On Thursday night, dozens of students, faculty and even some Farmville community members gathered in Molnar Auditorium for the second annual history lecture honoring the late Dr. C. G. Gordon Moss.
These lectures were put together by Longwood’s departments of History, Philosophy and Political Science as a way to honor Dr. Moss and his work, as well as to spotlight on the other great social activists in American history.
Dr. Moss served not only as a professor of history at Longwood from 1944 to 1969, but also during his time here he was the department chair and Dean of the Faculty. More importantly, Dr. Moss served as a great activist for the Civil Rights Movement, especially here in Prince Edward County. While Prince Edward County Schools were closed from 1959 to 1964 as a way to resist integration, “Dr. Moss became an outspoken advocate of reopening the schools and of equality and justice for all American citizens,” said our own Dr. Fergeson.
Thursday night’s lecture by Dr. Patricia Sullivan, an esteemed historian and professor at the University of South Carolina, honored Dr. Moss by shedding light on another very important civil rights activist, Robert F. Kennedy. During the 1960’s, the primetime for the Civil Rights Movement, Kennedy served as Attorney General, United States Senator and was even a candidate for the 1968 presidential election.
However, Kennedy took on a rather active role when it came to learning about and addressing the worlds’ problems. “He wanted to get out there. He wanted to experience first-hand the struggles that the African American population was going through,” said Dr. Sullivan in her speech on Thursday afternoon.
During Kennedy’s time in office, he did exactly what he had planned. Kennedy visited some of the harshest conditions in places such as Mississippi and Alabama to help in any way he could. After his visits, he would take this new knowledge straight to Washington D.C. to advocate for more policies and actions to be put into place.
Dr. Sullivan also focused on Kennedy’s 1964 visit to Farmville to check up on his policy of free schools, which was created to provide educational opportunities to students that were affected by the Prince Edward County School closings in 1963-64. Only a few weeks after his visit the Supreme Court ruled that Prince Edward County schools will not only reopen, but they will also integrate, in the case of Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County.
Up until his assassination in 1968, Kennedy was often seen visiting countless poverty stricken areas, sites of race riots and everything in between in order to raise awareness for the unfair treatment of African Americans and to do something about them.
Many students, such as Tyler Cepeda, were unaware of just how much of an impact Kennedy had on the Civil Rights Movement.
“Even though the lecture was a little sporadic in some places, all of the information was really interesting,” said Cepeda.
At the end of her speech, Dr. Sullivan left the audience with a quote from one of Kennedy’s famous speeches, “Still, even in the turbulence of protest and struggle, there is greater hope for the future.”
