As always, events will run from 4 to 6 pm Central Time (5 to 7 Eastern). As always, attending teachers will receive a certificate showing two hours of professional development.
Here’s the remainder of the fall lineup:
Wednesday, November 15: Fayette County’s Tent City Movement (Robert Hamburger) and the Lynching Sites Project (John Ashworth)
In 1965, graduate student Robert Hamburger visited Fayette County — a part of Tennessee where African Americans were still suffering the consequences of their attempt to fight for voting rights in the Tent City Movement which began about six years earlier. The end result of Hamburger’s experience was his 1973 book Our Portion of Hell, which told first-person accounts of that struggle from the point of view of people such as local farmers Harpman and Minnie Jameson. In this presentation, the now-retired author will retell the stories of people such as the Jamesons and explain how his time “in hell” affected his life.
John Ashworth speaks at a TN History for Kids event in July 2021
Part Two: We’ve always known there were lynchings in Tennessee, but until fairly recently, no one had ever compiled a list of them or mapped them. Brownsville native (and Vietnam veteran) John Ashworth is one of organizers of the Lynching Sites Project, and one of the many things that the project has done is create a detailed data base of Tennessee’s lynchings and collect details about these events. In this presentation, Ashworth will explain to teachers how their students can learn more about the project, and (more importantly) how they can dig up more about the history of their part of Tennessee.
Click here to register for November 15.