The New Albany Lecture Series kicks off its 2021-22 season with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Isabel Wilkerson.
The annual New Albany Community Foundation event continues its goal to promote lifelong learning and touches on several subjects, starting with Wilkerson’s discussion on social justice before lectures on health and well-being, civil discourse and debate, and the national security program.
Wilkerson’s second nonfiction book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, was published in August 2020 and describes racism in the United States as a caste system – a system dividing society into classes – with similarities to those seen in India and Nazi Germany.
With the exception of Wilkerson’s event, which will happen on a virtual platform, the lecture series will take place at the Jeanne B. McCoy Community Center for the Arts.
A Daughter of the Great Migration
Wilkerson’s parents were part of the Great Migration, the movement of more than six million African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, Midwest and West between 1916 and 1970 because of unsatisfactory economic opportunities and harsh segregationist laws.
The history of the Great Migration became the focus of Wilkerson’s debut book with her parents as a starting point.
Wilkerson’s father hailed from Virginia while her mother was from Georgia. The two met at Howard University in Washington. The couple sent Wilkerson to an integrated school where most students were the children of diplomats and immigrants.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Wilkerson became the first African American woman to win the prestigious journalism award. Her feature writing for The New York Times earned her the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for her profile of a fourth-grader from Chicago’s South Side and two stories reporting on the Midwestern flood of 1993.
An Award-winning Debut
Wilkerson spent 15 years researching and writing her first book, which represented the Great Migration through the lenses of three people from that era.
The Warmth of Other Suns won several awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction.
Wilkerson moved to Atlanta in the 2000s and found inspiration there for the writing process of her first book.
“I was married at the time, so it was a joint decision (to move),” Wilkerson says in a 2012 interview with Arts ATL. “I think many African Americans feel a connection to the South because it is the mother country, you might say, for those in the North, Midwest and the West.
“I needed to know exactly what it was they had left. I didn’t realize the beauty of the place. I had experienced this story spending much of the time talking to people who were in exile, and they had an exile’s perspective, an expatriate’s perspective, so I really needed to be here.”
Coming to the Big Screen
Wilkerson’s second book saw similar success. Caste again achieved bestseller status and received much critical acclaim. The book was a finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
In October 2020, Netflix announced a new feature film adaptation based on Caste with Ava DuVernay, director of such films as 13th, Selma and A Wrinkle in Time, joining the production team.
Brandon Klein is the senior editor. Feedback welcome at bklein@ cityscenemediagroup.com.
