Hanes Walton Jr. Lecture

A great deal has been discussed about the different types and degrees of violence\discrimination directed against African Americans since they were brought to the United States. Unfortunately, the work on this topic has largely been fragmented. We thus have separate literatures on slavery, lynching, Jim Crow (old and new), police violence, disenfranchisement, incarceration, police violence and hate crimes. Despite suggestions that these are all manifestations of a singular underlying phenomenon, there is very little empirical effort directed toward testing such an idea. Drawn from a larger research project on the consequences of racial violence funded by the Research Council of Norway, the current talk explores whether and to what degree distinct forms of anti-Black human rights violations fit together in a coherent sense as well as how they vary across space and time. At the 2024 Hanes Walton Jr. lecture, Christian Davenport will present data that will not only shed much light on what was done to African Americans between the years 1860 and 2010 but will also facilitate systematic evaluations of when things began to get worse and better, what was the relative intensity of violations, how long did bad/good periods last, what are the legacies/consequences of anti-Black human rights violations as well as where efforts should be made to address PTSD, reconciliation and/or reparations. This effort will also assist in the creation of a grand accounting of what has taken place by allowing individuals throughout the United States to provide their stories and archival material regarding what they experienced.