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.

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