“A College Town in Black and White: The Color Line and Fumiko Seki’s Days in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1955-1957”
North Carolina Historical Review 100 no. 1 (2023): 1-28.
My recently published article examines the memoir compiled and published by Fumiko Seki in 1966. She spent two years at Chapel Hill as a wife, a mother, and an international student of the University of North Carolina.
Seki’s memoir poses a series of important questions that complicates our understanding of the Jim Crow system and the civil rights movement in the 1950s.
- Why did Southern universities accept non-European international students while refusing to admit Black students?
- How did non-European international students understand the Jim Crow system and navigate the color line in the post-WWII American South?
- How did Seki’s Chapel Hill experience have an impact on her life back home in Japan?
Please check out my recent article in the North Carolina Historical Review.
Image credit: “United Nations Day, 24 October 1956,” in the Roland Giduz Photographic Collection P0033, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
