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On Friday, April 12, Winthrop Rockefeller Distinguished Lecturer Douglas A. Blackmon will deliver a free public lecture at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. The lecture will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the UAM Fine Arts Center.

The lecture, “Nothing to Fear: Why True Patriots Should Want to Learn Our Full History—the Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” will last approximately one hour. A public reception will follow in the Fine Arts Center’s Spencer Gallery.

Blackmon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, scholar, teacher and filmmaker. His first book, “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,” was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2009, became a New York Times bestseller and has been reprinted more than a dozen times. In addition to the award for his book, Blackmon was also a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for coverage of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and a member of The Wall Street Journal staff awarded a Pulitzer in 2002 for coverage of the 9/11 terror attacks.

From 2012 until 2018, Blackmon was a member of the faculty and a senior fellow in presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs and host of “American Forum,” a 30-minute television interview program seen weekly on more than 250 public television stations across the U.S. Prior to working at the University of Virginia, Blackmon was the longtime chief of The Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta bureau and the paper’s senior national correspondent. He has written about or directed coverage of some of the most pivotal stories in recent American life, including the election of President Barack Obama, the rise of the Tea Party movement and the BP oil spill. For more than a decade, he oversaw coverage of 11 southeastern states for The Wall Street Journal, including directing the journal’s acclaimed coverage of the failed federal response to Hurricane Katrina and the journal’s investigation into the training and preparations of the 9/11 hijackers, as well as immigration, poverty, politics and daily reporting on more than 2,000 corporations based in the region. Blackmon lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and serves as a Professor of Practice, directing the Narrating Justice Project, in the Creative Media Institute at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

The Winthrop Rockefeller Distinguished Lectures were established in 1972 by friends of former Arkansas Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller. The endowment that funds the lecture program allows six universities in the University of Arkansas system to offer free public lectures that communicate ideas to stimulate public discussion, intellectual debate and cultural advancement.

For more information on the event, contact Dr. John Henris at henris@uamont.edu or (870) 460-1163.