A Tuesday night lecture at Tennessee Tech presentation examining Martin Luther King Jr. and the continuing challenges of race relations in the South.
Retired Cookeville physician Dr. Chuck Womack established the endowed lecture series with the late Tennessee Tech Historian Dr. Mike Birdwell to honor Womack’s mother. This is its 10th anniversary. Womack said Rhodes College Historian Dr. Charles W. McKinney will deliver this year’s lecture
“Thank goodness we don’t have the segregation that was present when I was a child growing up,” Womack said, “That was endemic all over Mississippi at that time.”
Womack said he asked Tennessee Tech History Department Chair Dr. Kent Dollar to identify a speaker who could address race relations in the South. McKinney’s lecture is titled “The Struggle Is Always There: Reckoning with Martin Luther King Jr.’s Unfinished Work.”
Womack said the lectureship has brought historians from across the United States to Cookeville over the past decade. Previous presentations have explored the spread of slavery, the displacement of Native Americans, diseases such as malaria and yellow fever, and the migration of Southern workers to industrial cities including Dayton and Detroit.
Womack said his mother taught him the importance of kindness and helping others, lessons he carried into his 38 years practicing medicine in Cookeville and 16 years serving on the City Council.
The lecture series is supported by an endowment intended to sustain the program for future generations. Womack said that financial support will allow Tennessee Tech to continue bringing outside perspectives on Southern history to students and the community.
“Well, I think it’s it’s an endowed lecture so it’ll go on long after I’m gone but I think it brings aspects into this community from outside that tell us a different perspective on race relations and other things in Southern history,” Womack said.
Womack said he hopes the endowment continues growing over the next decade, allowing the university to attract more nationally recognized historians and award-winning scholars.
The Pauline Hartman Womack Lectureship brings historians from across the country to Cookeville to examine parts of Southern history that are often overlooked.