Curtis Wilkie
| Curtis C. Wilkie Jr. | |
|---|---|
| Born | Greenville, Mississippi |
| Education | University of Mississippi |
| Occupation | former reporter for the Boston Globe, professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi |
| Spouse(s) | Nancy Roberson (deceased) |
| Children | Carter, Leighton McCool, Stuart |
Curtis Wilkie is a journalist, college professor and historian of the American South. He is a Fellow of the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics at the University of Mississippi, and author of numerous books including Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South. Historian Douglas Brinkley has written that, "Over the past four decades no reporter has critiqued the American South with such evocative sensitivity and bedrock honesty as Curtis Wilkie."
Wilkie was born in Greenville, Mississippi in 1940. During World War II, he lived at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where his parents worked as civilians in the war effort. After his father died in a fire in Greenville in 1947, he spent the majority of his childhood in Summit, Mississippi, where his mother was a schoolteacher and his stepfather was the town's Presbyterian minister. He graduated from Corinth High School in 1958 and from the University of Mississippi in 1963 with a bachelor's degree in journalism.
While at the University of Mississippi, Wilkie witnessed the difficulties experienced by the first African-American students to enroll, and thereafter became involved in political causes. From 1963 to 1969, at a time when the civil rights movement was at its height in the Mississippi Delta, he worked as a reporter and editor at the Clarksdale Press Register. In 1968, he was a member of the first racially integrated delegation to represent Mississippi at a Democratic National Convention, unseating segregationist state party leaders disqualified for violation of party rules. The insurgent delegation of "Loyal Democrats of Mississippi" was co-chaired by his friends Aaron Henry, head of the NAACP in Mississippi, and journalist Hodding Carter III.
In 1969, Wilkie received a Congressional Fellowship from the American Political Science Association to work in Washington, D.C. as an aide to Sen. Walter F. Mondale (D-Minn.) and Rep. John Brademas (D-Ind,) from 1969 to 1971.
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