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Diane McWhorter | |
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| Born | 1 November 1952  |
| Occupation | Journalist |
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Rebecca Diane McWhorter is an American journalist, commentator, and author who has written extensively about race and the history of civil rights. She won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize in 2002 for Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 2001; reprinted with a new afterword, 2013).
McWhorter is from Birmingham, Alabama, where she attended the Brooke Hill School.
Among McWhorter's elementary school classmates was Mary Badham, who portrayed "Scout" Finch in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird . When the film was released, McWhorter was among the students who went to a viewing of the film as part of a school field trip. [1] She later reflected on that experience:
"By, you know, rooting for a black man, you were kind of betraying every principle that you had been raised to believe, and I remember thinking "what would my father think if he saw me fighting back these tears when Tom Robinson gets shot?" It was a really disturbing experience; to be crying for a black man was so taboo."
McWhorter graduated from Wellesley College in 1974. [2]
| External videos | |
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 Booknotes interview with McWhorter on Carry Me Home, May 27, 2001, C-SPAN |
McWhorter has written extensively on race and the struggle for civil rights in the US. In 2002 she was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. [3] [4] She is also the author of A Dream of Freedom, a young adult history of the civil rights movement (Scholastic, 2004). [5] She is a long-time contributor to The New York Times and has written for the op-ed page of USA Today and for Slate , Harper's , Smithsonian , among other publications. [2] She is a member of the Board of Contributors for USA Today's Forum Page, part of the newspaper's Opinion section, and has been managing editor of Boston magazine. [6]
She has been a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, a Guggenheim Fellow, a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study [6] and at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. [7] In 2015 she was one of the recipients in the first year of the National Endowment for the Humanities' Public Scholar program to underwrite the production of general-readership non-fiction books by scholars. [8] She is a member of the Society of American Historians. She is working on Moon over Alabama, a study of Wernher von Braun and the US space program in Alabama. [7] [8] [9]
She married Richard Dean Rosen in 1987; they have two children. [10] [11]
To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by the American author Harper Lee. It was published in June 1960 and became instantly successful. In the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. To Kill a Mockingbird has become a classic of modern American literature; a year after its release, it won the Pulitzer Prize. The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was ten.
Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1879. In 1999, it was fully incorporated into Harvard College.
A listing of the Pulitzer Prize award winners for 2002:
Jay Anthony Lukas was an American journalist and author, best known for his 1985 book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. Common Ground is a classic study of race relations, class conflict, and school busing in Boston, Massachusetts, as seen through the eyes of three families: one upper-middle-class white, one working-class white, and one working-class African-American.
Arthur George Gaston was an American entrepreneur who established businesses in Birmingham, Alabama. He had a significant role in the movement to remove legal barriers to integration in Birmingham in 1963. In his lifetime, Gaston's companies were some of the most prominent African-American businesses in the American South.
Freddie Lee Shuttlesworth was an American civil rights activist who led the fight against segregation and other forms of racism as a minister in Birmingham, Alabama. He was a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, initiated and was instrumental in the 1963 Birmingham Campaign, and continued to work against racism and for alleviation of the problems of the homeless in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he took up a pastorate in 1961. He returned to Birmingham after his retirement in 2007. He worked with Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, though the two men often disagreed on tactics and approaches.
Richard Friederich Arens was an American mathematician. He was born in Iserlohn, Germany. He emigrated to the United States in 1925.
William Shield McFeely was an American historian known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1981 biography of Ulysses S. Grant, as well as his contributions to a reevaluation of the Reconstruction era, and for advancing the field of African-American history. He retired as the Abraham Baldwin Professor of the Humanities emeritus at the University of Georgia in 1997, and was affiliated with Harvard University since 2006.
The Birmingham campaign, also known as the Birmingham movement or Birmingham confrontation, was an American movement organized in early 1963 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to bring attention to the integration efforts of African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama.
The 16th Street Baptist Church is a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, United States. In 1963, the church was bombed by Ku Klux Klan members. The bombing killed four young girls in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. The church is still in operation and is a central landmark in the Birmingham Civil Rights District. It was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 2006. Since 2008, it has also been on the UNESCO list of tentative World Heritage Sites.
Anne McCarty Braden was an American civil rights activist, journalist, and educator dedicated to the cause of racial equality. She and her husband bought a suburban house for an African American couple during Jim Crow. White neighbors burned crosses and bombed the house. During McCarthyism, Anne was charged with sedition. She wrote and organized for the southern civil rights movement before violations became national news. Anne was among nation's most outspoken white anti-racist activists, organizing across racial divides in environmental, women's, and anti-nuclear movements.
Virginia Foster Durr was an American civil rights activist and lobbyist. She was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1903 to Dr. Sterling Foster, an Alabama Presbyterian minister, and Ann Patterson Foster. At 22 she married lawyer Clifford Durr, with whom she had 5 children, one of whom died in infancy. Durr was a close friend of Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt, and was sister-in-law of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who sat on many crucial civil rights cases. Her circle of friends extended to Alger Hiss. She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 2006.
Megan Marshall is an American scholar, writer, and biographer.
Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, written by Diane McWhorter and published by Simon & Schuster in 2001, won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
Lola Mae Haynes Hendricks was corresponding secretary for Fred Shuttlesworth's Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights from 1956 to 1963. She assisted Wyatt Walker in planning the early portions of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's involvement in the 1963 Birmingham campaign during the Civil Rights Movement.
Bill Hudson was an American photojournalist for the Associated Press who was best known for his photographs taken in the Southern United States during the Civil Rights Movement. The depictions of police brutality against peaceful protesters that were seen in his widely published photographs helped push public support towards the goals of the civil rights movement.
The Birmingham riot of 1963 was a civil disorder and riot in Birmingham, Alabama, that was provoked by bombings on the night of May 11, 1963. The bombings targeted African-American leaders of the Birmingham campaign. In response, local African-Americans burned businesses and fought police throughout the downtown area.
Alabama literature includes the prose fiction, poetry, films and biographies that are set in or created by those from the US state of Alabama. This literature officially began emerging from the state circa 1819 with the recognition of the region as a state. Like other forms of literature from the South, Alabama literature often discusses issues of race, stemming from the history of the slave society, the American Civil War, the Reconstruction era and Jim Crow laws, and the US Civil Rights Movement. Alabama literature was inspired by the latter's significant campaigns and events in the state, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Selma to Montgomery marches.
The Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) (1938-1948) was an organization that sought to promote New Deal-type reforms to the South in terms of social justice, civil rights, and electoral reform. It folded due to funding problems and allegations of Communist sympathies; its successor was the former sub-group the Education Fund.
The Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) (1942–1981) was an organization that sought to promote social justice, civil rights, and electoral reform in the American South, particularly for African Americans. The organization began as the Education Fund of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), before becoming an independent successor organization after the SCHW was disbanded in 1948.
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