Author of Marion Lynching Retrospect to Lecture at IUPUI

INDIANAPOLIS – The author of the newly published book that uses the infamous 1930 Marion, Ind., lynching of two young African-American men as the entry point for a look at race relations in America will lecture at IUPUI on April 6.

Former “Village Voice” arts writer Cynthia Carr, author of “Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, A Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America,” will speak at IUPUI from noon to 1 p.m., Thursday, April 6, 2006, in the Ruth Lilly Auditorium of University Library.

Carr’s discovery that her beloved grandfather belonged to the Ku Klux Klan and may have been involved in the Marion hate crime immortalized in a revolting and haunting photograph – which shows white townspeople gathering to stare at the mutilated corpses, still dangling from their nooses – lead Carr to return to Marion and ask hard questions about race relations and the struggle for civil rights in America.

“Our Town” is the result.

“Publisher’s Weekly says, “Carr’s sense that she bears – that we all bear – a burden of guilt allows her a empathy that enables her to gain access to present-day Klan members, who talk freely about their ideology; her refusal to view herself as morally superior to them lends power to her observations; and her lack of self-righteousness is refreshing.”

IUPUI’s African-American and African Diaspora Studies program, in collaboration with the Joseph Taylor Branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, is hosting Carr’s visit to IUPUI.

For additional information, contact Monroe Little at (317) 278-2347 or mlittle@iupui.edu.