A panel discussion on the American Civil Rights Movement in conjunction with the Ulrich Museum of Art's current exhibit The Hard Kind of Courage: Gordon Parks and the Photographers of the Civil Rights Era, celebrating the legacy of Kansan Gordon Parks.

Moderator: Carla Eckels

Carla Eckels, a graduate of Wichita State University, is a News Producer and Local Host of NPR’s All Things Considered on KMUW, 89.1 FM.  Carla also hosts and produces Soulsations, a soul and gospel music show on KMUW. As part of KMUW’s Kansas Association of Broadcasters award winning news department, Carla produces daily newscasts, and files stories statewide and with NPR  Carla is a Senator for the WSU Unclassified Professional Staff. .  Carla worked as a member of the Exploration Place Race: Are We So Different Exhibit Community Advisory Board. Prior to her work at KMUW, She was the host of NPR’s Morning Edition at WYSO Public Radio in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She also hosted a gospel program on WCSU in Wilberforce, Ohio, and was co-host of the nationally syndicated Gospel Top 20 Countdown. Before moving to Ohio, Carla was Program Director of KIBN, The Inspirational Black Network in Wichita. Carla is former advisory board member for WSU’s Center for Women’s Studies, and a committee member of the Gospel Music Workshop of America’s Gospel Announcer’s Guild. She has been married for twenty five years to Wichita State Football Hall of Famer, Rev. Reuben Eckels. She and her husband are the founders of New Day Christian Church. They have two children,  Samuel Isaiah Eckels and Lauren Elizabeth Eckels.

Panelists

Dr Stefan Immler studied physics and astrophysics at the University of Munich, Germany, and the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, UK. After finishing his master in Physics and PhD in Astrophysics in 2000 he started to work as an astrophysicist at the University of Massachusetts and the Pennsylvania State University. In 2004, he took a position as astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where he is currently the lead of NASA's Swift mission guest observer program. As a faculty member at the University of Maryland, he frequently gives lectures and talks about cosmology and the origin of the universe. In 2004, he started to direct and produce a documentary film about the history of jazz in Washington D.C. The feature film explores the relationship between jazz, civil rights movements and democracy. He and his wife reside on Capital Hill in Washington, D.C.

Yvette Johnson grew up in San Diego never really knowing, but always curious about her Southern roots.  She took a Family History Writing class at Arizona State University where she started The Booker Wright Project – a blog where she collects her research and musings about her grandfather and her efforts to understand the place and culture in which he lived.  As a direct result of her interest in her grandfather’s story, Raymond De Felitta, the director of Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story decided to join her in her journey to learn about Booker Wright and the two worlds he straddled in Greenwood, Mississippi – in one he was a waiter in what was essentially a ‘whites only’ steakhouse and in the other he owned his own restaurant on the ‘black’ side of town.  Yvette has published a collection of blog posts and journal entries about this journey in a book called Searching for Booker Wright.  She is currently writing a another book about her grandfather’s life, his death, and how her quest to understand him finally helped her come to terms with her own complicated feelings about race.  She is the mother of two delightful children whom she has the pleasure of raising in Phoenix, Arizona where they live with her husband, a dog, a hamster, and a gecko.

Dr. Robert Weems, Jr., is the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants, including from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and is a Willard W. Garvey Distinguished Professor of Business History at WSU. He is the author of three books, and has published dozens of journal articles. His most recent book is Business in Black and White: American Presidents and Black Entrepreneurs in the Twentieth Century. Weems’ current research project is a biographical study of Anthony Overton, an important African American businessman in early twentieth-century Chicago