Shawn Alexander, associate professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas, will present “Go into the Courts and Fight it Out: T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American League and the Origins of the NAACP’s Legal Strategy” at 4 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 16, in the Cone University Center, Room 210.
Alexander, who also is director of the Langston Hughes Center, is a researcher whose focus is on African American social and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries. He wrote an anthology on the works of T. Thomas Fortune, the highly influential editor of the nation's leading black newspaper the New York Age and a leading economist in the black community.
Currently, Alexander is completing an inquiry on violence in this time period entitled “Reconstruction, Violence and the Ku Klux Klan Hearings” and a short publication on the life and activities of W.E.B. DuBois.
The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences’ History and Africana Studies departments are co-sponsoring Alexander’s talk, which is free and open to the public.