Lunch and Learn Program at the Laurens County Museum July 13, 2022 at NOON
Bring your lunch and learn about the Civil Rights struggle which erupted in a riot in Laurens County during Reconstruction. The Laurens County Museum will host a lecture program by
Dr. Robert Greene II, Assistant Professor of History at Claflin University, on Wednesday, July 13 at 12:00 NOON
The presentation “Laurens County and the Long Black Freedom Struggle” details the integral role Laurens has played in the Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights eras in South Carolina. All of these eras have direct connection to the Smithsonian exhibit on display at the museum, “Voices and Votes: Democracy in America.”
Dr. Greene will give a brief lecture about the history of civil, human, and voting rights in Laurens County. Like many other areas in South Carolina, Laurens played an important role in the expansion of democracy in the Palmetto State. Dr. Greene will chronicle unique experiences, like the Laurens protest that resulted in a riot against local and state Reconstruction governments in 1870, as well as events and accomplishments of the Civil Rights era in the region. He stated, “When folks learn this history, I hope they will be able to take it and use its lessons for today.”
This program is sponsored by the SC Humanities Council and is free and open to the public. The Laurens County Museum is located at 116 South Public Square, Laurens, SC 29360. For more information, call (864)681-3678, Bring your lunch and join us at 12 p.m. on July 13!
Dr. Robert Greene II
Assistant Professor of History Dr. Robert Greene II Dr. Greene received his Bachelor of Arts in Writing and Linguistics with a concentration in Creative Writing from Georgia Southern University; his Master of Arts in History from Georgia Southern University; and earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of South Carolina, Columbia. Dr. Greene recently completed his dissertation at the University of South Carolina, about the ways in which Democratic Party leaders in the South from 1964 to 1994 vied for the African American vote via appeals to Southern identity and memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Mr. Greene has published a book chapter in the collection Navigating Souths, and has published a scholarly article in Patterns of Prejudice. He has also published at several popular magazines and websites, including The Nation, Jacobin, Dissent, Scalawag, Current Affairs, and Jacobin.His research interests include African American history, American intellectual history since 1945, and Southern history since 1945. Dr. Greene is also a blogger and book review editor for the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians, and has just begun a six-post stint for the Teaching American History blog.
Education
B.A. Georgia Southern University, Writing & Linguistics, Creative Writing Concentration, 2008
M.A. Georgia Southern University, History, 2012
Recent Publications
Peer Reviewed Articles:
“The Legacy of South Carolina Within the Civil Rights Movement,” Patterns and Prejudice, Vol. 49, No. 5, pp. 486-501, published.
Edited Collection Book Chapters:
“Where Do We Go From Here? The Implications of Black Intellectual History in the Modern South,”
Navigating Souths: Transdisciplinary Explorations of a U.S. Region. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017, pp. 123-134, published.
“Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Legacy of W.E.B Du Bois,” No Deed But Memory: Forging American Freedom in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Twilight Years, University Press of Mississippi, Forthcoming.
“National Review and Memory of the Civil Rights Movement,” News on the Right, Oxford University Press, Forthcoming.
Selected Essays and Non-Scholarly Writings:
“The Southern Strategy,” Dissent, Summer 2015
“The Fall of the Confederate Flag,” dissentmagazine.com, July 15, 2015
“Racism Can’t Destroy This Charleston Church,” politico.com, published on June 18, 2015
“Campus Protests,” American Book Review, Vol. 37, No. 3, March/April 2016, p. 4.
“A Devil We Know,” Dissent, Winter 2017
“Atlanta and the Losing Politics of the South,” Scalawag,Summer 2017,p. 64-71.
Column,CLIO Newsletter, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, August 2015-June 2017.
Recent Presentations
“African Americans and the Newest South,” Association for the Study of African American Life and History, September 2015
“Towards A Newest South: Media and the Making of the South in the 1970s,” Presentation at the Media and Civil Rights Symposium, University of South Carolina, April 2015.
“Crisis of Negro and Jewish Intellectuals: Harold Cruse and Responses to Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,” Biennial Scholars’ Conference on American Jewish History, Emory University, June 2014.
“Before 1963: African Americans, USC, and the Battle to Desegregate Southern Universities,” African American Experiences At USC, 1865-1980 Symposium, April 2014.
“Black Power and the National Press: Representation of Black Power in the National Media, 1966-68”, Presentation at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Conference, Jacksonville, FL, October 2013
“Left, Right, and Civil Rights: Memory, Race, and the Age of Reagan in Partisan Magazines,” Presentation at the New England Historical Association Conference, October 2013
“Black Power and the Press: Newspapers and the Black Power Movement”,
Media and Civil Rights Symposium, University of South Carolina, March 2013,