The DeLaney Center
for the study of Southern race relations, culture, and politics
About the Center
Established in 2021, the DeLaney Center is an interdisciplinary academic forum that promotes teaching and research on race and Southern identity. It serves as a resource for students and faculty in all three of Washington and Lee’s academic units - the College, the School of Law, and the Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics.
Taking full advantage of the university’s Virginia location and extensive archival holdings, the center provides unique opportunities for students, faculty, alumni, community partners, and higher education colleagues to ponder how W&L’s long and complex history intersects with the racial issues that have defined and continue to shape both the U.S. South and the entire country.
The center serves our campus by encouraging the creation of new courses, facilitating faculty scholarship, and advancing student production of original research and creative work. Recognizing W&L’s status as a neighbor, it also hosts film showings, site visits, symposia, lectures, conferences, and other programming that build our community. We strive to foster liberty.
Our Work
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 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
The Screen to Square Film Series unites a transgenerational audience of students, community members, faculty, and staff in the common experience of enjoying a meal and viewing a film that engages race and Southern self-definition. Following the screening, a panel of firsthand observers and research experts shares their insights and leads the audience into a free-flowing conversation. This sharing does not guarantee interpretive consensus; however, participants recall their common investment in human thriving. Through such recollection, individuals discover alternate possibilities for performing their social duties.
The 2024-2025 Screen to Square Film Series will feature four films tied to the theme “Work, Pay and Southern Racial Reality.”
Black Women and Desegregation
While Washington and Lee desegregated in the 1960s, it was not until 1985 that women undergraduates were first admitted to the University. The Black Women and Desegregation Project seeks to capture the unique experiences of Black women who matriculated during the first thirty coeducated classes at W&L. Alongside the University Library and the Office of Institutional History, current undergraduate students work with the DeLaney Center Postbaccalaureate Fellow to explore, research, and conduct an extended oral history project that openly and honestly registers the stories and the voices of these pivotal alumni.
If you are a Black woman who graduated from Washington and Lee University between 1985 and 2015, and you are interested in having your experiences recorded, email DeLaney Center Postbaccalaureate Fellow Adrienne Jones to hear more or get involved.
DeLaney Dialogues
DeLaney Dialogues are curated exchanges about Southern race relations, culture, and politics. During an hourlong session, a presenter will offer fresh ideas about a regionally resonant theme. The audience engages both the speaker and their peers. Exhibiting innovative strategies for teaching, researching, and addressing Southern racial realities, these programs allow audience members to imagine how this protean region fits into broader professional and public possibilities.
Race and Southern-ness Speaker Series
Distinguished scholars will visit Washington and Lee for a one-day symposium to discuss contemporary trends in the study of race and Southern life. Using their specific research preoccupations, they will offer 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.
Freedom Ride
Freedom Ride is a five-day orientation experience for incoming first year Washington and Lee students. Inspired by a spring term course created by center namesake, Ted DeLaney, this program encourages 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 like Farmville, VA, Atlanta, GA, and Greensboro, NC. They use these visits to examine how racial injustice, resistance, and memorialization influence 21st century democratic unity.
Learn more about the Freedom Ride Leading Edge program.
Burr Datz ’75 has been a pillar of support – and supplier of stories and songs – to the W&L community for five decades.
Next DeLaney Center Dialogue to Feature Shane Lynch and Craig Robertson
The faculty members and choral directors at Washington and Lee University and Virginia State University will discuss their historic collaborative performances held in February.
Award-Winning Quilter Stephen Towns to Deliver Next DeLaney Dialogue Lecture
On March 4, Towns will present an artist talk in Wilson Concert Hall while his works will play a central theme in a DeLaney Reading Club Breakfast held in the Staniar Gallery and Wilson Hall Room 2010.
W&L’s Staniar Gallery Presents Stephen Towns’ ‘Loud as the Rolling Sea’
The solo exhibition will open Feb. 17 with an artist’s talk slated for March 4.
Candice Robinson is the Next Speaker in the Anne and Edgar Basse Jr. Author Talk Series
Robinson will deliver a lecture titled “The Sociology of Cardi B: A Trap Feminist Approach” on campus on Mar. 4.
DeLaney Center Screen to Square Film Series to Show an Episode of ‘High on the Hog’
This year’s second installment will focus on the Netflix show that traces how African American cuisine has transformed America.
DeLaney Center to Host Second Annual Race and Southern-ness Symposium
The Dec. 5 event will feature panelists from the higher education, business and health care industries discussing the theme “Black Female Leadership in the 21st-century South.”
Latest DeLaney Center Dialogue Discussion Features Musician and Scholar Tammy L. Kernodle
Kernodle will also participate in a Reading Club Breakfast discussion involving her essay “My Song is My Weapon: The Long Sonic History of Black Resistance.”
Musician and Scholar Tammy Kernodle to Deliver Lecture at W&L
Kernodle’s Nov. 15 lecture is supported by W&L’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter.
DeLaney Center to Open its 2024-25 Screen to Square Film Series with ‘The Color Purple’
This year’s first film will be screened on Oct. 15 in Stackhouse Theater.
The Jeffrey G. Lawson ’68 Endowment funds leadership roles in the DeLaney Center.
Associate Professor Catarina Passidomo ‘04 to Present DeLaney Center Dialogue Discussion
Passidomo will use her essay “Rooted in Sand: A Reflection on Teaching and Tomatoes” to explore “Tomatoes and Southern Racial Realities.”