For the third installment of the Strengthening Democracy Through Civil Dialogues series, the Office of Justice, Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion (JEDI) and Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD) welcome Dr. Talitha LeFlouria, associate professor of history and fellow of the Mastin Gentry White Professorship in Southern History at The University of Texas at Austin, to discuss her book, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South, with JEDI Associate Dean and CSRD Director Dr. Peniel Joseph.
Featured Panelist
Talitha LeFlouria is associate professor of history and fellow of the Mastin Gentry White Professorship in Southern History at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (UNC, 2015), the first history of Black, working-class incarcerated women in the post-Civil War period. This book received several awards including: the Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians (2016); the Philip Taft Labor History Award from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations & Labor and Working-Class History Association (2016); the Malcolm Bell, Jr. and Muriel Barrow Bell Award from the Georgia Historical Society (2016); the Best First Book Prize from the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities (2015); the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians (2015); and the Ida B. Wells Tribute Award from the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History (2015). She is currently finishing her second single-authored book, Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block (forthcoming from Beacon Press). The Carnegie Corporation supported this project with a prestigious Andrew Carnegie fellowship. In addition to her scholarly publications, LeFlouria writes for popular media outlets including The Atlantic, Washington Post and The Root. Her research has also been profiled in Ms. magazine, New York magazine, Huffington Post and The Nation, as well as in several documentaries including "Slavery by Another Name"; "Rust"; "Demanding Justice: A History of Domestic Workers"; and "One Thousand Years of Slavery," a series co-produced by Angela Bassett and Courtney B. Vance.
Moderator
Peniel Joseph holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the inaugural associate dean of the Office of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI), and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD) at the LBJ School. His career focus has been on "Black Power Studies," which encompasses interdisciplinary fields such as Africana studies, law and society, women's and ethnic studies, and political science. In addition to being a frequent commentator on issues of race, democracy and civil rights, Joseph's most recent book is The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.