Letters from Old Screamer Mountain: A Reading with Melanie Morrison (via Zoom)

RCWMS is honored to invite you to a reading with Melanie Morrison from her new book, Letters from Old Screamer Mountain. The reading is sponsored by RCWMS and EVERYbody Reads, Books and Stuff, an independent bookstore in Melanie’s hometown of Lansing, Michigan.

In 1939, when Melanie Morrison’s mother, Eleanor, was eighteen, she spent a winter weekend at the home of Lillian Smith on Old Screamer Mountain in North Georgia. Smith was a white Southern author who wrote scathing critiques of white supremacy. That weekend was an unforgettable turning point in Eleanor’s young life as she and her college friends stayed up late listening to Lillian read from her manuscripts and talk about the shriveled-up heart of whiteness.

Seven decades later, in 2012, Melanie made a pilgrimage to the Lillian E. Smith Center to write about the intergenerational legacies of lynching and how that reign of terror remains largely unacknowledged by the descendants of its white perpetrators.

 

From the mountain, Melanie wrote letters to her mother describing the avalanche of emotions and epiphanies she was experiencing. Letters from Old Screamer Mountain is an intimate testimony to the power of intergenerational legacies and the urgency to write what must not be forgotten.

Melanie S. Morrison is the author of four books, including Murder on Shades Mountain: The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham. Morrison is a seasoned racial justice educator, speaker, and author with thirty years experience designing and facilitating transformational group process. Author’s website: melaniemorrison.net.