USA Presents the 2014 Annual Stallworth Lecture

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Posted on October 24, 2014

Joy Washington

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The University of South Alabama department of history in partnership with the USA Foundation will present the eighth annual N. Jack Stallworth Lecture featuring Distinguished Professor of History Dr. James Oakes on Thursday, Nov. 6 at 7 p.m. in the USA Student Center Ballroom. This event is free and open to the public.

Oakes, of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, will lecture on “Self Emancipation” and the antislavery movement. A book signing and reception will be held following the lecture. Oakes earned his Ph.D., from the University of California at Berkeley and has held positions at Purdue University, Princeton, Northwestern University, and the City University of New York.

Oakes’ latest book is “The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War,” and was published in May, 2014. He is also the author of “The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders,”1982; “Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South,” 1990; “The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics,” a 2008 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize award-winner; and “Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865,” which won the 2013 Lincoln Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Historian Eric Foner described this book as “the best account ever written of the complex historical process known as emancipation.”

This lecture is named in honor of N. Jack Stallworth, a well-known Mobile businessman, who owned several business ventures and restaurants. Stallworth was instrumental in founding American’s Junior Miss completion, now renamed the Distinguished Young Woman Program; the Mobile Chapter of the English Speaking Union; and Camellia Ball. He was a leader of the Mobile Carnival Association and was best known as “Mr. Mardi Gras.”

Stallworth’s love for Mobile Southern life and history led him to establish and support N. Jack Stallworth Lecture in Southern History through the USA department of history and the USA Foundation. He also funded two scholarships in memory of his parents Montgomery Carlton and Minnie Lee Stallworth. Also, the Stallworth family home and contents were left to the USA Foundation to be used to enhance the teaching of Southern history and to support programs at USA.                                                                       

 

 

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