Dr. John Kirk
MAGNOLIA – Dr. John A. Kirk will deliver the Robert B. Walz Lecture in Arkansas and Regional History at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 4, in Foundation Hall of the Donald W. Reynolds Campus and Community Center at Southern Arkansas University. His presentation is titled “Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas.”
Kirk is Donaghey Professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
In 1962 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) sent William Hansen to work with local activists in Little Rock to open department store lunch counters and other downtown businesses to African-American customers. This successful movement in the capital spurred SNCC to organize civil rights campaigns throughout the Arkansas Delta region. Kirk will explain how SNCC’s accomplishments in Arkansas fit within the national civil rights movement and transformed the state’s politics and society.
Kirk is the author of numerous studies on the civil rights era in Arkansas and America including Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas, a volume he co-edited with Jennifer Jensen Wallace. It was published this year by the University of Arkansas Press. Kirk’s study of Martin Luther King, Jr. will be released next year, and he is researching the life of Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller of Arkansas.
Kirk received his Ph.D. from University of Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K., and was professor of history at Royal Holloway, University of London, before joining UALR.
Dr. Robert Walz taught history at SAU from 1958 to 1987 and was recognized as a leading scholar of Arkansas history. The Walz Lectureship was established in 1995 with a bequest from the estate of Mrs. Curtistine A. Walz, in honor of her husband’s long service to the university.
The lecture is sponsored by the College of Liberal and Performing Arts at Southern Arkansas University.
The lecture is free and open to the public. The audience is also welcomed to attend a reception for Kirk in the Salon B in the Reynolds Center following the lecture.
