On Friday, February 26, the Upper School welcomed award-winning historian Dr. Crystal Sanders, who marked the conclusion of Black History Month with a talk entitled “Humanizing the Heroes: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives.”

The address was an examination of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and John Lewis’s lives. By explaining that these now-exalted figures of the Civil Rights Movement were everyday figures who were moved to take action, Sanders hopes that young people will understand that they, too, have the power to make meaningful changes to address injustice and inequality in their own communities.

Sanders is Associate Professor of History at Penn State and is a 2020-21 fellow at the National Humanities Center. Sanders is the author of A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle published by the UNC Press in 2016 as part of the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. She is currently writing a book on black southerners’ efforts to secure graduate education during the age of Jim Crow.