The Great Nonfiction Writers Lecture Series kicked off Wednesday evening in MacMillan 117 with an inaugural lecture from author Thulani Davis.
The series, presented by the Nonfiction Writing Program in the Department of English, will bring four internationally recognized nonfiction writers to campus this year from the genres of historical memoir, personal nonfiction, science narrative and film documentary. Future scheduled speakers include Brown alums Scott Russell Sanders '67 and Davis Guggenheim '86, producer of "An Inconvenient Truth."
At her lecture, Davis spoke about her latest book, the memoir "My Confederate Kinfolk," in which she investigates her family's black and white roots in Civil War and Reconstruction-era America. Her lecture focused on misinformation and missing records apparent in both journalism and historical documentation.
Davis' memoir recounts the history of her family's bloodlines in Mississippi - the black Davis lineage and white Campbell family line. Her book seeks to reassess "the Campbell family mythology" by examining inaccuracies in the family history, including the family's denial that they bought and sold slaves, she said.
Davis said she discovered that both the family and local newspapers took pains to cover up the lynching of a black member of the Mississippi House of Representatives on the Campbell family farm so that a member of the Campbell family could succeed him in the position.
In writing the memoir, Davis said she ran into the same problems of "missing documentation" that occurred in writing her earlier novel, "1959."
Problematic Reconstruction-era newspaper articles were sometimes completely removed from the newspapers' records, she said. Davis recalled an instance when she had to unearth newspaper articles from an alternative source: a man's personal scrapbook.
Davis was already familiar with finding gaps in published information. Growing up in 1950s Virginia, Davis said, the events of the civil rights movement in her town rarely appeared in the newspapers. As the desegregation movement in her neighborhood grew, "the newspapers reported less and less of what was happening," she said.
Davis said she learned from elementary school to be skeptical of journalism: "We couldn't believe everything we read. Our own textbooks could not be trusted."
Through the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, which she encountered in her later education, she also realized that "I knew I would have to find history for myself."
Discussing the state of journalism today, Davis lamented that "corporate takeovers have created a reduction of information." Americans today are getting their news from three or four sources that are usually repetitive, she said.
She commended "the margin" that is alternative journalism such as blogs and encouraged them to keep being creative and finding more ways of reaching people.
"Journalism may be needed now more than ever," Davis said.
In her historical research, Davis said she tried to look at "aspects of life in a microcosm" and strived to be able to "understand what is not in the books." She said examining daily life in the Reconstruction-era South helped her gain "a more writerly sense of how someone's day was spent." For example, she said, she noticed during a visit to Mississippi that the ground was loaded with rocks, and this helped her get a better sense of what it was like to be a slave working there without shoes.
Davis said her research forced her to reassess her identity. She found that many of her white ancestors, largely unknown to her, possessed character traits and physical features more akin to hers than her familiar black forebearers'. She noted that her own distinctive hairline - a trait absent in the black relatives she grew up with - was ubiquitous in the family photographs she found of Campbell women.
As a Buddhist priest and co-founder of the Brooklyn Buddhist Association, Davis was also surprised to find evidence of a spiritual awakening toward Buddism and Taoism in the writings of one of her white Reconstruction-era ancestors, who was herself a writer. Findings like these have made her realize that "some of what I am comes from places utterly unknown to me," Davis said.
"I am the logical conclusion of the Campbell story and the Davis story," she said.
Davis is a writer of books, plays, films, musical works and several award-winning PBS documentaries. She has written for an extensive repertoire of national publications, among them the New York Times, the Village Voice, the Nation and the Quarterly Black Review.
