Booker T. Washington: The Man and His Legacy (virtual)

Virtual Event with Live Captioning

Booker T. Washington: The Man and His Legacy

Booker T. Washington was a leading voice for Black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. An author, a pioneer in higher education, adviser to presidents and business leaders, and a pillar in the emerging Black elite and middle class, Washington helped conceive a future for an educated, prosperous Black society in the wake of emancipation and Reconstruction.

Join UVA knowledge leaders Deborah McDowell, Alice Griffin Professor of English in the Department of English in the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, and Derrick Alridge, Philip J. Gibson Professor of Education in the School of Education and Human Development as they discuss Washington’s work and legacy.

The panel will be moderated by Suzanne Morse Moomaw, Director of the University of Virginia Press and Associate Professor, Urban and Environmental Planning in UVA’s School of Architecture. In 2020, UVA Press acquired the Booker T. Washington Papers Digital Edition, a fourteen-volume print series of Washington’s papers and considered one of the greatest documentary editions in American scholarship.
 

Speaker Biographies

Suzanne Morse Moomaw, Director, University of Virginia Press and Associate Professor, Urban and Environmental Planning, School of Architecture, University of Virginia

Suzanne Morse Moomaw was named director of the University of Virginia Press in January 2020. Morse Moomaw is also an associate professor of urban and environmental planning in UVA’s School of Architecture and director of the Community Design Research Center. In her teaching, Morse Moomaw has spent the last three decades observing communities through social, design, and political lenses on local, regional, national, and international scales. Her teaching in community development challenges students to consider possibilities in order to create transdisciplinary solutions to the “wicked” problems facing civilization. She involves students – both in and out of the classroom – in wrestling with the systemic causes of issues such as poverty, racial inequities, economic restructuring, human settlements, and lack of affordable housing through historical and cultural frames.

Deborah E. McDowell, Alice Griffin Professor of English, College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia

Deborah E. McDowell, a scholar of African-American/American literature, is the Alice Griffin Professor of English, where she has been a faculty member since 1987. McDowell served as the director of Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies from 2008 – 2021. Her publications include ‘The Changing Same’: Studies in Fiction by African-American Women, Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin, and numerous articles, book chapters, and scholarly editions. She is co-editor (with Claudrena Harold and Juan Battle) of The Punitive Turn: Race, Inequality, and Mass Incarceration. Extensively involved in editorial projects on African-American literature, McDowell founded the African-American Women Writers Series for Beacon Press and served as its editor from 1985 – 1993. The project oversaw the reissue of fourteen novels by African-American women writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She also served as a period editor of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, contributing editor to the D.C. Heath Anthology of American Literature, and co-editor with Arnold Rampersad of Slavery and the Literary Imagination.

Derrick P. Alridge, Philip J. Gibson Professor of Education and Director, Center for Race and Public Education in the South (CRPES), School of Education and Human Development, University of Virginia

Derrick P. Alridge is the Philip J. Gibson Professor of Education and an affiliate faculty member in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies. An educational and intellectual historian, Alridge examines American education with foci in African American education and the civil rights movement. He is the author of The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History (2008) and co-editor, with James B. Stewart and V.P. Franklin, of Message in the Music: Hip-Hop, History, and Pedagogy (2011). Alridge is currently writing The Hip-Hop Mind: Ideas, History, and Social Consciousness (University of Wisconsin Press) and is co-editor, with Neil Bynum and James B. Stewart, of The Black Intellectual Tradition in the United States in the Twentieth Century (forthcoming, University of Illinois Press). He has published numerous articles in journals, such as History of Education Quarterly, The Journal of African American History, Teachers College Record, Educational Researcher, and The Journal of Negro Education.