Eudora Welty scholar to speak during King Day Celebration

Dr. Pearl McHaney

Renowned Eudora Welty scholar, Dr. Pearl McHaney of Georgia State University, will speak during Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College’s week-long celebration honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. McHaney’s presentation, “Eudora Welty, Crusader for Human Rights,” will be held on Tuesday, Jan. 19, at 11 a.m. in the Jefferson Davis Campus Arena Theatre.

McHaney, an associate professor in the English Department at GSU, is a Welty scholar, president of the Eudora Welty Society 2007-2009, and editor of the “Eudora Welty Review” and several books of Welty’s writing and photographs. She has also made presentations on Welty in Georgia public libraries and has lectured in Mississippi, Georgia, Versailles, Paris and Venice.

“In my presentation, I will offer an overview of Welty’s career drawing from her memoir, ‘One Writer’s Beginnings,’ her stories, novels and photographs, and then focus on her contributions to human rights through her insistence upon civil rights in Mississippi in particular,” McHaney said. “Welty is in large measure responsible for integrating Millsaps College in Jackson. She understood so well the people of the South that she intuitively imagined the assassin of Medgar Evers in a short story that she wrote the day of Evers’ death. She called for books in hospitals, institutions and prisons. She articulated the power of the arts to ‘speak reliably’ to one another across boundaries and borders of every sort.”

McHaney added that Welty is an interesting civil-rights figure because her fight for equal rights was spoken through her actions, not her voice. “Although Welty answered, ‘No’ to the demand that she be a crusader and did not use her fiction or her public persona to directly demonstrate for civil rights, she lived an individually political life that effectively modeled respect and encouragement for the possibilities of individual human dignity and ‘mutual understanding in the world.’”

King Day activities at the Jefferson Davis Campus will happen throughout the week of Jan. 18-21. For more information or to sign up for volunteer activities, contact LeeAnn Gunn-Rasmussen, chair of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration Committee at the Jefferson Davis Campus, at 228-897-3798, or leeann.rasmussen@mgccc.edu.