Pulitzer-prize winner Isabel Wilkerson to address Oakwood (1634 hits)
Isabel Wilkerson will be the special guest speaker for chapel on Thursday, February 28, at 10:00 a.m., in the Oakwood University Church. A book signing will follow the program.
Ms. Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times in 1994, making her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African-American to win for individual reporting in the history of American journalism.
She spent 15 years interviewing more than 1,200 people to write The Warmth of Other Suns, her award-winning work of narrative nonfiction that tells the epic story of three people who made the decision of their lives in what came to be known as the Great Migration. Tom Brokaw praises the book as "an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation."
The Great Migration was one of the biggest underreported stories of the 20th Century. It lasted from 1915 to 1970, involved six million people and was one of the largest internal migrations in U.S. history. It changed the cultural and political landscape of the United States, exerting pressure on the South to change and paving the way toward equal rights for the lowest caste people in the country. During the Great Migration, Wilkerson's parents journeyed from Georgia and southern Virginia to Washington, D.C., where she was born and reared.
Wilkerson is a gifted and passionate speaker who has addressed the topics of migration, social justice, urban affairs and 20th Century history at universities across the country and in Europe. She has appeared on national programs such as CBS' 60 Minutes, PBS's Charlie Rose, NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, NBC's Nightly News, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and others.
