In recognition of the centennial of the 19th amendment, join us on Zoom or live on Facebook as we reckon with the complicated legacy of the women's suffrage movement. The panel will explore the history and current state of the women’s movement in the U.S., the intersections of race and class with gender, and the future of feminist activism and research.

Sponsorship: This program is sponsored by the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice with support from a NC CARES: Humanities Relief Grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council, www.nchumanities.org. Funding for NC CARES has been provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act economic stabilization plan.

The panelists include:

Representative Vernetta Alston represents North Carolina’s 29th District in the NC House and is a former Durham City Councilor. In her time as an attorney, she has worked with the Racial Justice Act Studies and the North Carolina Center for Death Penalty Litigation. Her accomplishments include helping exonerate a client who was, at the time, the longest-serving death row inmate in North Carolina. Vernetta is married to her wife, Courtney, and the two have a daughter, Reese.

Rep. Vernetta Alston

Kendra Johnson

Kendra Johnson holds a B.A. in History from Spelman College and a Master’s in Public Administration from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.  Since returning to the nonprofit sector after a 13 year hiatus,,  Kendra has served as the Interim Executive Director of Women’s Project, Community Outreach coordinator for LA Corp,  the Lead In-Person Assister Guide at Better Community Development during the rollout of the Affordable Care Act and the State Director for Human Rights Campaign Arkansas. She previously worked in bilingual communications in Brazil for 14 years as a writer, editor and translator at that country’s top financial newspapers.

She is a native of Little Rock, Arkansas. Kendra has been a lifelong volunteer and activist, including founding the first lesbian/bi-sexual support group at Spelman College in the 90s.

Adriane D. Lentz-Smith

Adriane D. Lentz-Smith is Associate Professor of History and African & African-American Studies at Duke University where she teaches courses on the Black freedom struggle, the 20th-century United States, and history in fiction and fact. A scholar of African American and modern U. S. history, she is the author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Harvard, 2009). She currently is writing a book, entitled The Slow Death of Sagon Penn: State Violence and the Twilight of Civil Rights on Black lives and the remaking of white supremacy in the Reagan Era.

Lentz-Smith holds a B.A. in History from Harvard-Radcliffe and a Ph.D. in History from Yale University. She lives in Durham, North Carolina with her family.

Dr. Michele Tracy Berger

Michele Tracy Berger is Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her research, teaching, and practice all focus on intersectional approaches to studying areas of inequality, especially racial and gender health disparities. This work spans the fields of public health, sociology and women's and gender studies.

Her books include Workable Sisterhood: The Political Journey of Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS (Princeton University Press, 2004), the co-edited collections Gaining Access: A Practical and Theoretical Guide for Qualitative Researchers (Altamira Press, 2003) and The Intersectional Approach:  Transforming the Academy Through Race, Class and Gender (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) and the co-authored Transforming Scholarship: Why Women’s and Gender Studies Students Are Changing Themselves and the World (Routledge 2011, 2014). Black Women's Health: Paths to Wellness for Mothers and Daughters will be published in 2021 by NYU Press.

She is a sought after public speaker and commentator. Her public scholarship has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Ms. Magazine, The Feminist Wire and other media outlets. She is currently co-chair of the Ms. Scholars Board.

Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner

A founder of one the first college-level women’s studies programs in the United States (CSU Sacramento), Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner received one of the first doctorates in the country for work in women’s studies (UC Santa Cruz) and has taught women’s studies for 50 years. Founder and Executive Director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, she teaches in the Honors Program at Syracuse University, She was selected as one of “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” by Women’s E-News in 2015 and serves on the New York Suffrage Centennial Commission.