Luncheon speaker to link suffrage and civil rights movements

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Johanna Miller Lewis, associate dean of Graduate School at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock will be the keynote speaker at University of Louisville’s Women’s Center 7th annual Elizabeth Cady Stanton luncheon on Nov. 12.

Lewis will present “The Men Have Failed…It’s Time to Call Out the Women: Adolphine Fletcher Terry and the Little Rock School Crisis.” Lewis will discuss Terry’s ties to the suffragist movement and her life of political activism, which peaked with the formation of the Women’s Emergency Committee in 1958-59, the year the Little Rock public high schools were closed in an effort to prevent desegregation efforts. Lewis, an author and curator, also serves as the graduate coordinator for the masters in public history program at UALP.

The 2008 Elizabeth Cady Stanton Awards Luncheon commemorates the birthday of Stanton, a 19th century pioneer of women's rights. The lunch will be held 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the University Club on the Belknap Campus.

At the luncheon, the Women’s Center also will recognize the efforts of men and women who integrated Louisville’s schools and members of the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky. Members of that unit were sent to Little Rock to safeguard students as racial tensions intensified.

Also, the Women’s Center will honor Eliza Atkins Gleason, the winner of the 2009 Mary K. Tachau Gender Equity Award. In 1940, Gleason earned her doctorate in library science at the University of Chicago, becoming the first African American woman to do so. Preceding that, she was the head librarian at the Louisville Municipal College for Negroes which, prior to integration, existed as a branch of the then private University of Louisville. Gleason, who will be 100 in December, is the mother of UofL professor Joy Gleason Carew.

Tickets for the luncheon are $25 per person and must be purchased by Nov. 9. For reservations and more information, call the Women’s Center at 852-8976.