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Diane McWhorter | |
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| Born | November 1, 1952 (1952-11) (age 73) |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Awards |
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Rebecca Diane McWhorter (born November 1, 1952) is an American journalist, commentator, and author who has written extensively about race and the history ofcivil rights. She won thePulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and theJ. Anthony Lukas Book Prize in 2002 forCarry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 2001; reprinted with a new afterword, 2013).
McWhorter is fromBirmingham, Alabama, where she attended theBrooke Hill School, which is now The Altamont School.
Among McWhorter's elementary school classmates wasMary Badham, who portrayed "Scout" Finch in the 1962 filmTo Kill a Mockingbird. When the film was released, McWhorter was among the students who went to a viewing of the film as part of a school field trip.[1] She later reflected on that experience:
"By, you know, rooting for a black man, you were kind of betraying every principle that you had been raised to believe, and I remember thinking "what would my father think if he saw me fighting back these tears when Tom Robinson gets shot?" It was a really disturbing experience; to be crying for a black man was so taboo."
McWhorter graduated fromWellesley College in 1974.[2]
| External videos | |
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 Booknotes interview with McWhorter onCarry Me Home, May 27, 2001,C-SPAN |
McWhorter has written extensively on race and the struggle for civil rights in the US. In 2002 she was awarded both thePulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize forCarry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution.[3][4] She is also the author ofA Dream of Freedom, a young adult history of the civil rights movement (Scholastic, 2004).[5] She is a long-time contributor toThe New York Times and has written for the op-ed page ofUSA Today and forSlate,Harper's,Smithsonian, among other publications.[2] She is a member of the Board of Contributors forUSA Today's Forum Page, part of the newspaper's Opinion section, and has been managing editor ofBoston magazine.[6]
She has been a Holtzbrinck Fellow at theAmerican Academy in Berlin, Germany, aGuggenheim Fellow, a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and a Fellow at theRadcliffe Institute for Advanced Study[6] and at theW. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.[7] In 2015 she was one of the recipients in the first year of theNational Endowment for the Humanities' Public Scholar program to underwrite the production of general-readership nonfiction books by scholars.[8] She is a member of the Society of American Historians. She is working onMoon over Alabama, a study ofWernher von Braun and the US space program in Alabama.[7][8][9]
She marriedRichard Dean Rosen in 1987; they have two children.[10][11]
| 1962–1975 |
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| 1976–2000 |
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| 2001–2025 |
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