Lee Hawkins Lecture
Free and open to the public. There will be a welcome reception and book signing at 5 P.M. All are welcome.
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鈥 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 鈥淲hat Happened in Alabama?鈥 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鈥檚 Hutchins Center for African & African American Research working on a long-form narrative audio investigation titled 鈥淟earning Under Threat: Corporal Punishment and Black Children in the Classroom.鈥 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鈥檚 Slave, which Kirkus Reviews hails as "a profound work about the Black experience and white oppression," and Library Journal calls 鈥渧itally important and essential to understanding the magnitude of the impact of racism and violence.鈥
Suggested Reading
Hawkins, Lee. I Am Nobody's Slave: How Uncovering My Family's History Set Me Free. Amistad, 2025.
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