The 2025 John Lax Memorial Lecture in History will be delivered by Professor Dylan C. Penningroth: “Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights.”

Dylan Penningroth is Professor of Law and Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History, University of California at Berkeley, Affiliated Research Professor, American Bar Foundation, and author of Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights.

The John Lax Memorial Lecture was endowed in 1982 by the late Professors Peter and Anneli Lax of New York University’s mathematics department, in memory of their son, John, a historian who taught at Mount Holyoke in the mid-1970s. After John Lax’s premature death, his parents created a permanent memorial in the form of this annual lecture. The Lax Lecture is given by a historian of the highest distinction to commemorate the work and spirit of John Lax by making the latest advances in history accessible to the public.

This event is sponsored by the Mount Holyoke College History Department.