Historian to Speak at UA on Landmark Desegregation Ruling

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – A Brown University history professor will give a talk entitled “The Legacies of Brown v. Board of Education” on Tuesday, Sept. 25, at 7:30 p.m. in 125 ten Hoor Hall, on The University of Alabama campus.

The speaker, James T. Patterson, Ford Foundation Professor of History at Brown University, recently authored “Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy.” This book, published by Oxford University Press, deals with the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision aimed at ending segregation in schools.

Patterson’s talk is presented by the Summersell Fund in Southern History and the UA history department.

Patterson, who has written on topics ranging from New Deal politics to poverty to cancer, is a graduate of Williams College. He earned both his master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. He won the Bancroft Prize in 1997 for his synthesis of recent American history, “Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974.”