County of Buncombe issued the following announcement on Oct. 24.
As part of the community efforts to help raise local consciousness of racial history Buncombe County Special Collections, in partnership with Martin Luther King Jr. Association of Asheville and Buncombe County and the Equal Justice Initiative, is preparing to mount a permanent exhibit about racial terror violence in Buncombe County. The central focus of the exhibit is soil samples collected at sites where Black men were lynched in our area presented together with information about each one of the victims and the events surrounding their murder.
A series of programs that focus on race relations in the Jim Crow South and how historians have interpreted the period over time will mark the occasion. The public is invited to join distinguished author James C. Cobb for a talk on his upcoming biography of American historian C. Vann Woodward on Tuesday, Nov. 1.
Revisiting the ‘Bible of the Civil Rights Movement’: C. Vann Woodward’s Strange Career of Jim Crow
When: Tuesday, Nov. 1 at 6 p.m.
Where: Lord Auditorium, Pack Memorial Library
Cost: This event is free and open to the public
Details: “Contrary to legend, Dr. King did not refer to Woodward’s book as such in his speech at the completion of the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, but that was precisely how Woodward intended the book to function,” notes author James C. Cobb. “In the end, his determination to make it a source of inspiration optimism to civil rights activists led to a deeply flawed and misleading account of the origins of segregation in the South.”
Malaprop’s Bookstore will be on hand with copies of the new book for sale.
Original source can be found here.
