’Saving Babies for Two Dimes a Day’: The Politics of Hunger and Race in Memphis - A talk by Laurie Green April 21, 2011

In the late 1960s, an unusual alliance of grassroots black community activists and pediatric researchers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital fostered a unique program to eradicate malnutrition, which was responsible for a high rate of disability and death among black infants and young children. The talk will discuss the history of this struggle, and its challenge to medical and social scientific understandings that linked hunger and malnutrition to race and culture.

Laurie Green is a professor of history at the University of Texas, Austin. Dr. Green's central research areas include the politics of race and gender in the twentieth-century U.S.; social movements; and cultural studies. She teaches modern U.S. history, with concentrations on women and gender in twentieth-century America, the Civil Rights Movement, the South, African-American history and comparative race and ethnicity. She earned the 2008 Philip Taft Labor History Book Prize for her book Battling the Plantation Mentality: Race, Gender and Freedom in Memphis during the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

Free and open to the public.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/thursdayscals11.php