Grace Elizabeth Hale Corcoran department of History University of Virginia U Virginia Thu, 01/30/2020 - 12:30pm 101 LeConte Hall Dr. Grace Hale is Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia. She will speak on her paper, "The Lyncher in the Family: Reckoning with My Mississippi Grandfather and the Intimate History of White Supremacy." The “lyncher in the family” is a metaphor for just how close most white Americans are to the practice of white supremacy. Despite our desire to see vigilante violence as a relic of the distant past and a practice adopted only by backward people, lynchers were ordinary Americans. As recently as the 1960s, they worked the farms and ran the businesses and made and enforced the laws and edited the newspapers and sang in the choirs. For many Americans with white southern roots, the lyncher in the family is also a fact. Hale is the author of Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched the Alternative Scene and Changed American Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle-Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998), in addition to numerous articles. This is a free and public event. Sponsored by the Gregory Chair of the Civil War Era.
