Mini-conference: Black Lives Next Door: George Mason College and the Fairfax Community, Past and Present

A mini-conference on Black Lives Next Door: George Mason College and the Fairfax Community, Past and Present, will be held on Friday, April 22 from 1:00-3:00 pm in the Main Reading Room of Fenwick Library. 

This conference will showcase the work of an interdisciplinary team of Mason graduate and undergraduate researchers, led by faculty members LaNitra Berger, Benedict Carton, and George Oberle, to investigate Mason's relationship to the local Black community. The team produced the Black Lives Next Door website that explores—through essays, images, oral histories, and primary sources—the history of the land on which the Fairfax campus is located (including slave plantations), the displacement of local Black residents in building the campus, the fraught relationship between the young college and its Black neighbors, and local struggles for elementary and high school integration occurring at the same time that Mason was being built. 

University Professor Rosemarie Zagarri chairs the panel, which features George Oberle, director of the Mason Legacies Project and history librarian, University Libraries; doctoral student researcher Anthony Guidone; and undergraduate student researcher Kyler Buckner. The mini-conference's keynote speaker is Robinson Professor Spencer Crew.