Seminar: Black Power and the Struggle over Public Education in Atlanta, 1960-1980

Tom Davies (Sussex) - Throughout the civil rights-Black Power era and in cities across the United States, public education became an important site of political contest, as African Americans fought for control of white-dominated institutions in their communities.

The struggle between poor and middle-class African Americans in Atlanta over the direction of school reform during the late 1960s and 1970s provides a fascinating example of how white elites dictated the scope of socio-economic and racial change. It also reveals the ways in which Black Power ideology could ultimately reinforce - rather than challenge - existing power relations and the racial and gender hierarchies they rested upon.

Dr Tom Adam Davies is a Lecturer in American History in the Department of History & Centre for American Studies at the University of Sussex. He is a specialist in twentieth century postwar political and social American history, and is particularly interested in the relationship between public policy and mainstream political institutions and minority movements for social, economic and political change. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Leeds (2013) and is currently finishing his first monograph which examines Black Power's place within, and impact upon, the American political mainstream.