From Melissa Forgey at the DeKalb History Center sends along the info for this month’s Lunch & Learn on Tuesday July 19th at noon…

The DeKalb History Center’s Lunch and Learn Lecture Series continues in July with a presentation by Professor Clifford Kuhn of Georgia State University.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Decatur resident Arthur Raper was one of the South’s leading liberals. Raper’s work as research secretary for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and as a founding member of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, his classic works on lynching and the plantation South, and his involvement with the New Deal have all been amply chronicled in the historical literature. However, from 1932 to 1939, Raper also taught sociology at Agnes Scott College, an experience largely neglected in the literature. An examination of Raper’s sometimes controversial tenure at Agnes Scott reveals an important yet forgotten dimension of his life, an experience he himself later referred to as perhaps his “finest hour.” It also sheds light on white women’s education of the period.

Professor Kuhn is a specialist in twentieth-century southern history and in oral history. His publications include Living Atlanta: An Oral History of the City, 1914-1948, Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta’s Fulton Mills and ‘There’s a Footnote to History! Memory and the History of Martin Luther King’s October 1960 Arrest, which appeared in the September 1997 issue of the Journal of American History. He also is the director of the Georgia Government Documentation Project, an archive and oral history project on the state’s political heritage. He was named a distinguished lecturer of the Organization of American Historians in 2003. He has also been involved with numerous oral and public history efforts, including the “Will the Circle be Unbroken” radio series on the civil rights movement, winner of the OHA’s 1997 media award and a Peabody award.

The lecture is Tuesday, July 19 at 12:00 noon at the Old Courthouse on the Square and is free of charge. Guests are encouraged to bring a lunch to eat during the program.