ATTENTION: Reporters covering race relations, law and social justice, American history, black history, Black Lives Matter
WHAT: “100 Years Later: The Lynching of (Grandpa) Anthony Crawford: Has Racial Difference Ended or Simply Evolved?” a lecture to be presented by scholar, public historian and activist Doria Dee Johnson.
The talk will examine the lynching of Johnson’s great-grandfather in Abbeville, South Carolina, in 1916, following a dispute about the price of cottonseed, and to explore United States history, human rights and restorative justice. After Crawford died, his family was banished from town and their property confiscated illegally.
The lecture is free and open to the public.
WHEN: 4-5:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 11
WHERE: Hearst Field Annex, Room D-37. The annex is located on the southern edge of campus, near Bancroft Avenue and just west of Bowditch Street. A campus map is online.
A reception will follow the lecture at the Fannie Lou Hamer Black Resource Center, also located in the Hearst Field Annex.
WHO: Johnson has worked with Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy, the featured book for UC Berkeley’s On the Same Page 2016 program. She has worked with the Equal Justice Initiative to establish at the site of her great-grandfather’s slaying one of the only historical markers in the nation dedicated to lynching. Johnson also successfully lobbied the U.S. Senate in 2005, persuading it to issue a public apology for how long it took the federal government to enact anti-lynching legislation.
Leon Litwack, a well-known UC Berkeley American history professor emeritus, wrote about the Crawford lynching in his landmark book Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow.
Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a visiting scholar at the Newberry Library in Chicago and a U.S. representative to the Nelson Mandela International Dialogues in Cape Town and Sri Lanka.
DETAILS: Introducing Johnson will be Walter Hood, a professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning and of urban design at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. A question-and-answer session will follow the talk.
The event is co-sponsored by the On the Same Page program, the Division of Equity and Inclusion, the Department of African American Studies, the Department of Sociology, the College of Environmental Design and the Fannie Lou Hamer Black Resource Center.