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New Exhibit on Welty and Learning
The exhibit Moments of Learning in the Life of a Writer opens Tuesday, September 9, at the Eudora Welty House and Garden Education and Visitors Center. Taking its inspiration from Welty’s comment in her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings that “learning stamps you with its moments,” the exhibit will explore pivotal times and places of learning in Eudora Welty’s life and their impact on her writing.
The connection between Welty’s formal education and her acute observations of human nature and passion for language began with her arrival at age five at Davis Grammar School in Jackson. Through photographs, a high school notebook, college yearbooks (like the page pictured at right from Mississippi State College for Women) and transcripts, poetry, and letters from MDAH’s Eudora Welty Collection and the Welty family, the exhibit follows Welty through high school and into college and young adulthood, in Mississippi and the wider world.
Welty attributed her love of wordplay to her Latin teacher at Jackson Central High School. After graduation, Welty enrolled in Mississippi State College for Women (now Mississippi University for Women) in Co-
lumbus where she wrote for various publications and drew cartoons and other illustrations for the college’s humor magazine during her freshman and sophomore years. Welty’s cartoon from the April 1927 is- , sue of Oh, j Lady! is featured.
After
transferring to the
University of Wisconsin in Madison to finish her degree, Welty first encountered the influential Irish poet A. E., father of her future agent Diarmuid Russell. During the year she spent in graduate school at Columbia University School of Business in New York City, Welty and her friends immersed themselves
in the city’s creative culture.
Welty returned to Jackson in 1931 upon the death of her father and remained at the family home on Pine-hurst Street, where she wrote the short stories and novels that would garner national acclaim. Readers familiar with Welty’s work will recognize the lasting impact those early years and experiences featured in the exhibit had on her writing.
The exhibit is on display through December 4,2015. Hours are Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. To schedule school groups or for more information call 601 -353-7762.
Civil Rights Veteran Owen Brooks, 1928-2014
Owen H. Brooks, an army veteran and leader in Mississippi’s Civil Rights Movement, died July 27, 2014, in Jackson. He was 85.
Brooks was born in New York City on November 18, 1928. It was during his high school years in Boston that he became active in the fight to gain equal justice for all people. He was drawn to the work being done in the Mississippi Delta. In 1965, he joined the Delta Ministry, a program established under the auspices of the Division of Church and Society of the National Council of Churches, and moved to Mississippi as a staff member in 1965. He became director of Delta Ministry in Mississippi in
1967,	in which position he was active in addressing the needs of African Americans in the Delta in all areas of social justice.
Brooks worked nearly fifty years in the Delta and other areas of the state. He was involved in the desegregation of the public schools in Greenville, helped to establish the Child Development Group of Mississippi, worked with Fannie Lou Hamer in developing a cooperative farming venture in Sunflower County, and was active politically within the state and on the national scene. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr., Kwame Toure, and others in the historic March against Fear begun by James
Meredith in 1966. He joined the struggles of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the National Democratic Conventions of 1964 and
1968.
Brooks served as field representative to U.S. Representative Mike Espy from 1987 to 1992 and as field director for U.S. Representative Bennie C. Thompson from 1993 to 1995. Between1995 and 1997 he worked as a field director for the Delta Oral History Project, a collaborative effort between Tougaloo and Dickinson colleges that produced some of the most important oral histories of the Civil Rights Movement.
Brooks was a founder of
the group Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, Inc., in 2004. He was the organization’s first chairman and served on the board of directors until 2012.
“Owen Brooks’s work with the Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement will be his greatest legacy,” said Clarence Hunter, former curator of the Tougaloo Collection at MDAH. “It was in many ways one of his most important contributions to the state and nation. Those men and women who sacrificed so much for social justice in this state now have a place where they may share their memories and dedicate themselves to racial peace and social justice.”