Programming
Freedom Ride
Freedom Ride is a five-day orientation experience for incoming first year W&L students. Inspired by a spring term course created by Ted DeLaney, this program began in 2019 as a multi-state journey that encouraged students to view the black freedom struggle as a mirror for their transition from high school to college and their community-building in a complicated Southern environment. Freedom Ride commences with a look at the circumstances that led young people in 1961 to board buses and travel throughout the Jim Crow south. After noting this backdrop, students, trip leaders, faculty, and staff get on their own bus to visit cities with rich connections to the civil rights movement. They use these visits to examine how racial injustice, resistance, and memorialization influence 21st century democratic unity.
Freedom Ride includes stops at a wide range of social institutions in Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina. During the pilgrimage, sojourners head to the Moton Museum in Farmville, VA, the King center in Atlanta, GA, the Moore's Ford Lynching Site in Monroe, GA, and the International Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro, NC. This exposure provides participants with a vivid connection to Washington & Lee that enriches them academically and strengthens their sense of belonging.
Race and Southern-ness Speaker Series
Three distinguished scholars will visit Washington and Lee to discuss contemporary trends in the study of race and Southern life. Using their specific research preoccupations, they will offer broader conclusions about the position of the South in American self-definition. Their explorations will provide analytical anchors for the DeLaney Center's pursuit of its mission.
DeLaney Center Saturdays
DeLaney Center Saturdays occur three times each academic year. Dedicated to the tenets of place-based learning, this program invites a group of 20 students, community members, faculty, and staff to explore civil rights sites in Virginia. These trips feature encounters with on-location experts, a shared meal, and debriefing via small and large group conversations.
Screen to Square Film Series
Hollywood repeatedly tells stories about desegregation. During the 2022-2023 academic year, the DeLaney Center will bring an audience together to view a movie and discuss its depictions. The lineup includes:
About Ted DeLaney
In 2021, Washington and Lee University named its new interdisciplinary academic center for teaching and research on Southern race relations, culture, and politics in honor of late professor of history emeritus Theodore "Ted" Carter DeLaney Jr. '85.
DeLaney's scholarship focused on the untold histories of African Americans in Virginia, including his research on John Chavis, who was the first known African American to receive a college education in the United States in the 18th century and who studied at Liberty Hall Academy. In addition, DeLaney recorded oral histories of western Virginians directly involved in the battle over school desegregation 15 years after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. Much of his research found its way into his courses and the presentations he developed for alumni colleges, class reunions, neighboring colleges, museums and historical societies. DeLaney's own oral history is now part of W&L's Special Collections.
During his career at W&L, DeLaney taught courses on colonial North America, comparative slavery in the Western Hemisphere, African American history, civil rights, and gay and lesbian history. His popular Spring Term course on the civil rights movement took students on the path of the Freedom Riders through the South, while his course on the institutional history of W&L introduced students to archival research in W&L's Special Collections & Archives.In 2005, DeLaney co-founded the Africana Studies Program, which he directed from 2005-07 and again from 2013 to 2017. He chaired the History Department from 2007 to 2013 and was the first Black department head at W&L. He also served on both the Working Group on the History of African Americans at W&L and the 2018 Commission on Institutional History and Community.
"Ted was known to people across the W&L community as a wise, thoughtful, and generous teacher whose passion for justice and inclusion was evident both in the classroom and in his scholarship," said W&L President William C. Dudley in announcing the center's name. "Ted's work provided keen insights into the history of the university and the local community. His personal history and the example that he set for all of us represent the best of the university's core values. The center that bears Ted's name will be a model for the work that was so important to him and remains so critical to the understanding and advancement of our society in the future."
DeLaney Center News
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