Category — Faculty note

John Hope Franklin, a prolific scholar of African-American history who profoundly influenced thinking about slavery and Reconstruction while helping to further the civil rights struggle, died Wednesday in Durham, N.C. He was 94.

…Dr. Franklin also taught at some of the nation’s leading institutions, including Harvard and the University of Chicago in addition to Duke, and as a scholar he personally broke several racial barriers.

…He often argued that historians have an important role in shaping policy, a position he put into practice when he worked with Marshall’s team of lawyers in their effort to strike down segregation in the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed the doctrine of “separate but equal” in the nation’s public schools.

“Using the findings of the historians,” Dr. Franklin recalled in a 1974 lecture, “the lawyers argued that the history of segregation laws reveals that their main purpose was to organize the community upon the basis of a superior white and an inferior Negro caste.”

See full story at the New York Times:  John Hope Franklin, Scholar of African-American History, Is Dead at 94 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com.

The next event in Women’s History Month is a panel discussion with the women of SWAN….the Service Women’s Action Network in MLK 255/256 noon-1:30pm.   SWAN is “a group of military service women and allies who came together in 2007 to create a network of support for military service women and also women considering military service.” In this panel, veterans will “speak to the realities of life in the military and demystify the illusions often marketed by military recruiters. Panelists will address the myths and realities of the messages often promoted to target young women.

It is a crucial time for women in the military

• Over 155,000 women currently serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.
• 15% of our military service personnel are women.
• The current VA system provides limited services specified for women.

Learn more about SWAN...

Michelle stands boldly in a White House where she is mistress, not slave. Her body is for her own pleasure, her own adornment, her own vanity. She is not reduced to the mule. Her labor will not enrich white folks, it will supply her family. She is not reduced to a breeder. Her children belong to her and she is free to love and protect them. It is an act of resistance for a black woman to demand that her body belong to herself for her pleasure, her adornment, even her vanity, because in the United Sates black women’s bodies have only been valued to the extent that they produce wealth and pleasure for others.

from THE KITCHEN TABLE.

NEW YORK – A global women’s rights treaty completed 30 years ago has a better-than-ever chance for U.S. Senate ratification this year, yet the hunt for the needed 67 favorable votes is likely to incur the wrath of activists on both the left and right. [Read more →]

Global Disconnects: The Internet & Human Trafficking
February 20-21, 2009 Berkeley, California

Brought to you by The Center for Race & Gender (UC Berkeley), Students & Artists Fighting to End Human Slavery (Northern CA), and The End Internet Trafficking Coalition (USA)

As the internet has become more and more a part of the everyday in the U.S. and the global north, questions have arisen: How has the internet used as a tool for violence, for the trafficking and sexual exploitation of people? How has it used as a tool for social change to counter violence? In 2008 the End Internet Trafficking Coalition formed to address the increasing usages of services on the web to exploit people through labor and sex violence. In an effort to further the conversations that began with a national call through emails to collaborate, the coalition recorded an online presentation on the issue. February 20-21, 2009, in a conference meeting titled, “Global Disconnects: The Internet & Human Trafficking” the coalition and collaborators will be meeting at UC Berkeley to address the complexities of human trafficking and the technoscapes of the web, as well as the prospects for countering human trafficking through theory and practice.