Diane McWhorter
- Guggenheim Fellowship (2009)
- Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (2002)
- Berlin Prize (2007)
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).
Early life and education
McWhorter is from Birmingham, Alabama, where she attended the Brooke Hill School, which is now The Altamont 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]
Career
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]
Personal life
She married Richard Dean Rosen in 1987; they have two children.[10][11]
References
- ^ "New details about Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, expored in new documentary". Public Radio International. June 5, 2011. Retrieved September 30, 2018.
- ^ a b "Wellesley Alumna Wins Pulitzer Prize". Wellesley Wire. Wellesley College. 2002-04-10.
- ^ "2002 Pulitzer Prizes". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2016-02-06.
- ^ "J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project". Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Retrieved 2016-02-06.
- ^ Noble, Don (2005-07-10). "'Dream' offers a clear account of the civil rights movement". The Tuscaloosa News. p. 4E.
- ^ a b "DianeMcWhorter: 2011–2012 Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow". Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Retrieved 2016-02-06.
- ^ a b Long, Alan (2012-09-28). "Back to Birmingham: Du Bois Fellow McWhorter plans update on her Civil Rights classic". Harvard Gazette. Harvard University.
- ^ a b Charles, Ron (2015-07-28). "Uncle Sam wants YOU to read 'popular' scholarly books". The Washington Post.
- ^ Theil, Stefan (2015-01-09). "How A Nazi Rocket Scientist Fought For Civil Rights". NPR Berlin.
- ^ "Diane McWhorter Is Married to Richard Rosen". The New York Times. 1987-05-03.
- ^ Schumer, Fran (1990-04-02). "Star-Crossed: More Gentiles and Jews Are Intermarrying—And It's Not All Chicken Soup". New York magazine. pp. 32–38.
External links
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- "The Civil Rights History Project: Survey of Collections and Repositories". American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.
- v
- t
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(timeline)
groups
- Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights
- Atlanta Student Movement
- Black Panther Party
- Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
- Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
- Committee for Freedom Now
- Committee on Appeal for Human Rights
- Council for United Civil Rights Leadership
- Council of Federated Organizations
- Dallas County Voters League
- Deacons for Defense and Justice
- Georgia Council on Human Relations
- Highlander Folk School
- Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
- Lowndes County Freedom Organization
- Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
- Montgomery Improvement Association
- NAACP
- Nashville Student Movement
- Nation of Islam
- Northern Student Movement
- National Council of Negro Women
- National Urban League
- Operation Breadbasket
- Regional Council of Negro Leadership
- Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
- Southern Regional Council
- Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
- The Freedom Singers
- United Auto Workers (UAW)
- Wednesdays in Mississippi
- Women's Political Council
- Ralph Abernathy
- Victoria Gray Adams
- Zev Aelony
- Mathew Ahmann
- Muhammad Ali
- William G. Anderson
- Gwendolyn Armstrong
- Arnold Aronson
- Ella Baker
- James Baldwin
- Marion Barry
- Daisy Bates
- Harry Belafonte
- James Bevel
- Claude Black
- Gloria Blackwell
- Randolph Blackwell
- Unita Blackwell
- Ezell Blair Jr.
- Joanne Bland
- Julian Bond
- Joseph E. Boone
- William Holmes Borders
- Amelia Boynton
- Bruce Boynton
- Raylawni Branch
- Stanley Branche
- Ruby Bridges
- Aurelia Browder
- H. Rap Brown
- Ralph Bunche
- Guy Carawan
- Stokely Carmichael
- Johnnie Carr
- James Chaney
- J. L. Chestnut
- Shirley Chisholm
- Colia Lafayette Clark
- Ramsey Clark
- Septima Clark
- Xernona Clayton
- Eldridge Cleaver
- Kathleen Cleaver
- Charles E. Cobb Jr.
- Annie Lee Cooper
- Dorothy Cotton
- Claudette Colvin
- Vernon Dahmer
- Jonathan Daniels
- Abraham Lincoln Davis
- Angela Davis
- Joseph DeLaine
- Dave Dennis
- Annie Devine
- Patricia Stephens Due
- Joseph Ellwanger
- Charles Evers
- Medgar Evers
- Myrlie Evers-Williams
- Chuck Fager
- James Farmer
- Walter Fauntroy
- James Forman
- Marie Foster
- Golden Frinks
- Andrew Goodman
- Robert Graetz
- Fred Gray
- Jack Greenberg
- Dick Gregory
- Lawrence Guyot
- Prathia Hall
- Fannie Lou Hamer
- Fred Hampton
- William E. Harbour
- Vincent Harding
- Dorothy Height
- Audrey Faye Hendricks
- Lola Hendricks
- Aaron Henry
- Oliver Hill
- Donald L. Hollowell
- James Hood
- Myles Horton
- Zilphia Horton
- T. R. M. Howard
- Ruby Hurley
- Cecil Ivory
- Jesse Jackson
- Jimmie Lee Jackson
- Richie Jean Jackson
- T. J. Jemison
- Esau Jenkins
- Barbara Rose Johns
- Vernon Johns
- Frank Minis Johnson
- Clarence Jones
- J. Charles Jones
- Matthew Jones
- Vernon Jordan
- Tom Kahn
- Clyde Kennard
- A. D. King
- C.B. King
- Coretta Scott King
- Martin Luther King Jr.
- Martin Luther King Sr.
- Bernard Lafayette
- James Lawson
- Bernard Lee
- Sanford R. Leigh
- Jim Letherer
- Stanley Levison
- John Lewis
- Viola Liuzzo
- Z. Alexander Looby
- Joseph Lowery
- Clara Luper
- Danny Lyon
- Malcolm X
- Mae Mallory
- Vivian Malone
- Bob Mants
- Thurgood Marshall
- Benjamin Mays
- Franklin McCain
- Charles McDew
- Ralph McGill
- Floyd McKissick
- Joseph McNeil
- James Meredith
- William Ming
- Jack Minnis
- Amzie Moore
- Cecil B. Moore
- Douglas E. Moore
- Harriette Moore
- Harry T. Moore
- Queen Mother Moore
- William Lewis Moore
- Irene Morgan
- Bob Moses
- William Moyer
- Elijah Muhammad
- Diane Nash
- Charles Neblett
- Huey P. Newton
- Edgar Nixon
- Jack O'Dell
- James Orange
- Rosa Parks
- James Peck
- Charles Person
- Homer Plessy
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
- Fay Bellamy Powell
- Rodney N. Powell
- Al Raby
- Lincoln Ragsdale
- A. Philip Randolph
- George Raymond
- George Raymond Jr.
- Bernice Johnson Reagon
- Cordell Reagon
- James Reeb
- Frederick D. Reese
- Walter Reuther
- Gloria Richardson
- David Richmond
- Bernice Robinson
- Jo Ann Robinson
- Angela Russell
- Bayard Rustin
- Bernie Sanders
- Michael Schwerner
- Bobby Seale
- Cleveland Sellers
- Charles Sherrod
- Alexander D. Shimkin
- Fred Shuttlesworth
- Modjeska Monteith Simkins
- Glenn E. Smiley
- A. Maceo Smith
- Kelly Miller Smith
- Mary Louise Smith
- Maxine Smith
- Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson
- Charles Kenzie Steele
- Hank Thomas
- Dorothy Tillman
- A. P. Tureaud
- Hartman Turnbow
- Albert Turner
- C. T. Vivian
- Wyatt Tee Walker
- Hollis Watkins
- Walter Francis White
- Roy Wilkins
- Hosea Williams
- Kale Williams
- Robert F. Williams
- Andrew Young
- Whitney Young
- Sammy Younge Jr.
- Bob Zellner
- James Zwerg
songs
- "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round"
- "If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus"
- "Kumbaya"
- "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize"
- "Oh, Freedom"
- "This Little Light of Mine"
- "We Shall Not Be Moved"
- "We Shall Overcome"
- "Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind Stayed On Freedom)"
- Jim Crow laws
- Lynching in the United States
- Plessy v. Ferguson
- Buchanan v. Warley
- Hocutt v. Wilson
- Sweatt v. Painter
- Hernandez v. Texas
- Loving v. Virginia
- African-American women in the movement
- Jews in the civil rights movement
- Fifth Circuit Four
- 16th Street Baptist Church
- Kelly Ingram Park
- A.G. Gaston Motel
- Bethel Baptist Church
- Brown Chapel
- Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
- Holt Street Baptist Church
- Edmund Pettus Bridge
- March on Washington Movement
- African-American churches attacked
- List of lynching victims in the United States
- Freedom Schools
- Freedom songs
- Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam
- "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence"
- Voter Education Project
- 1960s counterculture
- African American founding fathers of the United States
- Eyes on the Prize
- In popular culture
- Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
- Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument
- Civil Rights Memorial
- Civil Rights Movement Archive
- Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument
- Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument
- Freedom Rides Museum
- Freedom Riders National Monument
- King Center for Nonviolent Social Change
- Martin Luther King Jr. Day
- Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
- Mississippi Civil Rights Museum
- National Civil Rights Museum
- National Voting Rights Museum
- St. Augustine Foot Soldiers Monument
historians