{"id":615,"date":"2011-11-22T12:54:08","date_gmt":"2011-11-22T12:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vandfam.net\/dev\/wordpressmu\/college\/?p=615"},"modified":"2011-11-22T12:54:08","modified_gmt":"2011-11-22T12:54:08","slug":"remembering-the-past-brings-power-to-the-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/?p=615","title":{"rendered":"Remembering the past brings power to the present"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Minrose Gwin with a wood-carved portrait of Medgar Evers made by the Mississippi-born folk artist Carl Dixon. (photo by Dan Sears)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Minrose Gwin spent years researching deep into the life of civil rights activist Medgar Evers for an academic project.<\/p>\n

To her surprise, she came away with more than one way to tell this tale of the segregated South: not only the scholarly work that had long been on her mind, but also a debut novel of note.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany people have forgotten Medgar Evers,\u201d says the Kenan Eminent Professor of English. \u201cIf you go into any classroom and ask students if they know who Medgar Evers was, maybe four will raise their hands. There are many students, of different backgrounds, who don\u2019t know who he is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Medgar Evers was a native of Mississippi, an African American veteran of World War II and field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His life, 1963 assassination, and two unsuccessful murder trials were national symbols of the civil rights movement. (Byron De La Beckwith was eventually convicted of Evers\u2019s murder in 1994.)<\/p>\n

Collective memory \u2013 why we remember some things and forget others \u2013 is central to Gwin\u2019s areas of academic interest: issues of race, gender, and sense of place. Gwin also grew up in Mississippi, living on the white side of segregation as a backdrop to her youth. She knew Evers could not be forgotten.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we don\u2019t remember the past, someone else is going to form that past differently and use it or misuse it,\u201d she says. \u201cRemembering the past brings power to the present.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was in the midst of research, scouring old newspapers on microfilm and studying everything she could on Evers\u2019s family, life and death, when a voice crept in she couldn\u2019t ignore: that of a child. Gwin followed.<\/p>\n

\u201cGood writing is writing toward what you don\u2019t know,\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s always been a process of uncovering things in my work, excavating. Writing is a lot like archaeology that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Florence Forest is the 10-year-old narrator of the resulting novel, The Queen of Palmyra<\/em>. A child in the midst of the racial world of the early 1960\u2019s, Florence grows up in Mississippi with a Klansman for a father and a progressive \u201ccake lady\u201d for a mother. Florence\u2019s \u201cwilled, necessary blindness\u201d\u2014what she sees and doesn\u2019t see of her father\u2019s violence–paints the larger picture of racial violence of the south.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe novel was really instigated by this idea of belated witness, people who know things and don\u2019t speak at the time, and who later come forward,\u201d she says. \u201cThere are these big, large-scale horrific things happening because people turn away and refuse, either consciously or unconsciously, to see them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The novel was a Barnes & Nobel Discover Great New Writers selection and a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. (Read review from UNC’s Endeavors magazine.)<\/a> Gwin\u2019s book, Remembering Medgar Evers\/Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement<\/em>, is due from University of Georgia Press in 2013, the 50th anniversary of the civil rights leader\u2019s assassination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Minrose Gwin spent years researching deep into the life of civil rights activist Medgar Evers for an academic project. To her surprise, she came away with more than one way to tell this tale of the segregated South: not only the scholarly work, but also a debut novel of note.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":616,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-carousel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}