"Civil Rights, Feminism, and Sites of Memory: Birmingham's Ground Zero," Dr. Julie Buckner Armstrong

Historical markers call Birmingham's Kelly Ingram Park "Ground Zero" for the city's 1963 civil rights movement. Professor Armstrong—a civil rights scholar and a Birmingham daughter—turns an intersectional feminist lens on consensus memories of this significant public space.

Julie Buckner Armstrong is Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, where she teaches courses in African American, American, and women’s literatures. She has authored and edited multiple publications on the literature of civil rights and racial justice, including the Cambridge Companion to American Civil Rights Literature (Cambridge UP, 2015); Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching (U of Georgia P, 2011); The Civil Rights Reader: American Literature from Jim Crow to Reconciliation (U of Georgia P, 2009); and, with Susan Hult Edwards, Houston Roberson, and Rhonda Williams, Teaching the American Civil Rights Movement: Freeedom’s Bittersweet Song (Routledge, 2002). Armstrong is currently working on a collection of essays, Birmingham Stories, about everyday people and places in the iconic civil rights movement city where she was born.