The 2008 Marilyn Crandell Schleg Memorial Lecture will feature Dr. Marcy Sacks, Associate Professor of History at Albion College. Dr. Sacks has a B.S. from Cornell University in Industrial and Labor Relations, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in History.

Dr. Sacks' lecture is entitled, "Unmasking the 'Deadpan': The Search for the 'Real' Joe Louis." For her forthcoming biography of Louis, Sacks conducted several interviews with family members and friends of Louis, the iconic heavyweight boxing champion. "He had a tremendous impact on race relations," explained Sacks, whose research on Louis was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Sacks' lecture will discuss the challenges of finding information about Joe Louis that had not already been uncovered and the research methodology that helped to answer the question about his historical significance.

Dr. Sacks' other research interests include African American history, U.S. history to 1877, race and ethnicity in America, and the history of sports in the U.S. She has worked extensively with the Currier & Ives' Darktown Comics lithograph collection that is held in Albion College's Special Collections, both in her personal research and class curriculum. Her publications reflect these interests:

• “Recreating Black New York at Century’s End,” in Slavery in New York, Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris, ed. (The New Press, 2005): 325-349.
• “‘To Show Who Was in Charge’: Police Repression of New York City’s Black Population at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Urban History. Vol. 31, No. 6 (September 2005): 799-819.
• Entries for “Mary White Ovington” and “San Juan Hill,” in The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Taylor & Francis, 2005.
• “’To Be a Man and Not a Lackey:’ Black Men, Work, and the Construction of Manhood in Gilded Age New York City,” American Studies. Vol. 45, No. 1 (Summer 2004): 39-63.
• “We Rise and Fall Together: Separatism and the Demand for Equality by Albany’s Black Citizens, 1827-1860.” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History. Vol. 20, no. 2 (July 1996), pp. 7-33.
• Entry for "Reconstruction and ‘Redemption’ in the South, 1865 to 1915," in The African-American Experience. Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications International, 1995.

The 2008 Schleg Lecture will be held at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, October 7th in the Wendell Will Room of the Stockwell Memorial Library. It is free and open to the public. A reception, celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Schleg lecture, will follow.

The Marilyn Crandell Schleg Memorial Lecture provides visiting archivists, preservationists, curators and historians the opportunity to lecture on archival and library topics and work with the Albion College community in preserving their legacy.

It is named for Marilyn Crandell Schleg, a 1958 graduate of Albion College and medical librarian with master's degrees in microbiology from the University of Wisconsin and library science from the University of Michigan. In 1998, a love for libraries prompted Marilyn to endow the college with an archivist position and fund an annual lectureship dealing with archives and libraries. She stated, "(My family and I) wanted to do something for Albion because Albion did so much for me." Marilyn was afflicted with Multiple System Atrophy, a form of Parkinson's disease, for many years before her untimely death in July of 2001. In 2005, her husband, Edward Schleg endowed the lecture so that it would continue to serve as a memory to Marilyn far into the future.

Past lecturers have included Keith Donohue of the National Archives; Hank Meijer of Meijer, Inc.; Robert Warner, former Archivist of the United States; and Miles Harvey, novelist and journalist, to name a few. For a complete list of speakers, please see the Schleg Lecture homepage.