Marx Library Hosts Alabama Historian Scotty Kirkland
Posted on December 16, 2021 by Arts and Sciences
The Mobile Museum of Art welcomed Alabama historian Scotty Kirkland to the University of South Alabama’s Marx Library for a lecture about state and local Civil Rights history inspired by the special exhibition, Gordon Parks: Segregation Story in Mobile, 1956.
Sponsors for the event included the University of South Alabama Department of History, Office of Community Engagement, Department of Art and Art History, African American Studies Program and Honors College.
Kirkland is the coordinator of exhibitions, publications, and programs at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. He authored the catalog for the award-winning bicentennial exhibition, We the People: Alabama’s Defining Document, and is currently working on a book on politics and race in twentieth-century Mobile. He is currently working on a book that explores politics and race in twentieth-century Mobile, a project he has worked on for over a decade. Kirkland lives with his wife and two children in Wetumpka, Ala.
Gordon Parks: Segregation Story in Mobile, 1956 is an exhibition of photographs that document the everyday activities and rituals of one extended black family, the Thorntons, in Mobile and Shady Grove, Alabama, during segregation. Life magazine asked Parks to shoot the photo essay shortly after the Montgomery bus boycotts. The photographs were published in 1956 and became known around the work for helping inspire the national civil rights movement. The exhibition closes on Dec. 30, 2021.