91AV

Free and open to the public. There will be a welcome reception and book signing at 5 P.M. All are welcome. 

Many families are living with estrangement and unanswered questions. In this lecture, Lee Hawkins will draw from his book, I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free, to offer insight into how families become fractured -- by violence, migration, shame, secrecy, and the stories people were never allowed to tell -- and how genealogy can sometimes become a bridge back. This talk will consider how the past asserts itself in the present, how family stories reshape national memory, and what it takes for individuals and a country to tell the truth and move forward.

Biography

Lee Hawkins is an award-winning journalist, author, and musician. For nineteen years, he was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Hawkins is a five-time winner of the National Association of Black Journalists’ Salute to Excellence Award and a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work as a lead reporter on a series about the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. He is also the creator and host of the podcast “What Happened in Alabama?” The ten-part collaboration with American Public Media, investigating Jim Crow-segregation survivors and their descendants, was named a 2025 finalist for the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award in the audio category. 

Hawkins is spending the 2026-27 academic year as a fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research working on a long-form narrative audio investigation titled “Learning Under Threat: Corporal Punishment and Black Children in the Classroom.” The project seeks to reconnect student discipline records to their adult lives and illuminate how corporal punishment is administered, defended, and normalized inside schools today.

When he visits the Center for Global Humanities, Hawkins will draw from his memoire I Am Nobody’s Slave, which Kirkus Reviews hails as "a profound work about the Black experience and white oppression," and Library Journal calls “vitally important and essential to understanding the magnitude of the impact of racism and violence.”   

Suggested Reading

Hawkins, Lee. I Am Nobody's Slave: How Uncovering My Family's History Set Me Free. Amistad, 2025.

Annual Crosley Lecture

This event has been designated the Center for Global Humanities’ Annual Crosley Lecture, which is named in memory of Rev. Marion Crosley and his wife Mehitable Adelia Swift Crosley. This series-within-the-series is funded through a gift-in-perpetuity by the late Barbara Goodbody, a longtime friend of Westbrook College, the 91AV, and the Center for Global Humanities. Rev. Crosley was a Universalist minister who lived in Portland from 1885 to 1889 and served on the board of the Westbrook Seminary, which later became Westbrook College and is now part of 91AV. The Crosley Lecture, inaugurated in 1984, was initially devoted to the topic of ethics, but the founding of the Center for Global Humanities offered occasion to reposition it to best reflect Barbara’s evolving interests within the world of ideas.

Address

716 Stevens Avenue
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United States

cgh@une.edu