Current Class
Schedule & Registration
Here are the schedule and descriptions of current classes, workshops, and conversations at Let’s Learn! this semester. Each description includes a registration link.
Hope to see you in class!
Class Schedule
SUMMER 2026
Immigration Matters: A Conversation on Policy and Law
Omar H. Ali, Ph.D.
June 11, 6:00pm-7:30pm
International Civil Rights Center & Museum
This community educational forum will bring together legal practitioners and community leaders to discuss the current landscape of U.S. immigration law and policy, including DHS detention practices and the broader impact of policy changes on communities. The event will feature expert panelists and offer attendees the opportunity to learn, ask questions, and engage in meaningful dialogue both in person and online.
Facilitated by Dr. Omar Ali, Dean Emeritus at UNC Greensboro and Senior Fellow at the ICRCM, the panel will include Katherine Reynolds, Director of the Humanitarian Immigration Law Clinic at Elon Law School; Abdul Omer, Immigration Staff Attorney at the Center for New North Carolinians; Heather Scavone, most recently serving as Associate Counsel in the Office of the Chief Counsel, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, at DHS; and Kathy Hinshaw, Chair of the Latino Community Coalition of Guilford.
“At a precarious time in the United States regarding immigration practices and ever-shifting policies, we are fortunate to have local partnerships to create dialogue and help educate the public,” said Dr. Ali. “Hosted at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in downtown Greensboro, with deeply caring community leaders and experts in immigration law offering their knowledge, those who attend either in person or online will have a chance to learn, ask questions, and offer their own unique perspectives and experiences.”
About the Civil Rights Museum:
Animating an iconic landmark recognized across the globe, the International Civil Rights Center & Museum opened in 2010 as a comprehensive museum of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and an innovative educational organization devoted to understanding and advancing civil and human rights in this country and the world. It commemorates the Feb. 1, 1960, beginning of sit-ins at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, by the N.C. A&T Four college students — David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr (now Jibreel Khazan), and Joseph McNeil — reflecting careful planning carried out with colleagues at Bennett College. Their non-violent direct action challenged the American People to make good on promises of personal equality and civic inclusion enunciated in the Constitution. The fast-spreading Sit-In Movement ignited by the Greensboro protests served as a historical inflection point, renewing the Civil Rights Movement as a whole.
Sit-In Movement, Inc., was founded in 1993 to acquire and restore the F.W. Woolworth’s site of these transformative events and to establish the Center and Museum as a monument to the bravery and initiative of visionary young advocates of full citizenship and social justice.
Freedom-Makers: Maroons and the Underground Railroad
Omar H. Ali, Ph.D.
June 18, 11:00am-12:00pm
Guilford Woods
This hybrid offering will be an in-person/virtual visit to the “Underground Railroad Tree” in the Guilford Woods of North Carolina. The 300-year-old Tulip Poplar tree is a living monument and witness to the freedom-seekers who were part of this eastern seaboard launching point of the Underground Railroad during the early 19th century. The great tree is located in a 350-acre forest in Greensboro, N.C. We will walk through the woods, share the history of the area, read excerpts from primary source accounts (journals and runaway ads), look at material culture and discuss the oral history of runaway enslaved people (maroons), and explore the ways in which we–people and our living world–create community and connectivity underground, overground, everywhere.
Led by historian Omar H. Ali from UNC Greensboro, the offering is part of the “Let’s Learn!: The World as Classroom” initiative of Lloyd International Honors College at UNC Greensboro and the East Side Institute in New York, in partnership with improvscience, the African American & African Diaspora Studies Program at UNC Greensboro, and the all-disciplinary honors society Phi Kappa Phi.
Greensboro is on traditional Keyauwee and Saura lands settled in the mid-18th century by Euro-Americans who drew upon enslaved African labor. The city was a launching point of the Underground Railroad, a center of textile production and distribution to the world, a catalyst of the modern civil rights movement, and is a refugee site with over 150 languages spoken in its school districts today–a global city that teaches us about cultural diversity, social justice, human geography, political economy, and world history.