2019 Topic: What Happened to the NAACP?
Biography:
Jim Ralph is the Rehnquist Professor of American History and Culture and has taught in the History Department since 1989. He specializes in American History, particularly the Civil Rights Movement. Jim is also the Dean for Faculty Development and Research and the director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research.
Jim is the author of Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (1993).
He is a co-editor of, and contributor to The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016). This book has recently been released in paperback. For an excerpt from this book in The Chicago Reporter see http://chicagoreporter.com/the-roots-of-the-chicago-freedom-movement/. And for a recent story about the Chicago Freedom Movement and this book, see http://time.com/5096937/martin-luther-king-jr-picture-chicago/?iid=sr-link1.
Jim is also at work on a history of the struggle for racial equality from the 1840s to the present in Peoria, Illinois. For a story on this project, see http://www.pjstar.com/article/20150921/NEWS/150929894/0/SEARCH
His most recent publications include a foreword to Robert McKersie’s memoir of his involvement in the Chicago civil rights movement, A Decisive Decade: An Insider’s View of the Chicago Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s (2013), a chapter “Black Church Divisions and Civil Rights Activism in Chicago,” in R. Drew Smith, ed., From Every Mountainside: Black Churches and the Broad Terrain of Civil Rights (2013), and a foreword to Martin Deppe’s Operation Breadbasket: An Untold Story of Civil Rights in Chicago, 1966-1971 (2017).