Friday, October 24, 9:00 a.m.
author of Freedom Rider Diary: Smuggled Notes from Parchman Prison
This year's Eudora Welty Prize will be awarded to Carol Ruth Silver for her memoir, “Freedom Rider Diary,” which tells of her experiences as a young twenty-two-year-old college graduate who left New York City to join the Freedom Riders on one of the historic rides to desegregate the busses in the South. Her participation in this nonviolent civil disobedience led to her arrest and imprisonment in Parchman for forty days. The memoir recounts the experience of Silver and other members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the charged atmosphere of the Civil Rights movement.
Silver has gone on to be a successful lawyer and politician in San Francisco, as well as an advocate for women’s rights. One of her recent projects is to bring laptops and education to the young women of Afghanistan through the One Laptop Per Child program.
