Dr. Blair Kelley
MAGNOLIA— Dr. Blair L.M. Kelley, an associate professor of history and director of graduate history programs at North Carolina State University, will be the featured speaker for the Kathleen Mallory Distinguished Lecture at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 16. The event will be held in Foundation Hall of the Donald W. Reynolds Campus and Community Center at Southern Arkansas University.
The title of Kelley’s lecture will be “On the Meaning of Failure: Civil Rights Struggles in the Jim Crow South.” The event is free, and the public is invited to attend.
Kelley is the author of the award-winning book Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson. Through a re-examination of the earliest struggles against Jim Crow, she exposes the fullness of African American efforts to resist the passage of segregation laws dividing trains and streetcars by race in the early Jim Crow era. She is currently working on a new book on segregation and violence in Washington, D.C.
Kelley’s work as a scholar and teacher is grounded in the notion that confronting the history of race in America is essential to an understanding of our contemporary politics. Her scholarship, which has been published in scholarly journals and edited volumes, centers on the history of African American resistance to segregation. She also writes and presents work on African American women’s history, urban history, legal history, and southern history. She teaches courses on African American history, Civil Rights, black popular culture, oral history, and Katrina and the history of New Orleans.
Active inside the academy and out, Kelley resides in Durham, N.C., with her husband and daughter. She received her B.A. from the University of Virginia and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University.
