A. Wade Smith Memorial Lecture Series
The primary purpose of the A. Wade Smith Memorial Lecture Series is to promote improved race relations on the Arizona State University campus and within the greater Phoenix metropolitan area community. The lecture is free to the public and is designed to recognize and perpetuate the dream and work of A. Wade Smith, a respected scholar and former chair of the department of sociology at ASU who devoted his life and career to achieving racial and social parity.
Smith’s efforts began with his undergraduate work at Dartmouth and continued through his graduate work at the University of Chicago and his teaching career at the University of South Carolina. He joined the ASU faculty in 1981.
At the time of his death in 1994, Smith was chair of the ASU Campus Environment Team. When he died from cancer at the age of 43, he was most concerned and agitated about the work he was leaving undone. Elsie Moore, his widow and an ASU professor of psychology in education, decided to turn her grief into action and chose to perpetuate Smith’s legacy and work by initiating an endowment to support an annual community lecture on race relations. A campaign to permanently endow the annual A. Wade Smith Memorial Lecture on Race Relations is an ongoing effort by friends, family, colleagues and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
ASU invites nationally prominent individuals to present the annual lecture and to visit the campus to discuss race relations in the United States. Past lecturers include:
2007 Darlene Clark Hine, Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies, professor of history and inaugural director of the Center for African American History at Northwestern University; John A. Hannah Distinguished Adjunct Professor of History at Michigan State University
Topic: “From Respectability to Respect: Black Women’s Civic Culture and Consciousness in Jim Crow America” (March 22, 2007)
2006 Robin Kelley, William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia University
Topic: “Another Reconstruction: Debating Reparations and Race in Post-Katrina America”
(March 23, 2006)
2005 Christopher Edley, Jr., dean of the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley
Topic: “Race, Policy and the Political Process” (April 19, 2005)
2004 Ray Suarez, senior correspondent for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer”
Topic: “The Changing Face of America” (April 5, 2004)
2003 Johnnetta Cole, president of Bennett College and Emory University professor emerita as a Presidential Distinguished Professor
Topic: Affirmative Action (March 27, 2003)
2002 Mary Frances Berry, Chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania
Topic: “Race Relations in America” April 22, 2002)
2001 Michael Eric Dyson, Ida B. Wells Barnett University Professor at DePaul University
Topic: “Race Rules” (April 23, 2001)
2000 Roger Wilkins, Clarence J. Robinson Professor of History and American Culture, George Mason University
Topic: “Building Humane Communities: A Project Spanning the Centuries” (April 5, 2000)
1999 Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair, Afro-American Studies Department, Harvard University
Topic: “Race and Class in America” (April 30, 1999)
1998 Morris Dees, civil rights lawyer and co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center
Topic: “Teaching Tolerance” (February 11, 1998)
1996 William Julius Wilson, Director, Center for the Study of Urban Inequality, University of Chicago
1995 Cornel West, Professor Harvard University