Hospitalhof | Politik und Gesellschaft

Vortrag

Dreaming of Bigotry’s End

Head-to-Head: A Meeting of Inspired Minds

In the late 1960s, a handful of white philanthropists living in the American South quietly conducted a social experiment that they hoped would change the character of the region. They recruited and paid for 140 talented African American students to integrate all-white, Southern boarding schools, then havens for white families fleeing court-ordered integration. The question at the heart of their effort was novel for the time: Could they make white students less bigoted by exposing them to black students? For 10 years, a North Carolina-based organization called the Stouffer Foundation led the effort, and attempted to fashion a social science study of the results. In his talk, Secret will discuss the ideas that propelled this unique experiment and the beliefs that pushed the African American pioneer students to excel against the odds. And he will follow the expression of those ideas into the present, as citizens and societies grapple with ways to foster and teach tolerance.