Expert on 19th Amendment to deliver 2020 Betty Joe Wallace Memorial Lecture at APSU

 Betty Joe Wallace

At 4 p.m. on March 26, 2020, Paula F. Casey, a 19^th Amendment expert, will give the 2020 Betty Joe Wallace Memorial Lecture in rooms 303-305 of the Austin Peay State University Morgan University Center. Casey particularly focuses on the 72-year struggle for women to be included in the U.S. Constitution. She will speak on “Tennessee’s Superb Suffragists,” spotlighting the women who organized across the state as well as those men who were allies. 

In 2016 Casey published the second edition of “The Perfect 36: Tennessee Delivers Woman Suffrage,” a book written by Carol Lynn Yellin and Dr. Janann Sherman. She produced “Generations:  American Women Win the Vote,” a 12 minute DVD that covers the 72-year struggle for American women to win the right to vote. She is the co-founder of the Tennessee Woman Suffrage Heritage Trail (www.tnwomansuffrageheritagetrail.com). She also helped edit the upcoming book, “Why Can’t Mother Vote?  Joseph Hanover and the Unfinished Business of Democracy.”

Casey is working to get monuments to the suffragists raised across Tennessee. She served as president of Tennessee Woman Suffrage Monument, Inc., and was primarily responsible for the fund-raising for the monument that was unveiled on Aug. 26, 2016, in Centennial Park. She served on the committee for the city of Jackson’s statue of Sue Shelton White, the only Tennessee woman jailed fighting for suffrage, which was unveiled on May 25, 2017, in front of Jackson’s City Hall. She chairs the Memphis Suffrage Monument committee for the “Equality Trailblazers” monument to be unveiled in March 2020.

Speaking videos are on her website - www.paulacasey.com – and on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP3NoP1YjkuK9_aHhTUrAYA.

A reception for Casey will be held immediately after her presentation.

The Betty Joe Wallace Memorial Lecture is co-sponsored by the APSU Department of History and Philosophy and the APSU Women’s and Gender Studies Program. A champion of minorities’ and women’s rights, the late Professor Betty Joe Wallace pioneered and taught African American history and Women’s history courses at Austin Peay for nearly 30 years. She founded both the African American Studies Program and the Women’s Studies Program. In 1989, the faculty honored her service by presenting her with the Distinguished Professor Award. Between 1965 and 2004, Wallace also trained hundreds of history and social studies teachers who served throughout the area.