Noted Author and NC Native William McKee Evans to Speak on Race in America at UNC Wilmington March 17
3/12/2010 9:13:06 AM
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William McKee Evans, author of Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America, will speak at the University of North Carolina Wilmington at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 17 in the Education Building, Room 162. The program, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by a book signing with the author.
Evans, professor emeritus of history at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, will discuss how and why a distinctive pattern of black-white racial behavior and ideas emerged in the United States and why this pattern has changed over the years.
A native of Robeson County who earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in history from UNC-Chapel Hill, Evans is one of the foremost historians of the Reconstruction era in North Carolina. His previous books include Ballots and Fence Rails, about Reconstruction in Wilmington and the Lower Cape Fear and To Die Game, an account of Henry Berry Lowry, the Lumbee Indian “Robin Hood” who fought a guerrilla war with the white establishment through the Civil War and much of Reconstruction.
Open Wound looks at race in America from colonization of the New World to the present. Evans focuses on the three points when American race relations made significant advancements: after the American Revolution, after the Civil War and during the Cold War, when fear of communism and the end of colonialism helped to liberate many African Americans from a segregated stratum of American society. At this point, Evans asserts, class became more important than color. But never had class, being poor, been a more formidable obstacle for any individual, black or white, to getting ahead.
Today, Evans states, many African Americans remain segregated in jobless communities with dilapidated schools and dismal prospects in an increasingly polarized class society. Now he sees a new crisis looming in a convergence of environmental disaster, endless wars and economic collapse, which may again open space for a challenge to the racial system.
The event is co-sponsored by the UNCW departments of sociology and criminology, philosophy and religion, and history, and by the Upperman African-American Cultural Center.
Critical praise for Open Wound:
"William McKee Evans is that rare scholar who writes clearly and well, displays an impressive grasp of the smaller facts of history, and yet can rise above the fray of footnotes to make sweeping and extraordinarily telling historical observations. This book represents the capstone of a remarkable career, and it is his most expansive and well considered work."--Timothy B. Tyson, author of Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
"A penetrating look at the complicated history of race in America." -- Booklist
Media contact:
Dana Fischetti, media relations manager, 910.962.7259 or fischettid@uncw.edu
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