JSU Center for University Scholars

The Center for University Scholars hosted its Fifth Annual University Scholars Symposium. This symposium featured the inaugural Matthew Holden, Jr. Symposium Lecture. (Holden is the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Virginia. A Mississippi native, he is a nationally-recognized expert in the fields of public administration, executive power and regulatory politics. Holden has served as president of the American Political Science Association and as commissioner of the Federal Regulatory Commission. Matthew Holden, Jr. and Dorothy Holden donated nearly 4,000 books to the university, which are housed in a reading room named for them.)

The inaugural speaker for the Matthew Holden, Jr. Symposium Lecture was Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of History and Political Science at Columbia University. He has written extensively about racial and ethnic relations, urban politics and political theory. Like Holden, he has served as president of the American Political Science Association. He also has been president of the Social Science History Association and chair of the Russell Sage Foundation Board of Trustees. His talk wove together themes and research questions from his most recent book, When Affirmative Action Was White, and his current research project examining the impact of Southern dominance of the US Congress on domestic and foreign policy.

In 1935, three-quarters of a century after the end of slavery and in the midst of a pletora of federal programs to goose the economy, DuBois worried that African-Americans faced the most pivotal and dangerous point of their sojourn in the country. Katznelson wonders why DuBois saw this as the pivotal point for African-Americans. He postulates that DuBois noticed that the growth of federal policies that would fuel the growth of an American middle class were consistently being closed off to blacks. Prerogatives dealing with the enforcement of the GI Bill were left to states who sought to constrain the opportunities they afforded blacks. Domestics and farm workers--the typical jobs held by Southern blacks--were excluded from Social Security and other New Deal programs.

Due to their voting strength and their seniority, Southern Democrats exercised a de facto congressional veto against fully including African-Americans in these opportunities. Ira Katznelson calls this the "Southern cage" and is interested in exploring how this influenced not only domestic policies directly impacting African-Americans, but other domestic policies and foreign policy. Understanding this Southern cage requires rethinking conventional research questions and data sources. Katznelson suggests creating a roll call database on 80 issues to discern the issues on which Southern congressmen tended to vote as a bloc. More importantly, it requires academics and policymakers to go beyond slavery in thinking about historic obstacles to African-American opportunities.

Photos from the Symposium