The Hotel at Auburn University and Dixon Conference Center is opening its doors to a discussion of history and immigration.
The symposium, "Becoming Alabama: Immigration and Migration in a Deep South State," will be held Thursday through Saturday.
"We're going to open with a workshop on genealogy," said Jay Lamar, director of the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities. "That will be Thursday afternoon. All day Friday and Saturday there will be talks and presentations."
Registration for the conference is $50, but students may attend sessions--except those serving meals--for free.
The symposium is part of the statewide initiative "Becoming Alabama," which seeks to increase public understanding of Alabama history and the importance of the Creek War, the Civil War and the civil rights movement.
"Obviously there's quite a political interest in (immigration and migration) today," said Charles Israel, chair of the history department. "We wanted to look at it historically, not just as a new issue disconnected from the past."
Though now a controversial topic in Alabama politics, Lamar said the theme was selected before the recent immigration law came into the public eye.
"What we hope is that if we take a historical perspective on the theme, we can get really good background and context for looking at where we are today," Lamar said. "The idea is that we can look at these past 200 years of Alabama history and link that to the present."
Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration," will be the keynote speaker.
Paulette Dilworth, assistant vice president of Access and Community Initiatives, said the book highlights an important period of American history that is often untold.
"From about 1915 to 1970 there was a huge exodus of about 6 million people, and a lot of African-Americans in the South migrated to the North for better opportunities socially and economically," Dilworth said. "You could think of it as immigration in our own land. When you think of immigration, you think people are leaving because they think they're going to a better place."
Dilworth said "The Warmth of Other Suns" reflects the general theme of the conference.
"One thing she captures, which goes to the heart of the symposium itself, is although her book focuses on the African-American experience, it's a universal story and distinctly an American story," Dilworth said. "We didn't all come over on the same boat, but we're all on the same boat now. How did we become Alabama? People migrated to this state."
Lamar said she hopes the conference will reveal the diversity among Alabamians.
"Alabama is not really seen as a deeply diverse state, but in fact it really is," Lamar said. "Over the last 200 years many different nationalities--Spanish, French, African, Swedish, Greek and Southeast Asian--have come to Alabama, and each one has left a mark.
"The reflections of those nationalities can be see in our food, music, education system, civics and language. The more we learn about our history, the better we have an understanding of who we are as a state and who we are as the citizens."
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