City of Greensboro, NC

04/05/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 04/05/2024 08:01

History Museum Welcomes Lumbee Historian April 11

Historian, filmmaker and author Malinda Maynor Lowery will deliver the 2024 Wicker Endowment Lecture, "The Lumbees' Long Fight to Reimagine Democracy" at the Greensboro History Museum, 130 Summit Avenue, at 6 pm on Thursday, April 11. The program is free and open to the public.

Lowery is a historian and documentary film producer who is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. In July 2021, she joined Emory University as the Cahoon Family Professor of American History after spending 12 years at UNC-Chapel Hill and four years at Harvard University. Her book The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle was published by UNC Press in 2018. Lowery has also published essays in the New York Times, Oxford American, and Daily Yonder. She produced the Peabody Award-winning A Chef's Life (PBS, 2013-2018), Somewhere South (PBS, 2020), and other award-winning programs, as well as Sundance Film Festival entries Real Indian (1996) and Sounds of Faith (1997). Lumbeeland, her latest short film project, is scheduled for release in 2024.

Also participating in the program are Jennifer Revels Baxter, Executive Director of Guilford Native American Association (GNAA), the state's first urban Indian organization; Dr. Greg O'Brien, chair of the Department of History at UNC-Greensboro and co-editor of The Native South: New Histories and Enduring Legacies; Nora Dial-Stanley, Chair of the GNAA Board of Directors; and Stephen Bell, American Indian Education coordinator for Guilford County Schools. Scuppernong Books will have copies of The Lumbee Indians available for purchase and signing after the discussion.

The lecture is made possible by the John Floy Wicker Endowment Fund, created by Ruth Perkins Wicker in 1995 in memory of her husband. The program also supports the museum's award-winning exhibition NC Democracy: Eleven Elections, which explores choices and change across 11 elections between 1776 and 2010 that shaped what democracy means in our state today.