Speaker: James H. Madison

For over two centuries Hoosiers have struggled with challenges of race. There were times when African American Hoosiers could not vote, when the danger of lynching was real, when the Ku Klux Klan seemed right and necessary, when segregationists created schools, restaurants, and basketball tournaments for whites only.  Beginning in the1950s, Indiana reformers began a push toward equality that we know as the great civil rights movement.

Professor Madison’s lecture will focus on several flash points of challenge and change to spark thinking about race and about where we have been, where we are, and where we want to go as citizens in a changing world.

James H. Madison is the Thomas and Kathryn Miller Professor Emeritus of History, at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is without doubt one of the most distinguished scholars to work in the field of Indiana History. An award winning teacher over four decades at IU, Jim is the author of several books, including Eli Lilly: A Life; A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America; and Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys: An American Woman in World War II. He has taught as a Fulbright Professor in Japan and England and has served on the boards of Indiana Humanities and the Indiana Historical Society, as well as being a member of the Indiana Bicentennial Commission.

Professor Madison’s most recent book is the highly acclaimed bicentennial history of our state - Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana; it is the basis for an Emmy-awarded PBS documentary on Indiana’s history.