Black History Month

Black History Month

Miller Center events and exhibits to explore the African American experience

Featured Video

2023-01-19

Shining a light on the era of integration

Sharing their personal stories, journalist Jill Lawrence and psychologist Pamela Gipson Banks discuss the recent culture wars over how race is taught in public schools. As a teenager in the 1960s, Banks, an African American student from Jackson, Mississippi, attended Lawrence's white high school in Long Island, New York. Their conversation offers lessons from the past to help overcome the racial strife in our current politics.

Left

‘I did not get off the car’

In 1854, 100 years before Rosa Parks, a Black woman championed the end to segregated public transportation in New York City. A future president helped her.

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Miller Center events

Tulsa monument
Breaking silences: Lessons from Tulsa and Charlottesville

In May 2021, Joe Biden became the first president to officially commemorate the Tulsa Race Massacre, which happened exactly 100 years prior, when white mobs destroyed the all-Black Greenwood district.
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of freedom

January 24, 2020: David Blight discusses his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, a “breathtaking history that demonstrates the scope of Frederick Douglass’ influence”
Eric Holder as attorney general
American cauldron

February 15, 2017: As part of the Miller Center's First Year Project, a panel of high-profile experts gather at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library to discuss one of the nation's most challenging issues
Child feeling Barack Obama's head
Barack Obama and the burden of race

January 21, 2011: Thomas Sugrue, the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania discusses his book Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race

Featured Video

June 01, 2017

Race and the crisis of justice

In this 2017 documentary, the Miller Center looks at race, policing, and the criminal justice system through the lens of the presidency. Beginning with the 1964 shooting of an unarmed African American teenager in Philadelphia, the 12-minute film traces the decades-long history of federal policing and crime control policies across presidencies, and examines how "law-and-order" rhetoric has been used to justify violence against African Americans.