Mississippi College to host 48th Lipsey Lecture and May 1970 photography exhibition

Ellen Ann Fentress, an MC alum and producer of "Eyes on Mississippi," will present the 2024 Lipsey Lecture.

The Department of English and Philosophy at Mississippi College will host the 48th Lipsey Lecture, “The Stories That Are Ours to Write,” at 6 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 21, at the Gore Art Gallery in the Leland Speed Library.

The lecture will accompany a photography exhibit that focuses on the May 1970 Gibbs-Green tragedy at Jackson State College. The exhibit will remain on display at MC from Oct. 9-Nov. 6. Both events are free and open to the public.

This year's Lipsey Lecturer is Ellen Ann Fentress, an MC alum who produced and directed a documentary on civil rights, "Eyes on Mississippi." She was a reporter for Mississippi Public Radio; wrote for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic; and founded the "Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools."

“Women do a lot for free, no matter the era, no matter the location.” Fentress writes in her book, "The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning." The book, which will be the focus of her lecture, is her account of what it means to be a white Southern woman in Mississippi. Her time at Mississippi College is crucial to her memoir and the Lipsey Lecture was very important to her as a student.

Fentress will speak in the Gore Art Gallery while surrounded by photographs of the Gibbs-Green tragedy. The exhibit features 37 photos taken by Dr. Doris Derby, a Civil Rights activist who worked at the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People at Jackson State College.

Derby was one of the organizers of the March on Washington in 1963 and joined the Mississippi Civil Rights movement. Her photographs have been showcased in many museums and galleries, including the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, the National Museum of African American History in Washington, D.C., and the Rose Library of Emory University in Atlanta.

The Lipsey Lecture Series was established in 1971 as the MC Humanities Lectureship. It was renamed the Lipsey Lecture in 1974 to honor Sue Price Lipsey for her 28 years of service as an English professor at Mississippi College.