Lecture by June Manning Thomas, who entered Furman in the fall of 1967 as one of Furman’s first three African American women students. Her new book, Struggling to Learn: An Intimate History of School Desegregation in South Carolina, traces her experiences desegregating schools in Orangeburg and at Furman. Dr. Thomas is the Mary Frances Berry Distinguished University Professor, Emerita, in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and the author of many monographs, chapters, and articles on urban planning and its effects on African American life in the United States published from 1975 through 2022.
This talk will consider challenges facing education for Black students in SC from K-12 to higher education, describing how this affected the progress of the state as a whole in the 20th century. This history begins in the early 1900s and then covers the Rosenwald era and the civil rights/ desegregation era, covering Black self-help as well as white philanthropy, and discusses implications for the present. The talk, interactive, will feature points from the author’s recent book: Struggling to Learn: An Intimate History of School Desegregation in South Carolina (Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2022).
McEachern Lecture Hall
Furman Hall 214
Thursday, October 20th
7:00-8:00
CLP