National Humanities Center Project – The Making and Unmaking of One America

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the last presidential commission on race, Clinton’s One America: A Presidential Initiative on Race (PIR), chaired by historian John Hope Franklin. Exploring the PIR as the most recent, nationwide undertaking for racial reconciliation, this project returns to the late 1990s, a turning point in race relations, to examine how and why we lost the opportunity to systematically engage racism after the 1960s Civil Rights revolution. Coauthored with historian Nishani Frazier, who served as the assistant to Franklin during his tenure as the PIR chair, The Making and Unmaking of One America details the PIR’s history and legacy and highlights the Initiative’s continuing lessons for US race relations today.