The Northern Impulse to Save the South

Exhibit opening and lecture by Prof. Alan Kraut
Tuesday, April 10 at 5:45 p.m.
Pleasants Family Assembly Room, Wilson Library
Information: Manuscripts Department, (919) 962-1345

The southern United States has been the object for more than two centuries of Northerners wishing to aid, uplift, and otherwise rescue their compatriots.

This is the claim of "Reform, Reconstruction and Redemption: The Northern Impulse to Save the South," an upcoming exhibit in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Wilson Library.

Using documents from the library's collections, the exhibit explores an intellectual and cultural phenomenon that extends from the abolition of slavery, through the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, to 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 the "scourge of the South"--the vitamin deficiency pellagra that stalked the region in the early twentieth century. 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.

Kraut will speak at 5:45 p.m. in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room on the first floor of Wilson Library. Both the talk and exhibit are free and open to the public.

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 Library's Manuscripts Department. "The exhibit is a broad look at the way the North has repeatedly attempted to change things in the South--often for the better--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.
• Photographs taken at the turn of the twentieth century by northern missionaries John Charles Campbell and Olive Dame Campbell, illustrating the extreme poverty of Southern Appalachia.
• 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 first hand what southern rural poverty really means."

"Reform, Reconstruction and Redemption" will be on display in the Melba Remig Saltarelli Exhibit Room on the third floor of Wilson Library through August 31. Exhibit hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays.

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