Thoreau Center Lunchtime Speaker: Mark Brilliant, UC Berkeley

The Color-Line Problem

Presenter: Mark Brilliant, Professor of History, U.C. Berkeley

Thursday, May 19, 12:30P to 1:30P

Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability, Presidio Building 1014


Join us for an engaging discussion about the history of race and civil rights reform in California. This talk presents an overview of Mark Brilliant's book, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941-1978.

The book taps California’s civil rights history to reveal how the Civil Rights Era was truly a nationwide and multiracial phenomenon. Brilliant examines how California’s multiple “race problems” shaped and complicated the multifaceted efforts of civil rights reformers. While civil rights historians have long set their sights on the South and, more recently, turned their attention to the North, advancing a “long civil rights movement” interpretation, The Color of America Has Changed calls for a new understanding of civil rights history that more fully reflects the racial diversity and accompanying civil rights complexity of America - a civil rights history that is as "wide" as it is "long." Mark Brilliant is Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley.

Events are free informal mid-day learning sessions hosted at Tides. Friends, neighbors and colleagues are welcome. Visitors, please sign in at the front desk.

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