A steel town daughter’s search for truth and beauty in Birmingham, Alabama

Beginning at the center, with her family’s 1947 arrival to a housing project near the color line, within earshot of what would become known as Dynamite Hill, Julie Buckner Armstrong works her way over time and across the map in her latest book Learning From Birmingham.

Armstrong will be joined by NPR's TV critic and media analyst, Eric Deggans.

In her search for truth and beauty in Birmingham, Armstrong draws on the powers of place and storytelling to dig into the cracks, complicating easy narratives of civil rights progress. Among the discoveries she finds in America’s racial mirror is a nation that has failed to recognize itself in the horrific images from Birmingham’s past and to acknowledge the continuing inequalities that make up the Civil Right’s Movement’s unfinished business. Learning from Birmingham reminds us that stories of civil rights, structural oppression, privilege, abuse, race and gender bias, and inequity are difficult and complicated, but their telling, especially from multiple stakeholder perspectives, is absolutely necessary.

Julie Buckner Armstrong is a civil rights and southern literature scholar. Her research interests include literary engagements with segregation, the civil rights movement, and other social justice issues. Armstrong has been the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Activity at USF’s St. Petersburg campus.

Armstrong is the author of “Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching,” which recounts the 1918 lynching of a pregnant woman and the way the event resonated with activists, artists, writers and local residents for years to come. The book received the C. Hugh Holman Award Honorable Mention from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. Armstrong is also the editor of the “Cambridge Companion to American Civil Rights Literature” and “The Civil Rights Reader: American Literature from Jim Crow to Reconciliation,” as well as the co-editor of “Teaching the American Civil Rights Movement: Freedom’s Bittersweet Song.” Her scholarly and creative work has been published in the African American Review, Mississippi Quarterly, Narratively, the Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere.

Armstrong teaches undergraduate and graduate courses, including ones on American literature, African American literature, racial violence, and women writers. She is currently writing Learning from Birmingham, a book about everyday people and places in the iconic civil rights movement city where she was born.

Eric Deggans is NPR's first full-time TV critic.Deggans came to NPR in 2013 from the Tampa Bay Times, where he served a TV/Media Critic and in other roles for nearly 20 years. A journalist for more than 20 years, he is also the author of Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation, a look at how prejudice, racism and sexism fuels some elements of modern media, published in October 2012, by Palgrave Macmillan.

Deggans is also currently a media analyst/contributor for MSNBC and NBC News. In 2019, Deggans served as the first African American chairman of the board of educators, journalists and media experts who select the George Foster Peabody Awards for excellence in electronic media. He also has joined a prestigious group of contributors to the first ethics book created in conjunction with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies for journalism's digital age: The New Ethics of Journalism, published in August 2013, by Sage/CQ Press.

Now serving as chair of the Media Monitoring Committee for the National Association of Black Journalists, he has also served on the board of directors for the national Television Critics Association and on the board of the Mid-Florida Society of Professional Journalists.