Benjamin Mays biographer Randal Maurice Jelks.

Benjamin E. Mays was a civil rights theorist, educator, preacher, Morehouse College president and mentor to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Mays was also one of Bates College’s most influential graduates, a member of the class of 1920. The college presents award-winning Mays biographer Randal Maurice Jelks, a member of the University of Kansas faculty, in a talk at 7 p.m. Monday, March 25, in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St.

Sponsored by the college’s Office of Intercultural Education, the lecture is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-8376.

Jelks is the author of Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), the first full-length biography of the man King called his “spiritual and intellectual father.”

In recognition of Schoolmaster of the Movement, Jelks recently received the 2013 Literary Award for Nonfiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, one of several awards with which the organization salutes excellence in works by African-American authors.

Mays was born in 1894 to sharecroppers in rural South Carolina. His first memory was of a white mob threatening his father. From an early age, Mays was determined both to get the best education and to break the grip of Jim Crow laws on the South.

In 1917, he entered Bates as a 23-year-old sophomore after a year at Virginia Union University, where two Bates alumni on the faculty encouraged him to try their alma mater. He came to Lewiston not only for a better education than a person of color could reasonably expect down South, but to prove his intellectual equality to whites.

Proof abounded. Mays won a speaking award in his first year at Bates, finished his senior year as captain of a triumphant debate team and was one of 15 in his class to graduate with honors, among other achievements.

Central to Schoolmaster of the Movement is Jelks’ argument that by connecting the substance of Christianity with the responsibility to challenge injustice, Mays prepared the black church for its central role in the civil rights movement.

And it was at Bates, Jelks writes, that Mays laid the groundwork for “a new biblical interpretation that could mobilize black communities to take action against Jim Crow’s enforced apathy.” Mays’ studies in religion steered him toward an intellectual structure for both his Baptist faith and his personal mission “to uplift his people,” in Jelks’ words.

Mays and Bates had a profound and enduring effect on each other. As Mays famously summed up his experience in Born to Rebel: “Bates College did not ‘emancipate’ me: it did the far greater service of making it possible for me to emancipate myself, to accept with dignity my own worth as a free man.”

Those words are echoed in the college’s mission statement, which begins: “Since 1855, Bates College has been dedicated to the emancipating potential of the liberal arts.” Mays exemplifies commitments to social justice, individual worth and access to education that have always been bedrock values for Bates.

Jelks is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Kansas, with a joint appointment in African and African American studies. He is co-editor of the journal American Studies and a co-founder and editor of the Michigan-based blog theblackbottom.com, which covers politics, culture and social activism.

He received a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Michigan, a master’s of divinity from McCormick Theological Seminary and a doctorate in comparative black histories from Michigan State University. He is an ordained clergyman in the Presbyterian Church.

Jelks also wrote the award-winning African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids (University of Illinois Press, 2006).

“Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome” author Joy DeGruy.

The Feb. 11 talk by Joy DeGruy, author of a book about the residual impacts of slavery on African Americans, was canceled. Please watch bates.edu/events for information about a new date for DeGruy.

Presented by the Office of Intercultural Education at Bates, the lecture is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-8376.

An internationally renowned researcher, educator and presenter, DeGruy is the author of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (Uptone Books, 2005). The book addresses the consequences of generations of slavery and invites a discussion of how the black community can use strengths gained in the past to heal in the present.

The book incorporates DeGruy’s research in America and Africa, as well as her years of experience as a social work practitioner and consultant to public and private organizations.

Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome is a theory that explains the causes of adaptive survival behaviors in African American communities throughout the United States and the African diaspora. It is a result of multigenerational trauma with continued oppression and the absence of opportunity to heal or access the benefits widely available in society.

Susan Taylor, a former editorial director and editor-in-chief of Essence Magazine, called DeGruy’s book “a master work.  . . . the balm we need to heal ourselves and our relationships. It is the gift of wholeness.”

DeGruy has more than 25 years of practical experience as a professional in the field of social work. She conducts workshops and trainings in the areas of mental health, social justice and culture-specific social service model development.

She holds a bachelor of science degree in communication, master’s degrees in social work and clinical psychology, and a doctorate in social work research. She is on the sociology faculty at Portland State University and is president of JDP Inc.

Martin Luther King Jr. is shown at the White House after meeting with President Lyndon Johnson to discuss civil rights, 1963. Photograph by Warren K. Leffler/U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Spotlighting a less-known aspect of the work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Bates College will dedicate its Jan. 20-21 King Day programming to exploring issues of financial inequality and debt.

The theme of the observances is Debt and Inequality: The Relevance of King’s Forgotten Economic Message.

Never out of date, the question of financial inequality is especially pertinent now, given a national election season and “fiscal cliff” debate in which issues of economic fairness have been central.

Anthea Butler, associate professor of religious studies and African American studies at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a sermon and the keynote address at Bates’ Martin Luther King Jr. Day observances. Photograph by Byron Maldonado.

Taking place Sunday and Monday, Jan. 20-21, Bates’ programming features films; workshops; two addresses by Anthea Butler, a theologian whose forthcoming book explores the connection between Sarah Palin’s politics and her religion; and performances including one by the Bates student group Sankofa.

Sunday’s events include documentary films examining issues of corporate power and civil rights history, as well as the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Service, featuring a sermon by Butler titled God and the 99 Percent.

On Monday the college presents Martin Luther King Jr. and America’s Bad Check: America’s Poor in the 21st Century, Butler’s keynote address; a debate between Bates and Morehouse College students; a play; workshops; and the Sankofa event.

• See a complete schedule of King Day programming at Bates.
• See a video about the creation of Sankofa’s 2013 performance.
• Learn more about Anthea Butler.
• Learn more about Sankofa.
  

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All King Day events are open to the public at no cost, but a few do require tickets for admission; see the complete schedule for details. For more information, please call 207-786-6400.

In selecting this year’s theme, “we wanted to call attention to the fact that the Rev. Dr. King’s vision included economic justice,” explains Charles Nero, chair of the college’s King Day committee and a professor of rhetoric and American cultural studies.

“The people hit hard in the Great Recession have been middle- and working-class folks, the poor and people without substantial assets, such as students.”

The 2012 Sankofa performance at Bates. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

King, who at the time of his assassination was planning a “Poor People’s Campaign” that would march on Washington, D.C., had a clear view of the interrelatedness of poverty and injustice.

But, as Colleen O’Connor wrote in the Denver Post in January 2012, “Many never learned about King’s crusade for a guaranteed annual income or have forgotten he was assassinated while supporting the working poor — sanitation workers on strike [in Memphis] because of low wages and dangerous working conditions.”

For the public at large, King Day at Bates will provide “the opportunity to see a college community engage with a major social issue of our time,” says Nero.

“Our keynote speaker, Dr. Butler, will challenge us in new ways to recommit ourselves to King’s vision of economic justice. Our debate with Morehouse College addresses the issue of the role the government should play in reducing poverty.” And the films and workshops, as well as Aaron Calafato’s play about student loan debt, will address myriad dimensions of financial justice in the U.S. and abroad.

Marshall Ganz, senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Marshall Ganz, an expert in public policy at Harvard, discusses the leadership of social movements in the annual Andrews Lecture at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 14, in the Gomes Chapel, 275 College St.

Admission is open to the public at no cost. For more information please call 207-786-8272 or email lthomps2@bates.edu.

Ganz’s talk is titled Leading Change: Story, Strategy, Action. The Andrews Lecture is sponsored by the Multifaith Chaplaincy, the Office of Intercultural Education, the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the college’s social sciences division and the departments of politics, history and education.

Ganz, senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has nearly 50 years of experience with the craft of leading social movements. He teaches, researches and writes on leadership, organization and strategy in social movements, civic associations and politics.

Ganz entered Harvard College in the fall of 1960, and in 1964, a year before graduating, he left to volunteer as a civil rights organizer in Mississippi. In 1965, he joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. Over the next 16 years he gained experience in union, community, issue and political organizing, and ultimately became director of organizing.

During the 1980s, Ganz worked with grassroots groups to develop effective organizing programs, designing innovative voter mobilization strategies for electoral campaigns at every level.

In 1991, in order to deepen his understanding of his work, he returned to Harvard and, after a 28-year “leave of absence,” completed his undergraduate degree in history and government. He received a master’s degree in public administration from the Kennedy School in 1993 and completed his doctorate in sociology in 2000.

A signature talk at Bates since 1975, the Bertha May Bell Andrews Lecture commemorates Andrews, who served on the Bates faculty from 1913 to 1917 and created the women’s physical education program at the college. Her son, Dr. Carl B. Andrews, of the Bates class of 1940, established the lectureship.

U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins arrives at the White House for a Cabinet meeting in September 1938. Photograph by Harris & Ewing/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Laura Fortman, executive director of the Frances Perkins Center and Maine’s former commissioner of labor, gives a lecture titled Frances Perkins: New Deal Legacy and Lessons for Today at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 10, in the Benjamin Mays Center at Bates, 95 Russell St.

This lecture is the autumn’s fifth Civic Forum Series event, presented by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the Bates office responsible for the college’s community-based learning, environmental stewardship and volunteer programs. The talk is open to the public at no cost. For more information, call 207-786-8283.

Perkins, the nation’s first secretary of labor and the first female Cabinet member, is credited as the architect of much of President Franklin Roosevelt’s most significant New Deal legislation. She proposed and helped implement major reforms dealing with labor and working conditions that we take for granted today, such as child labor laws and workplace safety laws. She is also the “mother” of Social Security.

Perkins was the daughter of Maine-born parents, and the family residence, the so-called Brick House on the Damariscotta River in Newcastle, was her beloved vacation retreat. Today the house is the site of the Frances Perkins Center, dedicated to the history of Perkins’ career and the New Deal era, to carrying on her work and to interpreting her vision for a healthy and productive workforce.

Fortman served as Maine labor commissioner in the Baldacci administration from 2003-2010, administering the very laws and regulations protecting Maine workers that Perkins set in place. Fortman, who became the Perkins Center’s second director in October 2011, will focus her Bates talk on Perkins’ enduring legacy and its relevance to the United States today and to this November’s election.

Pat Webber, newly appointed director of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, poses in Riverside Cemetery near campus, where he leads an annual Bates history tour. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

For Pat Webber, becoming director of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library at Bates was in the cards.

As a boy, Webber recalls taking out his baseball card collection and scatter the dog-eared cards on the floor and sort them by the players’ last names.

Then he’d scatter the cards again, and sort them by team. And scatter again, and sort yet another way.

“I should’ve realized when I was 8 that I was going to be an archivist,” says Webber.

The college archivist since 2006, Webber was the Muskie Archives’ acting director this past academic year following the departure of Kat Stefko for a post at Duke University.

Gene Wiemers, vice president for information and library services and college librarian, says that Webber’s appointment, following a national search, “reflects well on his training and experience. The Bates archives operations require archivists who are both innovative and committed to the user. Pat embodies and builds on this tradition.”

Wiemers adds that Webber is “an expert on Bates and Muskie history, and he has played a key role in promoting the use of the archives and special collections among students, faculty, staff and the general public.”

Webber came to Bates from the Special Collections Research Center of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C., where he earned a master’s in public history in 2003. He earned a master’s in history from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2001 and bachelor’s from the College of William & Mary in 1988.

In May 1980, Edmund Muskie ’36 is sworn in as secretary of state under President Carter (left) by Frank Coffin ’40 (right), chief judge of the 1st Circuit. Also looking on are his daughter Ellen Muskie Allen (second from left) and wife Jane Muskie (second from right). Photograph by Bill Fitzpatrick/White House, courtesy of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

As its name suggests, the archives’ centerpiece collection is the papers of Ed Muskie, 1936 Bates alumnus, U.S. senator, vice presidential and presidential candidate and secretary of state.

“For almost every issue of national importance during his time, you’re going to find some information in the Muskie Collection,” Webber says.

The archives has two other identities: It’s the official repository for college records (this was Webber’s area of focus prior to his appointment as director), and it also holds a diverse collection of rare books, oral histories, photographs and films, manuscript collections and other items.

Among the recently processed collections generating interest are the papers of Professor of Chemistry Walter Lawrance. As the state-appointed “river master” of the Androscoggin River from 1947 to 1978, he had legal power to control the amount of pollution discharged into the river by the three major paper mills located along it.

Much of the Lawrance collection is now available online thanks to digitizing efforts by environmental studies faculty and students working with the archives.

The papers of Bates chemistry professor and Androscoggin “river master” Walter Lawrance (right, in 1949) are now online. Photo courtesy of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

And as his card-collecting past suggests, Webber’s mission is to keep this complex collection of Bates history preserved, sensibly organized and accessible to today’s academic community.

For Webber and the archives staff, “accessible” has a proactive meaning.

Webber has taught or co-taught the history Short Term course “Introduction to Archives and Archival Science,” and he leads a popular tour of nearby Riverside Cemetery, the resting place of many early Bates leaders and professors.

“Every cemetery plot tells a story,” he says. “Language professor Benjamin Hayes and science professor Richard Stanley served Bates for a combined 64 years in the 1800s. Their friendship was likely very strong: Their families share a single plot.”

Webber says it’s important for the archives to keep one foot in the past and one in the present.

For example, students and professors who are curious about Bates’ inclusive history are always captivated by the college’s 1950s-era enrollment and career publications: one version for men and one for women.

“But they don’t just want to look at, say, When a Girl Goes to Bates in historical context,” Webber says. “They want to go beyond that and ask, ‘What does this say about Bates today?’ We’ve been inclusive for 150-plus years, but how has that really played out?”

The women’s dining room in Rand Hall, circa 1920. The archives supports faculty and students looking at how Bates’ inclusive ideals have played out in reality. Photograph courtesy of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

Webber recalls how Professor of History Margaret Creighton and her students took on that question. For her course “A Woman’s Place,” examining gender and geography in the U.S. from 1800 to today, students looked at dining at Bates, which was not coeducational until the 1960s.

From looking at historical materials, including articles in The Bates Student, “the project morphed from ‘Here’s where women used to eat, and here’s where men used to eat,’ into a discussion of the culture of Bates dining today, the politics of who sits where and that sort of thing,” Webber says.

Early in his career, Webber did archeological fieldwork, then worked in the geotechnical services field in the construction industry for nearly a decade. Then he switched to archival work. “I’ve gone from archeology to geology to archives, so at least I’m getting more modern,” he jokes.

Students in the Short Term course "Making African American History: Preserving the Archives of the Portland NAACP" examine documents during a work session at the University of Southern Maine. From left: Joncarl Hersey '12, Tasheana Dukuly '€™12, professor Mollie Godfrey, Munroe Graham '€™13, Brad Reynolds '€™14. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

A placard inviting people to join the NAACP chapter in Portland, Maine.

A letter from NAACP leadership decrying the city government’s silence after a racially motivated assault in Portland.

A photograph of Coretta Scott King with U.S. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Hillary Clinton taken at the Portland chapter’s 40th anniversary celebration, in 2004.

These are among the papers of the NAACP’s branch in Portland, Maine — documents that, thanks to a two-year collaboration among the association, the University of Southern Maine and Bates, are being made accessible to researchers and the public for the first time.

The exhibition Making African American History: The Maine NAACP Collection, 1987-2012 shows through June 8 at the Glickman Library, sixth floor, University of Southern Maine, Portland campus.

Stored for years at the home and office of NAACP President Rachel Talbot Ross, the materials have been processed and arranged for archival storage by students in Bates Short Term courses in 2011 and 2012. While there is still work to be done with the materials, they now constitute the Maine NAACP Collection at the University of Southern Maine — whose Glickman Library, at the Portland campus, is showing highlights from the collection through June 8 in an exhibition curated by the Bates students.

Membership cards and informational materials from the Maine NAACP Collection, shown while Bates students were processing the documents for archival storage. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

The NAACP project was the brainchild of Mollie Godfrey, visiting assistant professor of English at Bates and an authority in African American literature and politics of the Jim Crow period. It was a collaborative effort involving not only Susie Bock, head of special collections at USM and director of the university’s Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, but staff at Bates’ own Edmund S. Muskie Archives, who trained the students in working with archival materials.

They ended up going through 20 boxes of papers, photographs, videotapes and so forth documenting about two decades of NAACP activities in Maine’s largest city, starting in 1987.

Like the countless bits of ceramic that make up a mosaic, such materials are among the constituent parts of what we understand as history. And what story can someone draw from the Portland NAACP collection about the African American presence in Maine?

The biggest lesson, as Ross points out, may be simply that such a presence even exists. “A lot of the secondary sources Mollie had us read, before going to the archives at USM, were saying that African Americans don’t exist in Maine,” the whitest state in the union, says Munroe Graham ’13, a history and politics double major who was one of the nine students in Godfrey’s Short Term course this year.

“But you look at these materials and you see that there was huge attendance at these events held by the NAACP, or that there were protests and articles in the newspaper every day. It’s completely different from how people perceive African American history in Maine.” And now researchers will be better equipped to change that perception.

From the academic standpoint, the project gave the students an opportunity to satisfy the history faculty’s eternal cry of “primary sources!” Sam Wood ’12, a history major from Waterville, Maine, found himself relishing the opportunity to get his hands on the NAACP materials.

Jamilia Davis '15 and professor Mollie Godfrey look at a file of NAACP documents. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

“It’s a very different kind of research than, you know, what you’re most exposed to in college,” says Wood. “You feel like you’re actually discovering things, as opposed to being told what was discovered. It makes it just that much more fun and exciting.

“When you’re actually digging through the archives, you’re eager to find the next thing,” he says. “You’re trying to make sense of it and place it in context, and it’s a much more active process” — all the more so because of the detective work that’s part of piecing together a bigger picture from scraps of information.

“It poses a lot of challenges, because a lot of the time the context isn’t given, or these documents could be misfiled or you don’t know what these notes are referring to. So it’s difficult, but it requires more investigation and, I think, is much more rewarding and fun.”

“I think the students can see, more than they might have before, really how ambiguous and unshaped history is, and the kind of work that historians have to do to make sense of it,” says Godfrey.

“By the end of the course they were actually able to see a history just by arranging the material that they had not been able to see at the beginning.”

If raising awareness of Maine’s African American community is one goal of this archival project, another is to raise awareness, among that community, of the value of archival preservation.

Munroe Graham '€™13, a member of the 2012 Short Term class "Making African American History: Preserving the Archives of the Portland NAACP," looks at an Martin Luther King Jr. Day event program during a work session at the University of Southern Maine. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Ross is acutely cognizant of that worth: She’s a daughter of Gerald Talbot, Maine’s first African American legislator and the first president of the current Portland chapter of the NAACP. His papers constituted the first donation to the African American Collection of Maine at USM’s Sampson Center, to which the Maine NAACP Collection also belongs. (A pioneer of civil rights in Maine, Jean Byers Sampson was married to longtime Bates math professor Richard Sampson.)

And Ross knows that, as so often happens with members of grassroots organizations, many NAACP people in Maine have — as she did until recently — valuable documents sitting in their houses gathering dust.

“We want them to understand that their contribution is so meaningful,” she says. “If they donate these materials, we can acknowledge that, and it’s for the betterment of the organization and then the public.

“To have your history be visible, particularly African American history, civil rights history in Maine, that has a real value,” she adds. “This feels like a rarity, and it feels like an amazing statement.”

Melinda Plastas, visiting associate professor of women and gender studies. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Offering new insights into the complex currents of racial politics between the world wars, A Band of Noble Women: Racial Politics in the Women’s Peace Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2011) is an engaging, surprising exploration of the convergence of two progressive forces: the women’s peace movement and the black women’s social reform and racial justice movement.

Plastas, visiting associate professor of women and gender studies at Bates, uses portraits of movement leaders and case histories of their work — such as a multi-year effort to pass federal anti-lynching legislation and a 1926 investigation of the U.S. occupation of Haiti — to illustrate the tangled difficulties of working for social change.

In the tumultuous years after World War I, white and black female advocates for peace and racial justice realized that ending war must also entail an end to institutionalized racism. “They were committed to a social justice approach that says, you can’t just look at one issue,” explains Plastas, who has taught at Bates since 2005. “You need to look at systems of power.”

Or, in the words of African American social reformer Addie Hutton, one of the leaders Plastas profiles, “There can be no world peace without right local relations.”

At the heart of Noble Women is the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which between the world wars became a widely influential peace organization. Half a century after the events described in her book, Plastas herself worked for WILPF, first as an intern, later as an employee, rising to the rank of national program director.

That experience launched her toward the research represented in the book, Plastas’ first. “I hope the book will show that the way race works is really complex,” she says. “I tried to convey a sense of the different planes on which race was at work — the ways it shapes intellectual thought, domestic and international politics, who has access to which institutions.”

Even as white and black women began collaborating within WILPF, prejudice among some white leaders left black activists sidelined. In fact, black women in this early and formative phase of the long civil rights movement often found themselves doubly marginalized, as the black men leading a newly assertive civil rights movement also discounted their contributions and capabilities.

“They came from an era in which black women’s reform work was central to black resistance politics,” says Plastas. But after the war, “black masculinity became a symbol of resistance and white feminist internationalism became a symbol of resistance” — leaving black women “astutely aware of how the ground shifted between these two populations, populations that they wanted to be allies with.

“I was really compelled by that.”

The hopes and frustrations of black women like Hunton and Alice Dunbar-Nelson become clear as Plastas profiles them and four other leaders — in total, three white and three black. The profiles create telling contrasts among the motivations, resources and methods of such influential figures as Hunton and white racial justice advocate Emily Greene Balch, the second woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize (the first being WILPF founder Jane Addams).

For Plastas, researching the book was a way of comprehending the roots of a compelling life interest. As an undergraduate at Ohio Wesleyan University, she majored in political science and social welfare and minored in women’s studies. “As a budding young feminist, I was really interested in how race and racism functioned in women’s movements,” she says.

WILPF, still robust in the 1980s, gave Plastas hands-on involvement in social justice advocacy. “Not just in its mission statement, but through its actions on the ground, it was WILPF that really allowed me to understand how all these issues are connected.”

Her projects, reflecting progressive flashpoints of the time, included campaigns to end the arms race, South African apartheid and militarism in Central America. All the while, she says, “I was reading and discussing with WILPF members the writings of people like anti-racism and prison activist Angela Davis.”

Plastas adds, “The other thing that sparked my imagination and confidence was the fact that the WILPF leaders, primarily much older women, really listened to me, a young twenty-something.” One of those leaders, by then in her 90s, was Mildred Scott Olmstead, whose efforts to initiate interracial peace committees are described in Plastas’ book.

“She listened to me and cared about what I, and other young staff and volunteers, thought about contemporary politics and strategy.”

Eben Miller '96 is the author of "Born Along the Color Line: The 1933 Amenia Conference and the Rise of a National Civil Rights Movement" (Oxford University Press, 2012).

A Bates honors history major whose thesis explored African American protest history in Maine, Miller tells Routhier that the idea for the book was sparked by seeing a photo of attendees at an NAACP conference at Amenia, N.Y., when the organization was at a crossroads.

By the 1930s, the NAACP was in “dire straits,” Miller explains. “It was during the Great Depression, and funding was drying up. Local branches were fizzling out, and the early guard of founders were aging, passing away.

“There was a sense that the NAACP’s traditional outlook of using litigation and legislation wasn’t capturing young people’s attention.”

Still, that early focus on litigation created a “structure later advocates would build on,” Miller says. The founding generation “also was concerned about a lesser-known theme at the time that [Martin Luther King Jr.] would pick up on later, that of economic equality.”

“It is hard to imagine writing this book without his influence.”

Miller, who teaches history at Southern Maine Community College, earned a Ph.D. at Brandeis University.

In the book’s acknowledgements, he thanks his adviser, Bates history professor Hilmar Jensen, noting that Jensen’s Bates seminar “Prelude to the Civil Rights Movement” inspired Miller to explore this era.

“It is hard to imagine writing this book without his influence,” Miller writes.

• View story from The Portland Press Herald, Feb. 26, 2012.

Thomas Shapiro of Brandeis University.

A Brandeis University expert on public policy and racial inequality, Thomas M. Shapiro speaks on the racial wealth gap at 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 11, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road.

Shapiro’s talk is part of the 10th annual Unity Conference presented by Amandla!, a student organization that advances understanding of the many communities of the African diaspora. The lecture is open to the public at no cost.

The conference’s theme this year is Economic Diversity: What Color Is Your Money? Understanding Economic Inequality and the Racial Wealth Gap. The event is co-sponsored by the Office of the President, the departments of economics and politics, and the social sciences division. A discussion and Q&A follow Shapiro’s talk.

Shapiro directs the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis, and is the Pokross Professor of Law and Social Policy at the university’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. His research focus is the relationship between assets and the racial wealth gap.

His book The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2004) combined national data with nearly 200 interviews to explore how continuing discrimination and the pervasive lack of financial assets dramatically impact the lives of many black families.

The book was widely reviewed, including by The Washington Post, Boston Globe and other major news organizations. Hidden Cost was named a Notable Book of 2004 by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

With Melvin Oliver of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Shapiro co-authored the acclaimed Black Wealth/White Wealth (Routledge, 1997). That book demonstrates how, over generations, blacks have had difficulty creating, expanding and preserving assets compared to their white counterparts. Analyzing quantitative data from more than 12,000 households, the authors illustrate the relationship between racialized wealth resources and opportunities for a better life.

The book revealed “for the first time the full economic damage caused by the special difficulties that blacks face,” wrote the New York Review of Books. “These facts need to be publicized so that white Americans can be made aware of the extent to which the civil rights movement of the 1960s failed to achieve its goal of fairness for blacks.”