Topeka, Kan. – Dr. Koritha Mitchell is Washburn University’s 2020 Lincoln Harman speaker. She will give her lecture, "Homemade Citizenship: All But Inviting Injury,” at 7:00 p.m. in the Washburn Theater in the Garvey Fine Arts Building on the Washburn University campus. This event is free and open to the public.
This event is part of the on-going WUmester conversation of citizenship and suffrage.
“Even when they embody everything the nation claims to respect, African Americans cannot count on being treated like citizens,” said Dr. Kelly Erby, assistant dean of the Washburn University College of Arts and Sciences, associate professor of history and chair of the WUmester committee. “Simply consider the black soldiers and nurses who served in the Civil War, WWI and WWII only to be disfranchised and denigrated … or consider the Ivy League-educated constitutional lawyer who rose to the office of president only to face demands that he “show his papers,” his birth certificate and academic transcripts.”
Mitchell’s talk focuses on how African Americans seem to cling to all that purportedly makes one an ideal citizen, including the nuclear family and its traditional household, though their success will not likely bring them the safety and respectability it should. What does this pattern of investing against the odds reveal about African American culture? The short answer: homemade citizenship.
Mitchell is an associate professor of English at Ohio State University, a literary historian and a runner. She is an award-winning author, cultural critic, and professional development expert. Her study “Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890 -1930” won book awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. She is the editor of the Broadview edition of lola Leroy and author of the forthcoming book “From Slave Cabins to the White House” Her scholarly articles include “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie,” which appears in American Quarterly, and “Love in Action,” which draws parallels between racial violence at the last turn of the century and anti-LGBT violence today (published by Callaloo). In March 2014, Koritha spoke at the Library of Congress and received a Certificate of Congressional Recognition.
The Lincoln Harman Lecture Series is in its 32nd year at Washburn University. The lecture’s purpose is to “encourage individual and public interest in the ideals and integrity exemplified in the life of Abraham Lincoln,” as stated by Judge Jerome Harman, a 1935 graduate of the Washburn School of Law, when he and his wife created the lecture fund. Washburn was established as Lincoln College by a charter issued by the State of Kansas and the General Association of Congregational Ministers and Churches of Kansas on Feb. 6, 1865.
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