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Waking from the Dream: the Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King

Exaggerated accounts of urban violence after Martin Luther King’s assassination, David Chappell will argue, have long obscured national reactions of far greater significance. Most important was the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which had been hopelessly stalled in Congress since 1966.

Date & Time

Monday
Dec. 1, 2014
4:00pm – 5:30pm ET

Location

6th Floor, Woodrow Wilson Center
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Overview

Washington History Seminar
Historical Perspectives on International and National Affairs

Waking from the Dream: the Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King

David Chappell
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA

Exaggerated accounts of urban violence after Martin Luther King’s assassination, David Chappell will argue, have long obscured national reactions of far greater significance.  Most important was the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which had been hopelessly stalled in Congress since 1966.  Both opponents and supporters of the Act said its passage was a response to King’s murder. The Act banned discrimination in rentals, sales, and financing of private housing.  Though many at the time saw this as more radical than the previous Civil Rights laws of 1964 and 1965, the 1968 Act has been almost completely forgotten.  Properly understood, however, it represents the nation’s most significant response to King’s death, and the last serious response to the civil rights movement that King has come to symbolize.  It also defines the post-King era, when his legatees struggled on to eradicate the most intractable and fundamental forms of racial deprivation and degradation.

David Chappell has published three books: Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Johns Hopkins, 1994), which won a Gustavus Myers award for Outstanding Book on Human Rights in North America; A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill, 2004); and, most recently, Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King (Random House, 2014). Chappell's articles, essays, and reviews have been published in the New York Times, Washington PostChicago Tribune, Newsday, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle; the Nation On-Line, the World Policy JournalTempo Magazine (Rio de Janeiro),Sekai Magazine (Tokyo), In These TimesBooks and Culture, Beliefnet.com, The Bulletin of the Atomic ScientistsHistorically Speaking; The African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, The American Historical Review, The Journal of American History, The Journal of American Studies, The Journal of the Historical Society, the Journal of Southern History, and the African American Review. He teaches history at the University of Oklahoma.

Monday December 1, 2014
4:00 p.m. 
Woodrow Wilson Center, 6th Floor Moynihan Board Room
Ronald Reagan Building, Federal Triangle Metro Stop

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Speaker

David Chappell

University of Oklahoma
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Hosted By

History and Public Policy Program

The History and Public Policy Program makes public the primary source record of 20th and 21st century international history from repositories around the world, facilitates scholarship based on those records, and uses these materials to provide context for classroom, public, and policy debates on global affairs.  Read more

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