitably incomplete, and fraught with tensions related to criteria, accuracy, and meaning. The talk explores
some of these challenges and strategies for overcoming them in the context of Ward’s ongoing work to build a racial violence archive and in
relation to Ward’s (Howe) family history and its ties to the 1898 Wilmington (NC) racial massacre and coup.
Presentation is co-sponsored by UNCW’s Department of Sociology and Criminology, Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, and
Upperman African American Cultural Center
Accommodations for disabilities may be requested by calling 910.962.3432 at least 7 days prior to the event. UNCW is an EEO/AA institution.