April 03, 2007
The southern United States has been the object for more than two centuries of Northerners wishing to aid, uplift and otherwise rescue their compatriots, according to the theme of an upcoming exhibit at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The display, “Reform, Reconstruction and Redemption: The Northern Impulse to Save the South,” will be on view April 10 through Aug. 31 in the Melba Remig Saltarelli Exhibit Room on the third floor of Wilson Library. Hours will be 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays.

Using documents from the library’s collections, the exhibit explores an intellectual and cultural phenomenon that extends from the abolition of slavery to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and public health initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s.

The exhibit will open April 10 with a lecture by Alan M. Kraut, professor of history at American University in Washington D.C., about what was called the scourge of the South: the niacin and protein deficiency pellagra that stalked the region in the early 20th century. Kraut will speak at 5:45 p.m. in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room on the main floor of Wilson. The talk and exhibit will be free to the public.

In 1915, Pennsylvania physician Dr. Joseph Goldberger enraged Southerners with his discovery that pellagra was caused by regional dietary practices rather than an infectious agent.

The pellagra controversy typifies a relationship between North and South that has proven both beneficial and tense, said Laura Brown, the exhibit curator and head of public services in Wilson’s manuscripts department.

“The exhibit is a broad look at the way the North has repeatedly attempted to change things in the South and an impulse to perceive the South as very much in need of saving.”

The exhibit will include:

  • An 1862 letter published in Philadelphia proposing assistance for liberated slaves in South Carolina.
  • A 1964 letter from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Washington Office encouraging “the use of federal government programs and northern political and economic pressure to improve southern situations.”
  • A 1969 job application from a Yale University medical student desiring a summer position in rural Mississippi “to observe firsthand what southern rural poverty really means.”
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For more information, contact Brown at (919) 962-1345 or ljcb@email.unc.edu.

Library contact: Judith Panitch, (919) 962-1301 or panitch@email.unc.edu.

News Services contact: LJ Toler, (919) 962-8589.

School of Public Health contact: Ramona DuBose, (919) 966-4555 or ramona_dubose@unc.edu.

 

 

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