AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR PAUL HENDRICKSON TO DISCUSS HIS BOOK SONS OF MISSISSIPPI

 RIVERDALE, N.Y. – Paul Hendrickson, veteran journalist, educator and author, will discuss his award-winning book Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy on November 3 at 4:00 p.m. in Manhattan College’s Smith Auditorium. Published in 2002, Sons of Mississippi won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2003 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for excellent nonfiction. The book is being read this semester by many students in their required freshman writing course.

Sons of Mississippi explores the lingering aspects of the racism surrounding the 1962 integration of the University of Mississippi by Civil Rights activist James Meredith. Meredith is best known as the first African-American student of the university after he risked his life by successfully applying the laws of integration at the institution. In his book, Hendrickson explores perhaps the most famous photo of that time. Captured in an infamous photograph, which appeared in the ’60s on the cover of Life magazine, seven white Mississippi lawyers have gathered to stop Meredith from integrating the school. One of the men in the photo is swinging a billy club. More than 30 years later, Hendrickson set out to discover who these men were, what happened to them after the photograph was taken and how attitudes about race shaped the way they lived their lives.

Hendrickson, a prizewinning feature writer for the Washington Post for more than 20 years, now teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Seminary: A Search, Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott (a finalist for the

National Book Critics Circle Award) and The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (a finalist for the National Book Award). Hendrickson’s lecture is sponsored by the school of arts and the department of English at Manhattan College.

For more information about this event, please call Dan Collins at (718) 862-7498. If you are a member of the press and are interested in covering this lecture, please call Melanie A. Farmer at (718) 862-7232. The College is located at West 242nd Street near Broadway in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, accessible by MTA subway line 1. For driving directions to the College, visit
http://www.manhattan.edu/about/directions.shtml.

Manhattan College, founded in 1853, is an independent, Catholic, coeducational institution of higher learning offering more than 40 major programs of study in the areas of arts, business, education, engineering and science, along with graduate programs in education and engineering.