As part of our continued effort by Mississippi College to bring lived and scholarly expertise of the African American experience to the campus and the larger metro Jackson community, we have secured Dr. Crystal Sanders from Emory University as our 2024 African American Studies Lecture Series speaker. She is an associate professor of African American Studies and will share her award-winning research from her book A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle. Her work has earned many important recognitions, including—but not limited to—the 2017 Critics Choice Award and New Scholar’s Book Award from the American Educational Research Association, the C. Vann Woodward Prize from the Southern Historical Association, the Huggins-Quarles Award from the Organization of American Historians, the Equity Award from the American Historical Association, and the Willie D. Halsell article prize from the Mississippi Historical Society. Sanders explores how working-class Black women, in collaboration with the federal government, created the Child Development Group of MS in 1965, a Head Start program that not only gave poor Black children access to early childhood education but also provided black women with greater opportunities for political activism during a crucial time in the unfolding of the Civil Rights movement. Sanders traces the stories of 2,500 women who staffed such preschool centers.
Sanders’s lecture will serve as the keynote for our month-long theme in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Brown decision, ‘Something Better for My Children: Black Education in Slavery and Freedom.’
