MELANIE ANZIDEI
Staff Writer

On Wednesday, Nov. 4, Gary Darden, assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences and History, welcomed author Philip Dray to Fairleigh Dickinson University to speak about his work. The presentation, titled, “We Are Not Afraid: The American Civil Rights Struggle from Emancipation to Obama,” attracted a full house in Lenfell Hall.
Dray was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America,” which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. He grew up in Minnesota and has always been infatuated with history.
Dray is the author of several other books, including “Stealing God’s Thunder” and “Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen.”
In the 1970s, when Dray attended college, a new American studies interdisciplinary field was created. This field steered Dray towards his career.
Prior to the presentation, Dray signed copies of his book, “We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi,” during a reception in Hartman Lounge.
Dray began the presentation by discussing the difficulties for African Americans during slavery. Society progressed with the 13th Amendment, which freed slaves; the 14th Amendment, which allowed U.S. citizenship for those who were once slaves; and the 15th Amendment, which allowed black men to vote, as Dray put it.
This progression brought forth violence. And while this violence may have halted the pace of progression, it didn’t cease completely. Instead, it motivated students, both black and white, to begin protesting throughout the United States. A very popular form of protests were sit-ins at universities.
To Dray, the most significant act of progression was the Freedom Summer in Mississippi. The Freedom Summer was a campaign where the United States tried to register as many black voters as possible in the state, which at the time was very anti-segregation.
Through campaigns like the Freedom Summer, the nation’s mindset changed.
In our lifetime, we are witnesses to the first black president. To Dray, this may have been the significant step in our nation’s continuum of the civil rights movement.
“You will all remember where you were the day Obama was elected,” Darden said to the audience, which was mostly filled with students from his courses.
One of Darden’s students, a freshman at FDU, thought that “the lecture was a very informative discussion on the progression and struggles of the civil rights movement.”
Darden, who recently helped develop the new minor in African American Studies, advised the audience that anyone interested in Dray’s presentation that they could enroll in a new course, which will be available next semester.
Any students interested in Dray’s novels could also go to the library, where his books were recently added to the collection.