The APL Presents Dr. Wayne Flynt
- Time
-
Jul 20 2015 3:00PM - 4:00PM
- Location
- Auburn Public Library
- Contact
- 334.501.3195
- Cost
- Free
To help celebrate Alabama history and the release of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, Dr. Wayne Flynt will be presenting “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Alabama: Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman, and Small Southern Towns.” Dr. Flynt’s personal history and experience in Alabama is varied and encompasses a great deal of the history he writes about in his work.
Please join us Monday, July 20 at 3:00 p.m. for Dr. Flynt’s talk and some light refreshments. Harper Lee, author of the southern classic To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) had this to say about Dr. Flynt: “I do so admire Wayne Flynt. Here is a man with a gift for making long ago and the recent past come alive. He writes with an unclouded clarity, and makes writing history the work of an artist; I savor the delights of Alabama in the Twentieth Century." [i]
Wayne Flynt is a fourth generation Alabamian. Son of a steel worker/salesman father and school teacher mother, he graduated from Anniston High School, then attended Samford University. Deflected away from the ministry and Alabama by the state's 1960s racial conflicts, he returned to his native state with his Ph.D. from Florida State University largely because of the influence of a novel he read, Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. [ii]
Dr. Wayne Flynt, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Auburn, author of eleven books, and one of the most recognized and honored scholars of Southern history, politics, and religion has also published his memoir Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives in which he writes about his experiences in the Civil Rights movement. The September 15, 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church was key in shaping Flynt’s views on the movement, confirming for him that those against civil rights were wrong and those who supported the movement were right. Flynt notes that being seventy allowed him some freedom in writing. “I’m retired, I don’t give a hoot what anybody thinks about me…nobody can get me fired because you can’t fire someone from retirement.”
As an historian, Flynt understands the sharp contrast between writing for academia and writing memoirs. “[With history] you’re tied to your sources, tied to facts.” A teacher, believes Flynt, is always a teacher, and can be a teacher in so many different ways—through writing, through lectures or through his or her memoir. It is Flynt’s ultimate wish to leave a legacy. “I’d sort of like for somebody to believe…somehow Alabama’s a little bit better because I was a teacher and wrote about what I experienced and how I changed.” [iii]
[i] Stephens, Randall J. “Taking Religion Seriously: An Interview with Wayne Flynt.” Journal of Southern Religion. http://jsr.fsu.edu/Volume11/Flynt.htm (Accessed May 6, 2015)
[ii] Department of History and Archives Alabama Academy of Honor http://www.archives.state.al.us/famous/Academy/w_flynt.html (Accessed May 6, 2015)
[iii] Auburn University Department of History http://wp.auburn.edu/writing/dr-wayne-flynt-professor-emeritus-department-of-history/ (Accessed May 6, 2015)