National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute

Co-directors: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Waldo E. Martin, Jr., and Patricia A. Sullivan

Email: NEHINST@fas.harvard.edu

Since 1995, the National Endowment for the Humanities has supported a summer institute at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute to teach educators the history of the Civil Rights Movement. The primary goals of the institute are to introduce the participants to the major scholarly works and developments related to this subject and to facilitate the development of teaching strategies and resources for introducing this history to a broad range of students.

The NEH Summer Institute of the year 2003 was titled "African American Struggles for Freedom and Civil Rights, 1865 to 1965." The 2003 Institute introduced college teachers to new and recent scholarship on this topic and aided in developing curriculum and teaching strategies for integrating African American history into American history curriculum and related areas of instruction. It was organized chronologically and topically into four major parts: Reconstruction; the Age of Jim Crow; the Civil Rights Struggles, World War I to the 1950s; The Civil Rights Years. As in the past, the Institute included leading scholars and writers in the fields of African American history, literature, music, and religion. Among the scholars who have participated in the NEH Summer Institutes are Leon Litwack, Eric Foner, Julian Bond, Barbara Savage, Cornel West, Peter Guralnick, Suzanne Smith, Gerald Early, Deborah McDowell, John Dittmer, and Raymond Gavins.