UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — For the second year, the Center for Democratic Deliberation in the College of the Liberal Arts is recognizing outstanding student essays based on landmark speeches in the civil rights era.
The Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement essay contest, led by Paterno Family Liberal Arts Professor Emeritus of Literature Jack Selzer in cooperation with the undergraduate research journal Young Scholars in Writing, was open to students across the country who submitted original essays based on speeches made during the civil rights era.
This year’s winner was Dana Diab, a student at Emory University, for her essay “Bridging the Gap: Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” based on speeches by Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, as well as the SCLC Citizenship School Workbook, part of the Citizenship Education Program spearheaded by Septima Clark; and a photograph of SNCC activist Joyce Ladner.
“Black women supplemented the often white-directed, respectability rhetoric of Black men in the civil rights movement through 'bridge leadership,' acting as mediators between formal movement leadership and local communities in places and manners that are not easily defined as public or private,” said contest judge Kyle King of Penn State Altoona. “Diab’s willingness to draw together seemingly disparate artifacts demonstrates the capaciousness of the category of public address, from political speeches to civic education to the politics of clothing and hairstyle."
The contest had two runners-up: Anna Grace Mixon of Baylor University for "John Lewis and the Unfinished Revolution of 1776;” and Fisher Calame of Sewanee University for “The Quiet Movement: The Rhetorical Veneer of Brunswick's Civil Rights Struggle.”
“Mixon excellently historicizes how Lewis revised his draft to create a more unifying tone, while nevertheless refusing to kowtow to the desires of the Kennedy administration. The reference to 1776 becomes a vehicle through which to drive home this unsteady trust in what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Selzer said. “Calame demonstrates how ‘Old Brunswick residents — both Black and white — had settled for a slow-moving gradualism that was supplanted and challenged by younger Black residents, whose attempts at greater and hastier integration — especially toward voting — were met with white politesse and obstruction.”
The winners will receive cash prizes and their essays will be published on the Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement website. Diab’s essay will also be published in the journal Young Scholars in Writing.