Carlos Reads The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle
Monday November 1, 2021, 7:30 – 9:00 PM EST
Registration Required: Call 404-727-6118; Space is limited
Fee: $30 for Carlos Museum members; $50 for nonmembers, and includes the cost of the book.
Malinda Maynor Lowery’s recent book, The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle, examines the remarkable history of the largest tribe east of the Mississippi, who have survived in their original homeland, maintaining a distinct identity as Indians in a biracial South.
Dr. Lowery, who recently joined the Emory faculty as Cahoon Family Professor in History, will lead readers in a discussion of the book, which intertwines her family history with that of the Lumbee, shedding new light on America’s defining moments from the first encounters with Europeans to the present day. How and why did the Lumbees both fight to establish the United States and resist the encroachments of its government? How have they not just survived, but thrived, through Civil War, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and the war on drugs, to ultimately establish their own constitutional government in the twenty-first century? Their fight for full federal acknowledgment continues to this day, while the Lumbee people’s struggle for justice and self-determination continues to transform our view of the American experience.
“The compelling saga of the Lumbee nation demands to be heard, and Malinda Maynor Lowery’s transcendent historical and cultural mastery of the Lumbee past make her the paramount historian to write it. This profound and lyrical work, in both its impeccable scholarship and its dazzling and seductive storytelling, reveals anew that the complexities of American history remain impenetrable without the foundational prism of Native American experience. And yet the Lumbee story illuminates that larger history better than any that spring to mind. Lowery’s radiant narrative unveils the Lumbee nation from distinctive angles of vision with which we all must reckon to understand even our own histories. —Timothy B. Tyson, author of The Blood of Emmett Till
