The movements for suffrage and equal rights based on gender and on race intersected, overlapped and sometimes faced off throughout American history. Understanding when, how, and why is critical to ensuring these rights are protected. The histories of the U.S. women’s suffrage and civil rights movements also stimulate a timely conversation on the value of the vote today. 

The GWC AND GBC invite you to join in conversation with two esteemed historians and writers, Dr. Alison M. Parker and Dr. Nikki Brown . They will explore the contested struggle for voting rights in the past and present in their opening remarks and will then respond to questions and comments from the audience.  

ABOUT OUR GUESTS:

Alison M. Parker is Chair & Richards Professor of American History at the University of Delaware. She has research and teaching interests in women’s and gender history, African American history, and legal history. In 2017-2018, Parker was an Andrew W. Mellon Advanced Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. Her book, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell is forthcoming (December 2020) from the University of North Carolina Press, in its John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. Among other publications, Parker is the author of two monographs, Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State (2010) and Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873-1933 (1997). She also serves as the founding editor of the Gender and Race in American History book series for the University of Rochester Press. As Chair of the History Department at the University of Delaware, Parker is committed to helping to build a coalition of students, faculty, and staff promoting a wide-ranging anti-racism agenda.

Nikki Brown Nikki Brown has been teaching American and African American history since 1999.  She majored in History at Oberlin College, and she earned a PhD in History from Yale University in 2001.  Her book, Private Politics and Public Voices:  Black Women’s Activism from World War I to the New Deal (Indiana University Press) won the Letitia Woods Brown Award for Best Book in African American Women’s in History in 2006.  The major themes in Dr. Brown’s work are around gender, race, identity, representation, and politics.  Dr. Brown is also a professional photographer, and has recently completed a photography project on African American men in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  She is currently working on a book about Louisiana’s Civil Rights Movement.  Dr. Brown travels often to Turkey, where she taught Civil Rights history and American Women’s history in 2014 for one semester and 2018-2019 for the academic year, as a Senior Lecturer with the Fulbright/CIES Program. She is also preparing an oral history of the Afro-Turks, the African descendants of slaves in the Ottoman Empire.

If you have questions for the panelists, you can send them in advance to womenscaucus@democratsabroad.org.

Capturing The Flag is an urgent cautionary tale that documents what’s in store for the fast-approaching election of 2020, and a close-up look of American democracy at its most vulnerable point. Through the intimate experiences of the film’s citizen volunteers, we are inspired to vote, to help someone else to vote, and to get involved in the growing non-partisan efforts to protect our fragile democracy. The shocking voter suppression we see unfold in real-time in Capturing The Flag is proliferating across the country, as those who control local elections have been emboldened to rewrite access to the ballot box along partisan lines. With verité footage of Barack Obama and Reverend Dr. William Barber II, the film is also a powerful call to arms for what we all can and need to do in the ongoing battle for voting rights.

After the film, we will have a Q&A with the producers, DA GOTV, and Angela Fobbs, GBC Chair.

About the Producers

Laverne Berry and Steve Miller have worked as volunteer Voter Protection lawyers in each of the past three presidential elections (2008 and 2016 in North Carolina, 2102 in Virginia) and during the 2018 midterms in North Carolina.  Most recently, they did this work during the re-do election in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District in September 2019, after the original results were thrown out for absentee ballot fraud.    They have spoken about voter suppression and their experiences as voter protection poll observers at universities and community groups around the US, including at the Kennedy School at Harvard and at TEDx events. 

• Laverne is an entertainment and media business affairs attorney representing independent film and television producers, directors, production companies, distribution companies, authors, and media companies. Drawing on eighteen years as a television producer and distribution executive before becoming a lawyer, Laverne understands both the business and legal sides of the media marketplace. She acted as Executive Producer for Perfectly Normal For The Silent Truth and Me. She was the Co-Executive Producer for Emmy-nominated Chely Wright: Wish Me Away, and The Lady in Question is Charles Busch. Laverne also has been involved in Alternative Dispute Resolution for 25 years. She is a member of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Dispute Panel, American Arbitration Association (AAA) Commercial Arbitration Panel, and Mediation Panel. Laverne has been named a New York Metro Area Super Lawyer for eight years by Thompson Reuters; and was included in the New York Metro Super Lawyers supplement to The New York Times newspaper, The Top Women Attorneys in New York, 2014- 2020.

• Steve is a consultant in international media and education, with over 25 years of experience developing and managing a broad range of media businesses and educational and social justice projects. Steve spent ten years at Sesame Workshop, the producer of Sesame Street, where he ran their international division. He then served as a member of the senior management team that ran the Walt Disney Company’s global publishing division for seven years, with responsibility for strategic planning and business development. Most recently he was Senior Vice President, Government and Corporate Relations and Business Development for the UK-based Study Group, an international education company.  Currently, advises clients on a wide range of international projects and partnerships and is a special advisor to the renowned Cambodian film director Rithy Panh’s Bophana Audiovisual Center in Phnom Penh. Steve was a member of the Board of Cambodian Living Arts, an NGO in Cambodia, from 2012 through 2017. He was a founding Board member of BAFTA-New York (the New York chapter of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts) and is one of the voters for the annual BAFTA Film Awards. He has also served on the Boards of Lambda Legal Defense and The Hetrick-Martin Institute. He has been a member of DA – Italy for over a decade and is a member of the LGBTQ+ Caucus. 

Ticket cost: While there is no donation required to attend, we hope you’ll consider a donation of $5 - or more - and help reach hundreds of potential voters!  Even if you can't join the Webinar, you can show your support by clicking HERE and making a donation for this event. 

Please RSVP for this event. The link to the online event will be sent a day before the event.