Lee Smith: "A Life in Books"

On Thursday, February 21, despite the terrible weather, about 130 people came to the University Center Theater to hear acclaimed fiction writer Lee Smith share with us her charming “life in books.” She spoke about the relationship between a writer’s real life and fiction. The event was enlightening not only for budding writers, but for anyone with at least a passing interest in writing. She began the event with a story about how two friends measured their lives—one friend saw her life terms of the people she came across, while the other said that she visualized her life in terms of time and places. By contrast, Smith said that she measured her own life in terms of books—first as a reader, then as a writer.

As a child, Smith said, reading actually introduced her to writing, since she just could not stand her beloved stories ending. She called herself an obsessive reader who read all night long; she then created her own chapters to her favorite books, which fulfilled her need to see her literary heroes and heroines live on. She soon began writing little books herself, and with her childhood friend Martha Sue, she began publishing a weekly, hand-crafted neighborhood newspaper which they delivered door to door on bikes for only a nickel.

Traveling around her neighborhood with her friend, they would see “really neat stuff” that later made its way into Smith’s fiction. In her Davy Crockett spiral notebook, she wrote down all of the scandalous sights she saw and included the date, time, weather, physical descriptions, and her reaction. She would use her discoveries later on in her life in her writing.Reading from her work, she recalled how they saw their fourth grade teacher necking on the couch with her boyfriend and smoking cigarettes.  She also claimed to see her neighbor running past the kitchen window wearing nothing but her apron, followed shortly by her husband wearing nothing at all and carrying a spatula – but Smith later admitted that she fabricated that story!

Smith’s first actual novel, published in 1969, concerns a nine-year old, strange girl similar to herself whose family is breaking up due to the mother running off with a man. Smith was excited to hear what her mother thought about her book, but her mother, concerned that the town would believe that she actually ran off with a man, proclaimed that she did not like it and actually threw it in the river. Her mother helped to censor Smith’s first and second book (the second book had sex in it, and her mother did not approve). Her hilarious anecdote of the creation of her first two novels showed how she incorporated events in her childhood and adolescence into her material.

After her first book, though, Smith said that she had used up her whole life up to that point and had nothing more to say. Luckily, she then became a reporter for the Tuscaloosa News in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and through her new position, she covered the “All South Majorette Competition,” an enormous event where the winner would be named “Miss Fancy Strut.” The competition was filled with charming young ladies and their “bitchy” mommas, she said. Of course, she named her next novel Fancy Strut.  It is a story about majorettes and their moms; her third novel was a breakthrough for her as no one in the novel was anything like her. She said that writers had to eventually stop writing about what they knew and about what they could learn and imagine. That way, she said, writers would come to experience that great pleasure, as Ann Tyler put it, of writing so as “to have more than one life,” which Smith called the greatest privilege and pleasure in the world.

Along the way, Smith had also realized that the relationship between real life and fiction is more complicated than she would ever have guessed. She said that she also wrote to find out what she thought. For instance, in 1980, she wrote a novel entitled Black Mountain Breakdown, where the protagonist Crystal Spangler alters her image for the various men in her life. Crystal loses her own true self and ends up literally paralyzed, but the most terrifying aspect of her condition is that she is happy. When Smith wrote the novel, she understood she was in a marriage that should have ended earlier. By reading the words from her novel, she understood how she felt during the last part of her marriage and was able to then deal with its inevitable ending. She said that her writing gives her a record of her former self.

Smith also said that writers, through their work, often express what is mute or unvoiced in their personality and minds. Along with expression, she said that writing has also become a source of strength for her. She intended for her novel Fair and Tender Ladies to be an honest account of the lives of all the resourceful mountain women she had grown up with. As she began the book, two catastrophic illnesses struck her family, and she spent two years sitting by hospital beds. Smith said that she did not know what she would have done if she had not been writing her novel. The heroine of the story, Ivy Rowe, grew stronger the more Smith needed her and actually became her best friend. Afraid that her mother would die, Smith did not want to finish the novel and began to write slower. Her mother eventually died slowly, and then after her mother’s death, she wrote the last line of the book. To her, writing is comforting and therapeutic. 

Smith’s last point concerning writing was that it has given her a chance to run into all kinds of people. She said that at times, she would meet someone only briefly and get curious about them.  Then, she just had to complete that person’s story. To her, writing has been a journey. She ended by saying that writing is a great pleasure and pastime that she would recommend to everyone.

Lee Smith’s entertaining and insightful talk was made possible by MOCH, the River City Writers Series, and the Creative Writing club, with important assistance from Public Service Funds and Student Event Allocation.  Thank you to all who came out!

The Warmth of Other Suns

About 700 people came into the Rose Theater on Thursday, February 7, to hear Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson deliver the Belle McWilliams Lecture in American History for 2012-2013.  She spoke on the “great migration” of blacks from the American South during the period 1915 to the 1970s. Her book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, was the basis for her lecture. 

As a preliminary to the lecture, the audience was treated to two choral pieces by Street Corner Harmonies, one of the ensembles of the Stax Music Academy, an institution that produces college-bound students from the Soulsville community and the greater Memphis area through music education. The first piece, “Middle Passage,” borrowed from the classic by the Reverend Thomas A. Dorsey, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” It was restrained, yet soulful.  But it hardly prepared the audience for the strikingly choreographed and vigorously performed “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel (and Why Not Every Man?),” which followed and received a standing ovation from the audience.

Ms. Wilkerson said that her book was about how far people are willing to go to improve their lives. During the period from 1915 to the 1970s approximately 6 million blacks left the rural South for urban areas of the nation, including the Northeast, the Midwest, and the Pacific Coast, the first time that the lowest class of Americans signaled that they had options and took them. In effect, they were seeking political asylum within their own country, she said.

Although her book, based on more than 1,200 interviews gathered over fifteen years, followed in detail the migrations of three of those 6 million — one to each to the sections just mentioned — Ms. Wilkerson chose to center her lecture on the more general reasons for the migration and the results that were achieved.

The situation that provoked the migration, she said, was the caste system in the South under the Jim Crow laws, an elaborate system of behavior based solely on skin color. She remarked that although many older audiences actually lived through some part of the period of migration or remember the system from its persistence long after the migration, high school audiences find it difficult to believe that she is telling the truth about a judge in North Carolina suspending a trial until a “black Bible” could be found for swearing in a black witness, a law forbidding blacks and whites in Birmingham from playing checkers together, or another law forbidding black motorists from passing slow white motorists. Students in Hawaii suggested that if they could not pass, they would have honked the horn or tail-gated closely to encourage the white motorists to speed up; they were appalled when they were told such things were just “not done” either with impunity. When one remarked, “Well, then, I would just have left,” she explained that was exactly what her book was all about.

Enforcement of the caste system always implied coercion and often went to the point of violence. During the period 1889-1929 there was a lynching every four days on average, sometimes just for “acting like a white person” or for committing minor offenses such as stealing small sums. Ms. Wilkerson remarked that the system caused a loss to whites as well — “to hold people down, you have to get in the ditch with them.”

Ms. Wilkerson explained that a partial reason for the migration beginning about 1915 was that the caste system had always depended on an oversupply of black laborers, most of them sharecroppers who did not own land themselves. The outbreak of war in Europe caused immigration to fall off at the same time that northern factories needed more workers to create the goods to support the Allies and later the American forces. Black workers from the South were part of the answer to the problem. Planters resisted, trying to keep blacks in the South, sometimes waving trains through passenger stations so that blacks could not board them.

She described in detail one particular migration by an Alabama family, sharecroppers with nine children, the youngest of whom was so frail that they worried about his ability to survive work in the cotton fields. Long dreaming of moving to Cleveland (they even named the youngest James Cleveland -- they called him J.C.), they finally made the move. The teacher in Cleveland could not understand his dialect and thought his name was Jesse and eventually the family followed suit. This was Jesse Owens, who in 1936 won four gold medals in the Olympics with Adolph Hitler looking on.

Other than Owens in sports, Ms. Wilkerson mentioned several writers and musicians who emerged out of the migration: Toni Morrison and Lorraine Hansberry in literature, and Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Jacksons, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, and John Coltrane in music. Indeed, she maintained, much of American culture was transformed through the migration. (Later in the lecture she said that she owed her own existence to the migration, for her parents would never have met otherwise.)

Ms. Wilkerson also emphasized the political importance of the migration, maintaining that it in time produced the civil rights movement, which was directed as much against reactions to blacks which had developed in northern states as against the southern caste system. The early migration had no acknowledged leaders, she said, but represented rather a people’s decision. Together the people accomplished what Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation could not do — "they freed themselves," Ms. Wilkerson asserted.

Toward the end of her lecture Ms. Wilkerson directed attention to the moment of departure for the migrants, usually a very poignant moment. The migrants were generally young people and their leaving the South was often a virtually complete break with the family, whom they might never see alive again. She reminded the audience that there was no Skype and no cell phones, only letters and expensive long-distance systems for the few who owned telephones of any sort, as well as expensive telegrams.

She ended with a quotation from Richard Wright, who left Natchez, Mississippi, in 1927 and passed through Memphis on his way to Chicago: “I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom.”

During the question-and-answer period which followed the lecture, someone asked Ms. Wilkerson what had prompted her to write the book. She explained that everyone knew The Grapes of Wrath, which described a much smaller group of migrants. She felt that there ought to be a book like it about the “great migration,” so she determined to write it.

A former correspondent for the New York Times, Ms. Wilkerson was the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, for reporting she did in 1994 when she was with the newspaper’s Chicago bureau. The Warmth of Other Suns won over ten major literary prizes, including the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Nonfiction, and has been named to over thirty periodicals' lists for “Best Books of the Year.”

 

The Belle McWilliams Lecture in American History has been made possible since 1980 by the Department of History through a bequest from Major Benjamin Schultze and his sister Ms Louise Fellows. They named a fund in honor of Miss Belle McWilliams, their aunt and guardian, “who for 40 years taught American History in the Memphis Public School system.” Besides the lecture series, the fund supports the Belle McWilliams Scholarships and other activities of the department.

For several years the lecture has been part of a series sponsored by the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities. This year MOCH also recruited a large host of co-sponsors: the Program in African and African-American Studies, the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, the Department of English, the Center for Research on Women, the Department of Journalism, and Facing History and Ourselves.

MOCH further worked with a huge number of community partners to publicize the event: African American Educators of Tomorrow, the African American Studies Program at Rhodes College, Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the Bridges Foundation, the Church Health Center, the Junior League of Memphis, Leadership Memphis, the Memphis Cotton Museum, the National Civil Rights Museum, the National Society of Black Engineers and Technologists, St. Andrew AME Church, the Soulsville Foundation, the Spence Wilson Chair at Rhodes College, Teach for America, United Way of Memphis, and the West Tennessee Historical Society.

The evening with Ms. Wilkerson was a highlight of the 2012-2013 MOCH calendar, and it was a memorable evening for everyone who participated.

Sex and World Peace

On Wednesday, November 14, Dr. Valerie Hudson gave a lecture about her new book Sex and the World Peace in the University Center Theatre. An audience of about 300 attended her fascinating talk. Dr. Hudson is the George H.W. Bush Chair at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texan A&M University. Her address was co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, the Program in International Studies, and the Center for Research on Women.

In her book, Hudson reveals some groundbreaking conclusions about how to promote peace in the modern world. She argues that the very best predictor of state security is its treatment of women. She started her lecture by welcoming the audience and showing her pleasure to be at the University of Memphis. She spent her day with the political science students and visiting the National Civil Rights Museum. Then she apologized, since the copies of her book did not arrive in Memphis due to the continued problems from Hurricane Sandy.

In her field of study, Hudson tries to move beyond the issue of conflict, which encompasses such themes as ethno-nationalism, democracy deficits, and poverty. She quoted Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General who was among the first major figures of the 21^st century to talk about empowering women and girls. Dr. Hudson related how colleagues at her old university had been skeptical about her research into the correlations between the status of women and national security; then she showed statistics for death rates from World War One and Two, revealing that the lost lives of women (from such phenomena as infanticide of young women) were even higher . She asked: “Might the security of women impact security of states?”

Dr. Hudson also discussed the issue of women and food security, as women have to find food and cook it, beside completing their other chores in homes and farms.  Where women have domestic security, there are higher rates of food security, and with that there is state stability. Women also have a role in economic prosperity, as lower rates of female education correspond to lower national income. In relation to health issues, the larger the gender gap, the higher the rate of disease. When the gender gap gets bigger, government corruption also increases. When the gap is lowered, the level of trust in the government becomes higher. In some cultures, marriage is arranged for economic stability, which leads to higher level of population since women have no control on their bodies. Treating women inadequately is the key for physical and structural violence in the world.

The subjugation of women is a threat to the security of the United States, according to Hillary Clinton. Hudson mentioned three “wounds” about women: violence against women, inadequate family laws, and lack of human-decision making. She talked about bad conditions and harsh situations that women suffer from around the world, such as rape, early marriage, sexual assault, domestic violence, women trafficking, honor crimes, sex selective abortion, and property rights. She concluded her lecture by listing several concrete first steps to recognize women as a half of the human race, such as accurate statistics on gender disparities and enforcement of international laws: she characterized these steps as the harvest of low-hanging fruits.

After fielding some interesting questions from the large and interested audience, Dr. Hudson chatted with many guests in an individual setting.  Her work and her talk provided an inspiration for many attendees, and it lent an appropriate conclusion to an exceptionally successful Fall 2012 season for the Marcus Orr Center for the Humanities.

Dr. Anne Twitty Saves the Day!

On Thursday, November 1, 2012, Dr. Deborah Gray White of Rutgers University was supposed to deliver her lecture, “Brown Sugar Melts: African American Women at the Turn of the Millennium,” which would have also been the keynote lecture for the 14^th Annual Graduate Conference in African American History. However, Dr. White canceled on short notice after becoming stranded in New Jersey due to Hurricane Sandy.

But all was not lost! Dr. Anne Twitty, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi, accepted the task of delivering a keynote lecture to a big audience with about twenty-four hours notice.  She gave a captivating lecture entitled, “Promiscuous Legality: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence.” The audience, including President of the University Dr. Shirley Raines, almost packed the UC Theatre. Dr. Twitty thanked the audience for not “running for the doors” when they heard that she would speak instead of Dr. White.

Dr. Twitty spoke on slavery and legal culture in a region she called the “American Confluence,” an area consisting of the Northwest Territory. Before she continued on to the central subject of the lecture, she treated us to “candy before dinner.” To the audience’s surprise, Dr. Twitty played the entire second verse of the clean version of Jay Z’s popular hit “99 Problems,” and tied the mega-hit into her lecture. She declared that Jay Z’s song tells us so much about legal culture, and we could apply what we learned from the song to other historical occurrences, specifically the way slaves and slaveholders used the law. Dr. Twitty said that the song is a revelation since it focuses on legal knowledge and how individuals develop and use legal knowledge, “in order to manipulate the law for their own gain.” She said that in our daily lives, we use the law, and the law structures our behavior.

Dr. Twitty then gave us the essence of the lecture after we enjoyed our “candy.” She enlightened us on slavery and the law before the infamous Dred Scott Decision of 1857, which declared that slaves were not citizens of the United States, and that all individuals of African descent living in the country at that time were not entitled to the protection of the Constitution. Therefore, no slaves could sue in Federal courts in the United States. Dred Scott petitioned for his freedom in the St. Louis Circuit Court, which had become home to the largest collection of “freedom suits” by the time of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in 1857. In fact, for centuries before the ruling, according to Dr. Twitty, slaves had the right to petition the court for their freedom, which was a right that derived from early modern English law.

Dr. Twitty related that the collection of freedom suits consisted of either petitions or formal written requests of nearly 300 slaves and more than 1,000 depositions and affidavits of those who owned, sold, hired, or worked among the slaves. She explained how the freedom suits complicate our understanding of slavery and legal culture. Freedom suits, she said, also provide details about the lives of slaves; many of the slaves who filed a freedom suit were urban slaves who had travelled a long way to St. Louis, which she referred to as the center of the American Confluence. She said that because of St. Louis’s ideal location, the St. Louis Circuit Court was an obvious site for the slaves’ legal battles; many slaves who had petitioned for their freedom in St. Louis had already spent a large amount of time in the Northwest Territory and therefore had the legal basis to file a freedom suit.

Dr. Twitty said that the collection of freedom suits also display that slaves and small slave owners learned about the law through their experience with slavery and had a keen understating of the law, specifically the laws that shaped their lives. She described the history of Maria Whiten, a female slave who filed a petition for her freedom in the St. Louis Circuit Court in 1829. Whiten and other petitioners had a savvy grasp of the law and were relatively informed of the state statues that allowed them to petition for their freedom. Dr. Twitty said that although the majority of the slaves were illiterate and had no legal education, they had a complex understanding of the law and used their knowledge to earn their freedom. Dr. Twitty said that an analysis of the hundreds of freedom suits showcases “the world before Dred Scott,” a world that was shaped by the law and where slaves and slave owners attempted to manipulated the law for their own gain.

Following the lecture, Dr. Twitty answered questions from audience members in a succinct but informative question and answer session. Based on the questions asked (and the amount of seats still occupied once the lecture ended), the audience apparently enjoyed Dr. Twitty’s brilliant lecture.

Katherine Bassard, "Transforming Scriptures"

On Thursday, October 18, the Marcus Orr Center hosted a wonderful lecture by Dr. Katherine Bassard about her latest book, Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible.  Dr. Bassard is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University.

She started out her lecture by welcoming the audience and sharing her pleasure to address the Naseeb Shaheen lecture, which is an annual event that is sponsored by the English Department.  She told a story about her visit to the library when she was a graduate student.  While looking for a book, she realized that the books on African American literature occupied only two half shelves.  She determined then that she would dedicate her career to remedying that situation. 

In her lecture, Dr Bassard intended to answer two questions. The first one was: “What did African American Women see in the Bible?”  The second one was: “What African American women do with the Bible?” Her talk reflected back onto the era of slavery in the nineteenth century and the particular hardships that African Americans faced during that time, but she also analyzed the writing of contemporary authors such as Toni Morrison, showing both the changes and continuities in how black women writers dealt with the Bible. 

Dr. Bassard explained the phrase “turning cursing into blessing” based on verses from various versions of the Bible.  Historically, she showed, African American women bore the curse of Adam (such as death, pain, disease…), curse of Eve (such as pain when giving birth), and the curse of Ham (such as being enslaved).  Yet through nuanced readings of various translation of the Bible as well as the work of authors such as Frances Harper and Zora Neale Hurston, she highlighted how black women writers reappropriated the Bible, emphasizing the idea of all people being brothers and sisters. 

Dr Bassard concluded her lecture by talking about her family’s history in relation to the Bible. In 2005, she stumbled upon a deed in the archives of the University of Virginia showing that her great-grandfather, Lafayette Banks, who may have been born in slavery, purchased five acres from the family of a former slaveowner – the man, Benjamin Randolph, had a diary in which he wrote. “References to Scripture authority for the Institution of Slavery.”  Yet Banks showed a steady rise from slavery to independenece.  When he bought the land in 1891, he marked the deed with an X.  The 1910 census listed him as able to read but not write.  In 1920, the census taker recorded that, at age 67, he could read and write.  There was a small comfort and inspiration in that story.

When Dr. Kathleen Turner took the podium to give her official response to the presentation by keynote speaker Dr. Karlyn Campbell, she joked that she was intimidated to be taking on “The Queen of Rhetoric.” Dr. Campbell, a professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, is the author or editor of eight books, including Deeds Done in Words: Presidential Rhetoric and the Genres of Governance.  She is a winner of the Distinguished Scholar Award by the National Communication Association. 

Dr. Campbell’s talk, held on Thursday, September 27, headlined the second event of the Fall 2012 season for MOCH, as well as our first event on campus.  It was a great success.  The audience numbered nearly 300 people, with attendees including students from the university, concerned citizens in the community, and numerous Communication and scholars from all across the U.S. participating in the 13^th Biennial Public Address Conference.

In a lively and stimulating talk, Dr. Campbell explained how political discourse affects everyday life and that “civic learning is key.” Ingeniously unveiling the rhetorical power and malleability of the Monroe Doctrine, she touched on the United States government’s involvement with outside powers, such as Chile, Nicaragua, and Cuba, paying particular attention to American leaders’ rhetorical strategies.  She professed, “Our hemisphere of freedom and commitment for democratic self-government uses rhetoric as a powerful force in foreign affairs.”

Following her lecture, Dr. Turner and Dr. James Jasinski of the University of Puget Sound offered respectful analyses of Dr. Campbell’s talk.  The night concluded with a quick and congenial question and answer session.  Thanks to all those who came!

What a successful first MOCH event of the semester with Dr. Kristen Iversen! Close to 200 attendees listened to the author of Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats with enthusiasm and anticipation. The audience included Dr. Iversen’s past students, faculty and graduate students from the university, and interested citizens from the Memphis community, including many who are involved in movements for public health and peace.  All joined together at the IMAX Theatre at the Pink Palace Museum to hear about her impressively researched and articulated “story of silences.”

The lecture included a presentation of her old family pictures, which contrasted with the ominous black and white photos of Rocky Flats and the  operations inside this still-dangerous and radioactive nuclear weapons plant.  This facility, which she grew up near and where she later worked, produced over 70,000 plutonium bits, each worth up to $4 million.  One millionth of a plutonium particle is capable of causing health problems such as cancer.

Despite the seriousness of the occasion, the crowd shared some laughs over Iversen’s sense of “gallows humor.” Though subjects like these are no joking matter, she lightheartedly expressed that because her family was raised in such a radioactive area, it contributed to why they all have such “glowing” personalities.  Yet some of her information – in the form of photos, maps, and graphs – struck the audience as truly eerie and chilling.  

Iversen characterized Full Body Burden as her own personal awakening to the dangers that linger in this world today – and for hundreds of generations to come – in regards to nuclear weapons and nuclear power. She ended the night by encouraging everyone that American society needed to acknowledge this issue as a paramount threat.  

Her overall message: government and private corporations have set a “cloak of secrecy” over nuclear projects.  We should no longer live under that shadow, as it places millions of innocent people at risk.  We paid the price in the past, we are paying it now, and we will keep paying it in the future.

Italian Film Festival

The second annual Italian Film Festival was a great success.  Associate Professor of Italian Dr. Cosetta Gaudenzi worked with Italian Film Festival USA to bring three recent films by up-and-coming directors to Memphis. The Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities was proud to present the films in conjunction with the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.  We also received support from Magneti Marelli and the Italian Culture Institute, while our friends at the Italian-American organization UNICO generously provided delicious treats at the conclusion of each film. 

At least 100 people attended each film and submitted ballots ranking the films, with the results helping to serve a larger competition run by Italian Film Festival USA.  The Memphis festival began on Tuesday, March 27, with Into Paradiso, a hilarious film about an unlikely friendship between scientist from Naples and a former Sri Lankan cricket star, set against a backdrop of organized crime and immigration to Italy.  On Thursday, March 29, over 140 people watched Scialla!, winner of the Contracampo Prize at the 2011 Venice Film Festival; the film humorously chronicles the tale of a washed-up writer who finds out that one of his listless students is actually his son.  On April 3, the festival concluded with Tatanka, a drama based on a true story about a powerful boxer who cannot seem to shake the influence of the mob.

The Italian Film Festival was the last major event on the calendar of the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities in 2011-2012.  The season concludes on April 12 with an "informance" of the play The Arabian Nights, led by Dr. Kent Schull.  Dr. Schull, a specialist on Middle Eastern history, will illuminate the complicated origins, manifestations, and meanings of this play in advance of the opening night performance.  The informance is free and open to the public, at 6:00 p.m. in the CCFA lobby.

Brian Stelter on "Old Media, New Media, Your Media"

On March 22, New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter delivered the address of the 30th annual Freedom of Information Congress, a lecture series devoted to issues of the First Amendment.  The Marcus Orr Center co-sponsored the event with the Society of Professional Journalists, the Department of Journalism, and Student Event Allocation Funds.

Mr. Stelter gave an engaging, informal talk, one full of enthusiasm and insights.  He told his own story: he started blogging when he was eleven years old, in his parents' basement, because he was such a fan of R.L. Stine's "Goosebumps" series of children's books.  That endeavor actually laid the foundation for his career, and it lent the heart of his advice to aspiring journalists.  He urged them that in this new age of social media and the internet, a journalist can follow his or her own passions, and thus make themselves an indispensable expert to a niche market.

Mr. Stelter kept blogging about new topics as his interests matured.  While a college student at Towson University, he started the blog TVNewser, which was soon read by media industry insiders, as well as countless fans of his scoops and analysis.  While only twenty-one years old, he was hired by the New York Times, a signal of a new era for the "Grey Lady," as it sought to incorporate younger voices in today's new media world.

Mr. Stelter kept his formal remarks short and took a wide array of questions from the audience at the University Center, which numbered over 200 people.  In contrast to the gloom-and-doom forecasts of most people in the newspaper business, Stelter reflected some optimism about the industry, and especially about the fast and wide flow of information through Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and newspaper websites.  He noted how tablets will soon revamp the way that people consume digital news.

Joe Hayden, Associate Director of the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities, provided opening remarks, and Dean Richard Ranta of the College of Communication and Fine Arts introduced the speaker.  Student Chris Whitten, president of the student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, emceed the affair.

Eric Foner on "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery"

The Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities hosted another event that packed the University Center Theater to capacity, proving once again its ability to stage events that bridge the academy and the community. 

Dr. Eric Foner, Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, delivered the Belle McWilliams Lecture for 2011-2012 on February 23. In connection with the 150th anniversary of the drafting of the Emancipation Proclamation, he discussed his latest book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, exploring the complex evolution of Lincoln’s views about slavery from his Kentucky roots through his presidential vision for post-Civil War America.

Among those who walked away impressed were students Juan Roncal and Chimene Okere.  “His oration skills matched the content of his lecture,” said Roncal.  Okere added that he appreciated Foner’s “different perspective on Lincoln,” stating that he was inspired to buy and read a copy of The Fiery Trial.

Dr. Foner began by noting that many recent books about Lincoln are introspective and self-referential, not considering or at least slighting the outside world. He intended his book to “put Lincoln back into history,” specifically the history of the American slavery issue.

What Charles Sumner called the “anti-slavery enterprise” ranged from gradualists and colonizers on the more conservative wing to radical abolitionists on the other. Lincoln occupied different positions on this spectrum at different times, showing his capacity for growth. (Dr. Foner observed that while Lincoln’s position changed, at any given time everything in his position was consistent.) Lincoln was not an abolitionist, Dr. Foner said, but rather a politician virtually all his life. While he was a member of the Whig Party, slavery was not an issue for him because of his concern that a debate about slavery would destroy the party as a national entity. It was only in the 1850s, when the Whigs did disintegrate and Lincoln joined the Republican Party that he began to speak about slavery. Even then, he denied being a believer in “Negro equality,” basing his opposition to slavery on its violation of the Declaration of Independence’s principles of liberty and pursuit of happiness. He believed that all persons had the right to enjoy the fruits of their labors, and therefore slavery was theft.

Lincoln said he always hated slavery. Why, Dr. Foner asked, was he not an abolitionist? Politically, Lincoln could not afford to be an abolitionist. There were few in Illinois and they were sometimes were lynched. Lincoln’s guiding principle was always his reverence for the Constitution and his firm belief in self-government. He did not believe in Manifest Destiny, however, maintaining that America should lead by example instead of forcing itself upon other peoples.

Lincoln’s original views were that slaves should be freed but that they should then be colonized in other parts of the world so that there would be no social or economic problems resulting from their freedom. While Henry Clay had argued for colonization on the grounds that freed slaves in America would be dangerous, even criminal, Lincoln believed that American racism would always prevent freedmen from advancing themselves, so their only hope was colonization.

Lincoln’s initial efforts proved fruitless. When he urged Delaware, which had only 1800 slaves, to take the lead in working toward abolition, he was soundly rebuffed. Similarly, when he presented the proposal to the other slave-holding border states, which had more slaves, he had no success. When he urged blacks in the District of Columbia to work for colonization, once more his appeal was rejected. Lincoln had to come up with something new. Lincoln did not think the Civil War was originally intended to abolish slavery, but abolitionists pressed the issue. His first movement in that direction was to permit the slaves who flocked to Union forts to be regarded as “contraband of war” — which meant that he regarded them as Confederate property being used illegally against the Union. As the war dragged on, Congress was moving more and more toward abolition: the war was not being won and many urged an attack on slavery as being the only way to destroy the Confederacy’s power; enthusiasm for enlistement was waning and there were calls for letting blacks fight; and slavery itself was disintegrating as thousands of refugees continued to flock to the Union forts.

The result was the Emancipation Proclamation, which Dr. Foner called the most misunderstood document in American history. While it did not apply to the border states or the areas of the Confederacy under Union occupation, which had about 750,000 slaves, it proclaimed immediate freedom for 3,200,000, the largest emancipation in history. Because it applied to areas under Confederate control at the moment it was issued, the proclamation is said by some to have freed no slaves. But it committed the Union armies to protecting those declared free as those armies moved into the affected areas.

What gave the president the right to issue such a proclamation? The Constitution does not convey such a right, but Lincoln issued the proclamation as commander-in-chief, using the concept of “war powers” that have routinely been asserted by American presidents. The emancipation was based on military necessity and all but the concluding sentence were strictly military. Bowing to the insistence of Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln agreed to add the words “sincerely believed to be an act of justice.”

The Emancipation Proclamation differed radically from Lincoln’s earlier beliefs about slavery. Emancipation was immediate. There was no compensation to slave-holders. There was nothing about colonization; instead freedmen were urged to work in America for “reasonable” wages, that is, wages that they bargained for on their own terms. Lincoln was then faced with considering the place of blacks in America, but he was assassinated before he could finish the process.

 Dr Foner said that, as Lincoln put it in his second inaugural address, “All knew that this interest [slavery] was somehow the cause of the war,” although many other issues, such as disagreements over tariff policies, have been advanced: “Six hundred thousand people don’t kill themselves over tariffs.” He pointed out that his book title says “American slavery,” not “southern slavery.” The North was complicitous in maintaining slavery. In his second inaugural address, before his famous statement about “With malice toward none, with charity for all,” Lincoln expressed the fervent hope that the war would soon cease: “Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Among the responses to questions that were asked after the lecture, Dr Foner spoke to several additional points:

He said that race was not an important issue for Lincoln at any time. He received numerous blacks at the White House, always on equal terms (Frederick Douglass remarked that Lincoln treated him like a man). Slavery, not race, was the important category for Lincoln.

Delaware, with only 1800 slaves, rejected Lincoln’s proposal for compensated emancipation. The end of slavery in Delaware came only with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which Delaware had voted against. The slaveholders simply wanted to keep their slaves. Was there any change that Mississippi, or any other southern state, would have voluntarily ended slavery?

Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln as president, lacked every quality Lincoln had. He was stubborn, unable to get along with Congress, racist and determined to keep blacks down. What would have happened if Lincoln had lived? Dr. Foner noted that the question involved counterfactual history, which he said was easy because no one could prove his conjectures were wrong. He speculated that Lincoln and Congress could have worked out an acceptable plan for Reconstruction, because Lincoln nearly always accepted bills proposed by Congress (he voted only four bills overall, the only important one being the Wade-Davis Bill, which called for a harsh program for Reconstruction).

Dr. Foner has won almost every major prize in his profession. Foner has served as president of three historical and professional organizations (Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, and Society of American Historians), curated prizewinning museum exhibitions, and won numerous teaching awards at Columbia. He has also written in popular venues such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He also has appeared on programs such as Charlie Rose, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report.

The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize, and it was named by the New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year.

Tim Snyder on "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin"

On January 26, the Marcus Orr Center for the Humanities presented the Sesquicentennial Lecture in History: Dr. Timothy Snyder, Bird White Housum Professor of History at Yale University, spoke on his prize-winning book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. It has been named a Best Book of 2010 by The Economist, New Republic, Guardian, Reason, and Forward, and it has been translated into twenty languages. "A historian of the highest caliber,” remarked Andrei Znamenski, an Associate Professor of History.  “I love that the Marcus Orr Center was able to bring him. He changes our perception of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes by putting them into the context of their times.  His superb book uses the bloodlands of Eastern Europe to answer broad historical questions."

Before a packed house at the University Center Theater, Dr. Snyder delivered a thorough, insightful, and provocative lecture that inspired many conversations in the lobby and beyond.   "Dr. Snyder brought a fresh perspective to a number of issues that still concern us today," reflected Amber Colvin, a Ph.D. candidate in History.  Robert Davis, a senior, added that “the event was very informative.  He definitely went into the history of that part of the world at that time more deeply than I've heard before, while still making it understandable."  Other students called it “very well spoken and argued” and “very thought provoking and smart.”  Freshman student Micah Hansen said that he “was moved by the detailed accounts of individual suffering.”

During the years 1933 to 1945, there were 14,000,000 persons killed in the lands that lay between Germany and the Soviet Union. It represented the greatest scale of killings in modern Europe and does not include soldiers (if soldiers were included, the number would reach 28,000,000). Included in the 14,000,000 were 5,500,000 of the 6,000,000 Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Why, Dr Snyder asked, isn’t this common knowledge? He thinks the reason is chiefly that we tend to partition history into subjects like the Soviet Terror and the Holocaust, seeing them as separate rather than related events. Another reason is that history is usually written about nations and told from the point of view of their governments. He maintains that affairs are not determined by national issues, that national histories can only ask questions, not answer them. He rejects dialectics, maintaining that Germany and the Soviet Union were not opposites, despite their great differences, and did not cancel each other out. In many ways they strongly resembled each other.

Most of the writing about deaths during the period centers on the Germany concentration camps and the Soviet gulags. In fact, Dr. Snyder said, most Holocaust victims never saw a camp — they were shot very close to where they lived, and many of the deaths in the gulags occurred because the German invasion cut off Soviet logistics to the gulags. But the camps and the gulags left many records, while most of those killed in the bloodlands left few or no records.

Dr. Snyder does not find it helpful to invoke ideologies as the root of the killings. Ideologies change over time. Marxism was not originally concerned with killings but became so in the Soviet system. He believes that economics played a very important role. Both systems looked to the middle lands as a way of strengthening themselves, the Soviet Union seeking to modernize its economy and Germany seeking to find agricultural lands to support its population. Both wanted to get rid of Poland as simply being in the way, but they could not agree on what should happen to Ukraine.

Bloodlands divides into three segments: 1933-1938, when most of the killing was by the Soviet Union; 1939-1941, when the two nations were allied and killings were about equal between the two powers; and 1941-1945, when Germany took the lead. The early Soviet killings were directed mostly against Ukrainians, whom Stalin blamed for the failure of his policy of collectivization. The middle period was crucial, Dr. Snyder believes. The primary damage was that entire states were destroyed, and he believes that states were very important for the protection of minority rights. With states destroyed and the rule of law at an end, minorities were perilously at risk at the hands of collaborators. Dr. Snyder cited figures that indicated that minorities had a 1 in 2 chance of surviving in states that were allied with Germany. While not good, this was in startling contrast to the 1 in 20 chance where states had been destroyed. Germany turned against its former ally and went to war with the Soviet Union in 1941. The expectation was that there would be an easy victory and that the Jews could be driven eastward. But the Soviet Union did not fall, and Germany blamed the Jews for the failure of the invasion, leading to the third phase of the killings in which most were done by Germany.

Overall, Dr. Snyder emphasized, his book is not about comparisons between German and Soviet killings. Comparisons involve separation, and his book is more about interaction between the two systems.

Recognizing that it is impossible to do so completely, Dr. Snyder urged his readers to think in human terms, not of 14,000,000 killings but rather of one killing done 14,000,000 times. At the beginning of his lecture Dr. Snyder had told how three persons in the bloodlands anticipated and prepared for what seemed inevitable death in different ways. He ended his lecture by identifying each of them by name.

End of Season Wrap Up and Forthcoming Events

The Marcus Orr Center, its staff and generous contributors would like to thank everyone who participated in our last run of events for the Fall term. Highlights from the end of the season included a series of provocative French films (including the Academy Award winning Un prophète), local favorite Preston Lauterbach’s talk on the Chittlin Circuit, American roots music, and the ‘road to rock ‘n roll’ and the riveting informance “Prophets of Funk”, a celebration of the oeuvre and broader cultural legacy of Sly and the Family Stone.

Our final event, eminent UC Berkley Hebraist and literary critic Robert Alter’s discussion of the King James Version and its impact on American literature, drew a standing room only crowd.  Alter, author of over a dozen books on topics ranging from the Pentateuch to the writings of Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, was both keynote lecturer for and participant in a larger three day, community-wide series of events commemorating the 400^th anniversary of the first pressing of the KJV.

When we reconvene after the holidays, you can anticipate another fantastic string of MOCH events. On the 26^th, the History Department presents its Sesquicentennial Lecture wherein Timothy Snyder will be discussing his universally acclaimed Bloodlands, an in depth look at impact of Soviet-Nazi competition over the territories of East-Central Europe, modern day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Western Russia, and the Baltic states.  

Other upcoming events include the 2012 Italian language film festival, presented in cooperation with Indie Memphis, the Freedom of Information Congress, an informance on Arabian Nights, and a talk from Pulitzer Prize winning historian Eric Foner on the 150^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, all part of our continued effort to bring intellectually stimulating speakers both to the campus and larger Memphis community.