Author and historian William H. Chafe to give lecture Oct. 10

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.-Author and historian William H. Chafe will give a lecture titled “From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: Continuity and Change in the Black Struggle for Freedom” at Middlebury College on Friday, Oct. 10, at 8 p.m. Chafe is the Alice Mary Baldwin Distinguished Professor and the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Duke University. Chafe’s talk is Middlebury’s annual Charles S. Grant Memorial Lecture and will take place in Mead Chapel on Hepburn Road off College Street (Route 125). The lecture is free and open to the public.

Chafe has written nine books, and his professional scholarship reflects a longtime interest in issues of race and gender identity. His first book, “The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Political and Economic Roles 1920-1970,” appeared in 1972 and a substantially revised version, “The Paradox of Change,” was published in 1991. Chafe’s book on the origins of the sit-in movement, “Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom” (1980), received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. Other books by Chafe include “The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II,” which appeared in 1986 with the latest edition published in 2001. He is also the author of many articles.

Chafe has received fellowships from a number of organizations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. From 1998-1999, he served as president of the Organization of American Historians.

A former chair of the Duke University History Department, Chafe became vice provost for undergraduate education at Duke in 1999, a post he holds along with his deanship.

Chafe graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1962 and earned a doctorate in American history at Columbia in 1971, the year he began his career at Duke.

The Charles S. Grant Memorial Lecture

The late Charles S. Grant was a gifted and much loved teacher and esteemed scholar at Middlebury College in the 1950s until his untimely death in 1961. Shortly thereafter, several of his colleagues and friends in the Middlebury community formed a committee and created a fund that eventually became large enough to establish an annual lectureship in American history as a tribute to him. Many of the most prominent American historians of the past 35 years have delivered Grant lectures. Previous speakers range from David McCullough, author of the best-selling biography “John Adams,” to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who served from 1961-1963 as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy.

For more information, contact Travis Jacobs of the Middlebury College History Department at 802-443-5315.

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