The 31st annual Earlie E. Thorpe Memorial Lecture will stream online on Sunday, October 24, 2021, from 2 to 4 p.m. at https://www.youtube.com/c/ASALHTV. The lecture is sponsored by the NCCU Department of History and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. This year's speaker is Dr. Crystal Sanders, Associate Professor of History at Penn State University. In 2016, Dr. Sanders published the award-winning monograph, "A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle" (UNC Press). From 2019–2020, she was a fellow at the National Humanities Center. Her talk is titled "America’s Forgotten Migration: The Black Pursuit for Graduate Education During the Age of Jim Crow."
This annual lecture is given in honor of Dr. Earlie Endris Thorpe, who chaired the Department of History at North Carolina Central University from 1962 to 1973 and taught at NCCU for 27 years, until his death in 1989. An outstanding teacher and scholar, Dr. Thorpe published several seminal works of history, notably "The Mind of the Negro: An Intellectual History of Afro-Americans" (1961), "Black Historians: A Critique" (1971), and "The Old South: A Psychohistory" (1972).