Our city, like many others, is currently wrestling with the meanings and fates of many controversial statues and monuments. This symposium aims to help facilitate community engagement and dialogue in advance of the Vance Monument Task Force’s anticipated report at the end of October with their recommendations for the Vance Monument and Pack Square.This program, hosted via Zoom, will feature several notable scholars and allow for audience questions.

Dr. Steve Nash, Dr. Dwight Mullen, and Dr. Fitzhugh Brundage will speak about:

• The legacy of Zebulon Vance and his commemoration elsewhere in North Carolina as well as Statuary Hall
• The historical uses of Pack Square for auctions of the enslaved as well as prominent and notable figures in the history of Asheville’s African-American community
• The memorialization of the Lost Cause and Confederacy as well as the history and possible future of monuments in general
• The Vance MonumentTask Force

About the Speakers
Steve Nash (Associate Professor, Department of History, East Tennessee State University) Dr. Nash is an associate professor of history at East Tennessee State University and the author of Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains.

Dwight Mullen (Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Asheville) As a Teaching Professor, Dr. Mullen was committed to both his students and to being professionally active. Specifically, he offered courses in public policy, American politics, and African and African-American politics. His scholarly activities included panels chaired and papers presented at meetings of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists; overseeing undergraduates’ research projects covering the State of Black Asheville; and serving in local, state, national, and international capacities that aim to improve the delivery of public services to underserved populations.

Fitzhugh Brundage (William Umstead Distinguished Professor, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Asheville)
Dr. Brundage’s general research interests are American history since the Civil War, with a particular focus on the American South. He has written on lynching, utopian socialism in the New South, white and black historical memory in the South since the Civil War, and the history of torture in the United States from the time of European contact to the twenty-first century. His current research project is a study of Civil War prisoner of war camps.