MARKING RACE, MAKING HISTORY
The organizers would like to express their appreciation to
Renee Basick, Cyndee Breshok, John Carey, David Coleman,
David Goodwine, Ruben Luciano, and Nancy Spiegel for their
essential assistance in planning and preparing for this event.
A CONFERENCE
IN CELEBRATION
OF THE CAREER
OF THOMAS HOLT
Regenstein Library, Room 122, 1100 East 57th Street, Chicago
April 29-30, 2016; 10am-6pm
Department
of
History
FRIDAY, APRIL 29
9:00
Coffee & muffins
9:45
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Emilio Kouri, University of Chicago
Jonathan Levy, University of Chicago
Allyson Hobbs, Stanford University
10-11:30
Struggles for Humanity in the Post-Emancipation South
Chair: Michael Dawson, Director of the Center for the Study of
Race, Politics, and Culture, University of Chicago
Gretchen Long, Williams College
Writing Freedom Down: African American Handwriting in the
Early Years of Freedom
Adam Rowe, University of Chicago
The Problem of Freedom in the Civil War Era: The Nation and the
Triumph of Liberalism over Republicanism, 1865-1870
Mark Schultz, Lewis University
Degrees of Segregation; Settlement Patterns, Black Farm Owners,
and the Shaping of Rural Communities in Georgia and Arkansas
A J Aiseirithe, Director of the Wendell Phillips Bicentennial
Project, Harvard University
Wendell Phillips’s Civil War: Beyond Praise or Blame
12-1
Lunch
1:00-2:30
From Civil Rights to Human Rights
Chair: Cathy Cohen, University of Chicago
Laurie Green, University of Texas, Austin
Out of Mississippi: The Relational Politics of Hunger and Race in
the Late 1960s
Quincy Mills, Vassar College
Raising Hell and Bail: The Danville, VA Demonstrations of 1963
Benjamin Talton, Temple University
The High Water Mark of Black Power: The 99th Congress and
Constructive Engagement in South Africa and Ethiopia
Thomas C. Holt, the James Westfall Thompson Distinguished Service Professor of
American and African American History at the University of Chicago, was born on
November 30, 1942 in Danville, Virginia. As a young man, Holt attended and graduated
from segregated schools in southside Virginia. During the Civil Rights Movement, Holt
worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Movement (SNCC) in Virginia and
Maryland. He received his B.A. from Howard University in 1965, and his M.A. in English
literature from Howard in 1966. Following that, Holt worked for federal antipoverty
programs trying to change the living and working conditions of migrant and seasonal farm
workers. Holt received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1973, studying
with the celebrated southern historian C. Vann Woodward. In the fall of 1972, he began
teaching at Howard University. He went on to teach at Harvard University, the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he was instrumental in the development of comparative and
interdisciplinary studies in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and as a
visiting professor at the University of California, Berkley, before becoming a professor at
the University of Chicago in 1987, where he was again involved in creating an institutional
home for the interdisciplinary and comparative study of race.
Over the course of his career, Holt has published eight books addressing the complexities
of race in the Americas and the history of the African American people. They include
field-defining works such as Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina
during Reconstruction (1979), The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica
and Britain, 1832-1938 (1992), The Problem of Race in the 21st Century (2000), Beyond
Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Post-emancipation Societies (2000),
which was co-written with Rebecca J. Scott and Frederick Cooper, and Children of Fire: A
History of African Americans (2010). He is currently at work on two books, one on the Civil
Rights Movement, and a second, co-authored text (with Leora Auslander) entitled Race
and Racism in the Twentieth-Century Atlantic World.
In addition to numerous honors and awards, Holt received the John D. and Catherine
T. MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 1990. In 1994, Holt served as President of the American
Historical Association. President Clinton appointed Holt to the Council of the National
Endowment for the Humanities from 1994 to 1997. In 2003, Holt was elected to be a fellow
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2014 he was awarded the Wilbur
Cross Medal, Yale’s recognition of distinguished alumni.
Holt has been a generous mentor from the very beginning of his career. He has taught and
advised hundreds of students who have produced projects on a wide range of subjects:
from the radical vision of Ella Baker and the Freedom Movement to the history of labor and
capitalism, from struggles in Chicago politics to segregation in Bermuda, from everyday
acts of sexual violence on plantations to slave tithing in Jamaica, from black legal culture
and the origins of sectional crisis in New York to the history of racial passing in the United
States, from the centrality of African American barbers and barbershops to black culture
to the meaning of democracy in Brazil, from abolitionism and emancipation to freedom
and civil rights, and so many more projects. Tom’s students enjoy the gift of a relentless
advocate who always encourages them to see their projects as their own, through
new eyes. He shoulders their struggles, while celebrating their successes with more joy
than they could ever imagine. Tom’s masterful intellectual touch has deeply enriched a
generation of historians.
2:30
Coffee break
3:00-4:30
The Problem of Race Around the World, Part I
Chair: Elisa Camiscioli, Binghamton University
Jack Jin Gary Lee, University of California, San Diego
Law and the Architecture of Tyranny: On the Crafting of Crown
Colony Government in Jamaica
Guy Emerson Mount, University of Chicago
A History of the Possible: Thomas C. Holt, C. Vann Woodward,
and the Recovery of a Black Pacific
Kate Bjork, Hamline University
Scouting for Empire: Indian Country Abroad
Nathan Connolly, Johns Hopkins University
The Strange Career of American Liberalism
4:30
Roundtable
Introductions by Jonathan Levy, University of Chicago
Chair: Julie Saville, University of Chicago
Allison Blakely, Boston University
Rebecca Scott, University of Michigan
Richard White, Stanford University
Darlene Clark Hine, Northwestern University
Kenneth Warren, University of Chicago
Michael Dawson, Director of the Center for the Study of Race,
Culture, and Politics, University of Chicago
7:00
Reception at the Smart Museum
5550 South Greenwood Avenue, Chicago
Roger Hart / Michigan Photography, 2016
Thomas C. Holt, the James Westfall Thompson
Distinguished Service Professor of American and
African American History at the University of Chicago,
is the preeminent historian of the peoples of the
African diaspora in North America. His writing and
teaching, covering the United States, the Caribbean, and
beyond, has transformed the way scholars understand
the histories of slavery, freedom, and race, as well as
the legacy of the African American experience. The
significance of Holt’s scholarship reaches beyond
the academy, illustrating the power of the historical
imagination to make history in the present.
SATURDAY, APRIL 30
3:00-4:30
The Culture of the Twentieth-Century Transatlantic World
Chair: Amy Stanley, University of Chicago
9:00
Coffee & muffins
10am-11:30
The Problem of Race Around the World, Part II
Chair: Kathleen Conzen, University of Chicago
Celeste Day Moore, Hamilton College
The Transatlantic Turn: Race, Culture, and African-American Music
in the Twentieth-Century Atlantic World
Christopher Todd, University of Chicago
New Light on Jamaica’s Baptist Rebellion: Slave Tithing, Church
Property, and Ownership in the Baptist War of 1831
Christopher Dingwall, University of Toronto
Of Black Books and The Souls of Black Folk
Nayan Shah, University of Southern California
Refugees, Fugitivity and the Material Culture of Survival
Theodore Francis, Huston-Tillotson University
Aces, but No Spades: Tennis, Tourism and the Problem of
Segregation in Bermuda
Janette Gayle, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Black Dressmakers, the Politics of Sartorial Style, and Black
Claims to Citizenship in Early 20th Century New York City
Jessica Graham, University of California, San Diego
Shifting the Meaning of Democracy: Racial Inclusion as a Strategy
in Brazil and the United States
Korey Garibaldi, University of Notre Dame
White Lives, Knock On Any Door, and Foxes of Harrow, Redux
Lauren (Robin) Derby, University of California, Los Angeles
Ota’s Travels: Rumors of Race and Speciation in the Atlantic World
12-1
Lunch
1-2:30
African American Activism and Its Contradictions
Chair: Barbara Ransby, University of Illinois at Chicago
4:30
Roundtable
Introductions by Allyson Hobbs, Stanford University
Chair: Adam Green, University of Chicago
Martha S. Jones, University of Michigan
Jim Campbell, Stanford University
George Chauncey, Yale University
Thavolia Glymph, Duke University
Mae Ngai, Columbia University
6:30
Remarks by Thomas Holt
Jill DuPont, College of St. Scholastica
The Athlete as Activist: Jackie Robinson’s Politics
Traci Parker, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Black Workers and Consumers in the Civil Rights Movement
Toussaint Losier, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
“The Public does not believe the police can police themselves”:
The Mayoral Administration of Harold Washington and the
Permanent Crisis of Police Accountability
Kai Parker, University of Chicago
“‘Sit Down, Children’: The Helen Robinson Youth Choir and
Chicago Gospel Music between Civil Rights and Urban Crisis”
2:30
Coffee