A noted expert on the women’s suffrage movement, specifically African-American women’s suffrage, will be on campus today.

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn is a professor of history at Morgan State University and the author of a number of books and other works on African-American women’s roles in history, including, “African American Women and the Women’s Suffrage Movement in One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement.”

“The Catt Center and Iowa State are always concerned with the issue of gender-race relations and politics. It is a very important issue, especially in the college community,” said Diane Bystrom of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center.

Bystrom said the scheduling of the African-American women speakers is not in any way related to the controversy surrounding Catt’s role in the suffrage movement.

“The speakers were all scheduled by the Iowa Board of Humanities and the university, not by the Catt Center,” Bystrom said.

“The speakers were scheduled far before the controversy arose, and it is all purely coincidental that she is speaking now, in the midst of all this,” she said.

She added that Terborg-Penn has not expressed an opinion on the Catt Hall controversy.

Through a grant from the Iowa Board of Humanities, Terborg-Penn is the final in what was to be a series of speakers on the subject of African-American Women in the Suffrage Movement. Nell Irvin Painter spoke in January, and Darlene Clarke Hine was scheduled to speak in March but was forced to cancel due to weather.

Terborg-Penn will focus her speech on African-American women suffragists in the Booker T. Washington era. She is an expert on Ida B. Wells and served as a consultant for a documentary on Wells, called “Legacy of Struggles.”

Terborg-Penn will speak Thursday, Oct. 24 at 8 p.m. in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union.