Noted historian Crystal Sanders, Ph.D., associate professor of history at Penn State University, will give the keynote address at the Oct. 24 North Carolina Central University (NCCU) Department of History 31st annual Earlie E. Thorpe Memorial Lecture.
The online presentation will take place at 2 p.m. at https://www.youtube.com/c/ASALHTV.
Her lecture is entitled “America’s Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners' Quest for Graduate Education in the Age of Jim Crow.”
Sanders is an award-winning historian and was former director of the Africana Research Center at Penn State. Her research interests include African American history, Southern history and the history of Black education.
In 2016, she published “A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle.” The book received numerous awards, including the 2017 Critics Choice Award from the American Educational Research Association and the 2017 New Scholar’s Book Award from Division F of the American Educational Research Association.
Sanders earned a bachelor’s in history and public policy from Duke University in 2005. She obtained a master’s and doctorate in history from Northwestern University.
The annual lecture is given in honor of Earlie Endris Thorpe, Ph.D., former Department of History chair from 1962 to 1973 who taught at NCCU for 27 years, until his death in 1989. An outstanding teacher and scholar, Thorpe published several seminal works of history.
