From: Phil deHaan (dehp@calvin.edu)
Date: Mon Aug 25 2003 - 10:25:08 EDT
August 25, 2003 == MEDIA ADVISORY
The 40th anniversary of a pivotal point in the Civil Rights movement is
drawing near.
On August 28, 1963 the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom brought more
than 200,000 people to the Lincoln Memorial. A coalition of civil rights
organizations planned the march to demonstrate to the entire nation that a gap
existed between the tenets of American democracy and the everyday experience of
black Americans. During this march, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I
Have a Dream" speech.
But the March on Washington included more than just King's famous address,
says Calvin College communication professor Garth Pauley. There were nine major
speeches that day and Pauley plans to recover the texts of all nine, most of
which have not been published, and to analyze the response to the speeches and
the role they and the responses played in the Civil Rights Movement.
Most public commemorations of the March, says Pauley, treat it as a symbol of
hope and unity. Pauley, however, suggests a more nuanced interpretation. He
believes that significant rhetorical and ideological differences existed
between white and black speakers, as well as between moderate and more militant
black speakers. These differences merit detailed analysis, he says, as do the
diverse audiences for the March.
Pauley's primary research interest is the Civil Rights Movement and its
rhetoric.
He won one of the top awards in his field - the Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award
- for his work on Civil Rights rhetoric and the March on Washington. He also
wrote an award-winning dissertation called "The Modern Presidency and Civil
Rights: Discourse on Race from Roosevelt to Nixon," now a book, and has written
such articles as "W.E.B. Du Bois on Woman Suffrage: A Critical Analysis of His
Crisis Writings" and "Harry Truman and the NAACP: A Case Study in Presidential
Persuasion on Civil Rights."
NOTE: Contact Garth Pauley at 616-526-6294. For more, including a pic of
Pauley, see:
http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2002_03/pauley_award.htm
-end-
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