Civil rights author to speak at Haley Farm on Sunday, April 19

The Langston Hughes Library at the Children’s Defense Fund Haley Farm in Clinton will host an author session and book-signing event with Carolyn Maull McKinstry, author of “While the World Watched.” It will start at 3 p.m. in Haley Lodge on Sunday, April 19.

McKinstry is a survivor of the civil rights struggle and an eyewitness to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 16, 1963. The bombing resulted in the deaths of four young girls, all of whom McKinstry knew well. As a teenager, McKinstry marched under Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and bravely faced Bull Connor’s German shepherds and stinging fire hoses during the battle for equal rights in her hometown of Birmingham.

Now, nearly 50 years after the bombing, McKinstry is still an active member of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, serves as president of the Sixteenth Street Foundation, and works full time spreading her message of racial reconciliation.

A highly sought-after speaker, McKinstry has appeared on Oprah, 20/20, CNN, and MSNBC, and portions of her story have been featured in Life magazine and USA Today. She has made numerous television and documentary appearances, including Spike Lee’s documentary “Four Little Girls,” Soledad O’Brien’s “Black in America,” Brian Williams’s “Shades of Progress, Shadows of Hate,” the Poverty Law Center’s documentary “The Children’s March,” and Family Network’s “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

McKinstry has addressed audiences in New Delhi, Mumbai, Barcelona, and the Italian Baptist Evangelical Union in Rome, as well as the Rosa Parks Museum, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and numerous colleges and universities.

McKinstry recently received the Master of Divinity degree from Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama, where she currently lives with her husband, Jerome.

Please come out to hear this amazing speaker’s story of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and her personal struggle to cope with the trials and challenges during one of the most turbulent times in our nation’s history. Copies of “While the World Watched” are now on sale in the CDF Haley Farm bookstore.

Contact Theresa Venable at tvenable@childrensdefense.org or call the CDF Haley Farm office at (865) 457-6466 for more information.