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[wd_asp id=1]Hattiesburg: William Sturkey
[ Photo: Jean’s Beauty Shop on Mobile Street, Hattiesburg, July 1964, Herbert Randall Freedom Summer Photographs, USM ]
William Sturkey with Tim Tyson
Community & Scholars Speaker Series
The Regulator welcomes William Sturkey, author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White, for a reading and book signing. Sturkey will be joined in conversation by author and activist Timothy Tyson as part of the Community & Scholars series co-sponsored by The Regulator and Duke’s Forum for Publics and Scholars. Sturkey’s Hattiesburg is a rich, multigenerational saga of race and family in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, that tells the story of how Jim Crow was built, how it changed, and how the most powerful social movement in American history came together to tear it down.
Sturkey reveals the stories behind those who struggled to uphold their southern “way of life” and those who fought to tear it down—from William Faulkner’s great-grandfather, a Confederate veteran who was the inspiration for the enigmatic character John Sartoris, to black leader Vernon Dahmer, whose killers were the first white men ever convicted of murdering a civil rights activist in Mississippi. Through it all, Hattiesburg traces the story of the Smith family across multiple generations, from Turner and Mamie Smith, who fled a life of sharecropping to find opportunity in town, to Hammond and Charles Smith, in whose family pharmacy Medgar Evers and his colleagues planned their strategy to give blacks the vote.
Free and open to the public. The Community & Scholars Speaker Series is co-sponsored by the Regulator Bookshop and the Forum for Scholars and Publics.
Speakers
Private: William Sturkey
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
William Sturkey is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he teaches courses on African American history and the history of the American South. His first book, To Write in the Light of Freedom, coedited with Jon Hale, brought together the newspapers, essays,…...
Read MoreTimothy B. Tyson
Duke University
Timothy B. Tyson is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture at Duke Divinity School, and adjunct professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina. He is the author of The Blood of Emmett Till;…...
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