UM Journalism Professor Featured in The New York Times

Vanessa Gregory. Photo courtesy of The Meek School of Journalism and New Media – Ole Miss.

Vanessa Gregory, assistant professor of journalism at The University of Mississippi, has made a name for herself as a freelance journalist.

Gregory earned national recognition from Afar, National Geographic Traveler, Men’s Journal and Outside. She has been awarded the Middlebury Fellowship award in Environmental Journalism. And now, The New York Times has published her piece, “A Lynching’s Long Shadow,” which depicts the lynching of Oxford’s Elwood Higginbotham in 1935. 
“I’ve been working on this story since September,” Gregory said. “I got interested in the
lynching of Elwood Higginbotham because the killing took place so close to where I live and work and yet there didn’t seem to be any visible remembrance of his life in town.”
Gregory discovered that Higginbotham’s three children still live in Oxford where he was murdered, which inspired her to write the story of his death.
“I wanted to show that the lynching era isn’t ancient history and that its effects are still felt today,” Gregory said. “I felt very fortunate that E.W. Higginbottom, Elwood Higginbotham’s 87-year-old son, was willing to share his story. His voice deserves to be heard.”
An excerpt from “A Lynching’s Long Shadow” as seen in The New York Times.
Tina Washington can’t remember being told that white men lynched her granddaddy back in 1935. Somehow she’s always known. The crime echoed in her father’s character, in his watchfulness and distant love, in the yawning void left in place of memory. As a child, she tried to pry answers from her tight-lipped parents. “Where is my granddaddy?” she would ask. “I want to know my granddaddy.” Now, at 39, she asked different questions but mostly to herself. Would her father have gone to college if his daddy had lived? What did her granddaddy look like? What sparked his murder? Who were his people? She had no photos. Nothing.
But one hot and clear afternoon in September, a day before the 82nd anniversary of her paternal grandfather’s death, Washington sat in the back seat of her sister’s car ready to crack open her family’s painful history. Her father, E.W. Higginbottom, sat beside her in a white dress shirt and cuff links, and her sister and brother-in-law, Delois and Irven Wright, rode up front. Washington’s children — Trinity, Bailee and Rico — squabbled quietly in the S.U.V.’s third row.
They had left the suburbs outside Memphis, Tenn., and were headed south, past deep green woods and an old railway line, toward Oxford, Miss., where Washington’s grandfather lived and died. The family planned to meet there with staff members from the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, a Mississippi nonprofit, and tour sites significant in her grandfather’s lynching: the county courthouse, the killing grounds and two graveyards where he might be buried.
To read Gregory’s story in full, read “A Lynching’s Long Shadow.”

By Talbert Toole, associate editor of HottyToddy.com. He can be reached at talbert.toole@hottytoddy.com.