Every other year, the American Studies program at Leiden University invites distinguished speakers from the United States and Europe to participate in a lecture series on an American Studies topic. In Spring 2007, for thirteen weeks between February 6 and May 8, the American Studies Program of Leiden University offered a series of guest lectures by leading international scholars on the subject “The Civil Rights Movement, Fifty Years After.” 

The civil rights movement was the most influential campaign for racial equality in American history, and 1957 was a turning-point in that movement.  That year saw the organization by Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the passage by Congress of the first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction, and the crisis over school integration in Little Rock. This fifty-year retrospective aimed to re-examine the words, deeds, and ideas as well as legacies of the civil rights movement, a moral, religious, and political crusade whose achievements and failures exert an enduring influence not only on American society and culture, but also on the continuing struggle for racial equality in the rest of the world.

The speakers participated in the series included the following internationally acclaimed civil rights scholars and activists: the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Martin Luther King David J. Garrow, David Thelen (Indiana University), Jane Dailey (Johns Hopkins University), Manfred Berg (University of Heidelberg), John Kirk (University of London), Stephen Tuck (Oxford University), Barbara Ransby (University of Illinois at Chicago), Rafia Zafar (Washington University) and William Tuttle (University of Kansas). Lois Pot-Mothershed, sister of Thelma Mothershed, one of the Little Rock Nine, will also speak. Additionally, a number of films and documentaries on the civil rights movement were shown on video or DVD.