August Signature Event Recap

Friday, August 28, 2020
In August 2020, the Library hosted programs covering equal rights.
Check out our latest roundup of signature event videos from the past month.

Signature Event Archive  |  More Videos  |  Youtube.com/KCLibrary  |  Upcoming Signature Events
Everywhere You Don't Belong
Gabriel Bump, Kaite Stover

August 5, 2020
54 minutes


Gabriel Bump joined the Library’s Kaite Stover in a discussion of Bump’s critically praised debut novel, which deftly weaves some of today's weightier matters – activism, social change, Black identity – into the story of a Black youth on Chicago’s South Shore who’s trying to figure out exactly where he fits in contemporary America. 


 


No One Is Coming to Save Us
Stephanie Powell Watts, Kaite Stover

August 12, 2020
58 minutes

Lehigh University’s Stephanie Powell Watts joined the Library’s Kaite Stover in a public conversation about her critically praised novel No One Is Coming to Save Us, a story about the things in our past that haunt us, that continue to call and constrain us from moving ahead. “Imagine The Great Gatsby (from which she drew structure and mood) set in rural North Carolina, nine decades later, with desperate black people,” Watts says.






 
Qualified Rights: Women’s Suffrage, Citizenship, and the 19th Amendment Reconsidered
Saje Mathieu

August 18, 2020
59 minutes

University of Minnesota historian Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu discussed both the pinnacles and pitfalls accompanying the promise of the 19th Amendment, which gave most – but not all women – the right to vote 100 years ago this month.



 


Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener
Kimberly Hamlin

August 27, 2020
1 hour

In a discussion of her book Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener, award-winning historian Kimberly Hamlin examined the life of the resolute woman deemed “the most potent factor” in the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.





 


Strictly Speaking: Equal Rights Should Have No Deadline
Julie Chi-hy Suk, Carol Jenkins, Carrie N. Baker, Pat Spearman, Kate Kelly, Marco Gonzalez, Erica Benson

August 29, 2020
1 hour

A distinguished panel of officials, experts, and ERA activists assessed the decades-long effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment – what would be the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enshrining the principle of gender equality in our founding charter. Erica Benson, the campaign coordinator for Project 28 MO, a Kansas City-area organization working for ratification, moderated the discussion a week before the nation observes Women’s Equality Day on August 26.