November 18th, Faculty Club
12pm
Led by Martin Schiesl, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, California State University, Los Angeles
The final Bancroft Round Table of the Fall Semester will take place on Thursday, November 18 at noon in the Lewis-Latimer Room of the Faculty Club. Martin Schiesl, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, California State University, Los Angeles, will give a talk entitled “Attacking Municipal Inequality: The NAACP and the Integration of the Oakland Fire Department, 1950 – 1955.”
Historians have generally considered Civil Rights as an issue from 1954, with the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and focused on the South and to some extent the urban areas of the Northeast. California, which looms so large in contemporary affairs, has been relatively neglected. Professor Schiesl has worked on racial issues in the Post-World War II era. He is writing a book on the NAACP in California in the years from 1930 to 1970. His examination of Oakland’s Fire Department and the effort to integrate it will serve to illuminate much about the overall dynamics of race relations in California during these critical early years. The Civil Rights movement in California, beyond its importance to the African-American community, was ultimately one of the most important factors in producing the culture out of which the Mississippi summer and the Free Speech movement would grow.
The campus community is invited to join us at this informal noontime event and learn more about this signal moment in the history of the East Bay. We also invite everyone to walk over to the Main Library after the talk to view the current display in the Brown Gallery, “Born of Struggle: 40 Years of African American Studies at UC Berkeley,” which includes many items from the Bancroft. Bancroft Round Tables aim to bring attention to the many and varied collections of our Library.
