Diane McWhorter
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Diane McWhorter | |
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Born | November 1, 1952 | (age71)
Occupation | Journalist |
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Rebecca Diane McWhorter(born November 1, 1952) is an American journalist, commentator, and author who has written extensively about race and the history ofcivil rights.She won thePulitzer Prize for General Nonfictionand theJ. Anthony Lukas Book Prizein 2002 forCarry 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
[edit]McWhorter is fromBirmingham, Alabama,where she attended theBrooke Hill School,which is now The Altamont School.
Among McWhorter's elementary school classmates wasMary Badham,who portrayed "Scout" Finch in the 1962 filmTo 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 fromWellesley Collegein 1974.[2]
Career
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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 forCarry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution.[3][4]She is also the author ofA Dream of Freedom,a young adult history of the civil rights movement (Scholastic, 2004).[5]She is a long-time contributor toThe New York Timesand has written for the op-ed page ofUSA Todayand forSlate,Harper's,Smithsonian,among other publications.[2]She is a member of the Board of Contributors forUSA Today's Forum Page, part of the newspaper's Opinion section, and has been managing editor ofBostonmagazine.[6]
She has been a Holtzbrinck Fellow at theAmerican Academy in Berlin,Germany, aGuggenheim Fellow,a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and a Fellow at theRadcliffe Institute for Advanced Study[6]and at theW. E. B. Du Bois Instituteat Harvard University.[7]In 2015 she was one of the recipients in the first year of theNational 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 onMoon over Alabama,a study ofWernher von Braunand the US space program in Alabama.[7][8][9]
Personal life
[edit]She marriedRichard Dean Rosenin 1987; they have two children.[10][11]
References
[edit]- ^"New details about Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, expored in new documentary".Public Radio International. June 5, 2011.RetrievedSeptember 30,2018.
- ^ab"Wellesley Alumna Wins Pulitzer Prize".Wellesley Wire.Wellesley College.April 10, 2002.
- ^"2002 Pulitzer Prizes".The Pulitzer Prizes.RetrievedFebruary 6,2016.
- ^"J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project".Nieman Foundation for JournalismatHarvard.RetrievedFebruary 6,2016.
- ^Noble, Don (July 10, 2005)."'Dream' offers a clear account of the civil rights movement ".The Tuscaloosa News.p. 4E.
- ^ab"DianeMcWhorter: 2011–2012 Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow".Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.RetrievedFebruary 6,2016.
- ^abLong, Alan (September 28, 2012)."Back to Birmingham: Du Bois Fellow McWhorter plans update on her Civil Rights classic".Harvard Gazette.Harvard University.
- ^abCharles, Ron (July 28, 2015)."Uncle Sam wants YOU to read 'popular' scholarly books".The Washington Post.
- ^Theil, Stefan (January 9, 2015)."How A Nazi Rocket Scientist Fought For Civil Rights".NPRBerlin.
- ^"Diane McWhorter Is Married to Richard Rosen".The New York Times.May 3, 1987.
- ^Schumer, Fran (April 2, 1990)."Star-Crossed: More Gentiles and Jews Are Intermarrying—And It's Not All Chicken Soup".New York magazine.pp. 32–38.
External links
[edit]- AppearancesonC-SPAN
- "The Civil Rights History Project: Survey of Collections and Repositories".American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.