The North Carolina Civil War & Reconstruction History Center is sponsoring a presentation by Hari Jones, one of the foremost authorities on the role of African Americans in the Civil War, who will speak on the topic: “How the Civil War Made America Great.” The presentation will be at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, June 19 th in the Rudolph Jones Student Center at Fayetteville State University, 1200 Murchison Road.
The lecture, which is free and open to the public, comes on Juneteenth or Freedom Day, an American holiday that commemorates the June 19, 1865 announcement of the abolition of slavery in Texas. It has also come to commemorate more generally the emancipation of enslaved African-Americans throughout the former Confederacy.
The presentation focuses on the perspective that there were no losers—North or South, Union or Confederate—because the war effectively formed a more perfect union and secured the blessing of liberty for millions of Americans who had not known such freedom before.
About the Speaker
Harold (Hari) Jones, a Pauls Valley, Oklahoma native, is a historian, curator, writer, and motivational speaker. For twelve years, he was the assistant director and curator at the African American Civil War Freedom Foundation and Museum in Washington, DC. He is currently an independent history consultant. He serves on the Board of Directors of the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he presented his award-winning lecture series “The Lost Story” in the fall of 2015.
Jones has appeared in over fifty television programs and documentaries viewed on CSPAN, Fox News, NBC, PBS, BBC, the American Heroes Channel, the History Channel, the Smithsonian Channel and numerous local outlets; plus, he has worked on exhibits on display across the country. He was a content developer for the National Park Service (NPS) museum at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site at Tuskegee, Alabama, a content adviser for the American Civil War Center exhibit “Take Our Stand” and a content adviser for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) exhibit “Discovering the Civil War.” He also curated the exhibit “Clearing a Path for Democracy: Citizen Soldiers of the Fighting Eighth in World War I” at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago.
Jones served in the United States Marine Corps as an infantryman, an artillery officer, and an intelligence officer. He was an instructor at the U. S. Naval Academy. Reaching the rank of staff sergeant as an enlisted Marine, he retired as a captain in 1997 after over twenty years of service.
