Frye Gaillard (born December 23, 1946) is an American historian and author.

Early life and education

Frye Gaillard was born in Mobile, Alabama on December 23, 1946. His parents were lawyer and later judge Walter Frye Gaillard, Sr., and Helen Amante Gaillard. Gaillard attended

Vanderbilt University Vanderbilt University (informally Vandy or VU) is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 1873, it was named in honor of shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided the school its initial $1-million ...

, graduating in 1968. During the 1960s Gaillard came into proximity with many of the most prominent political personalities of the decade. As a high school student in 1963, Gaillard witnessed the arrest of

Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist, one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968 ...

Birmingham, Alabama Birmingham ( ) is a city in the north central region of the U.S. state of Alabama. Birmingham is the seat of Jefferson County, Alabama's most populous county. As of the 2021 census estimates, Birmingham had a population of 197,575, down 1% fr ...

, during King's

Birmingham campaign The Birmingham campaign, also known as the Birmingham movement or Birmingham confrontation, was an American movement organized in early 1963 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to bring attention to the integration efforts o ...

against racial segregation. While at Vanderbilt he came into contact with Stokley Carmichael and

Eldridge Cleaver Leroy Eldridge Cleaver (August 31, 1935 – May 1, 1998) was an American writer and political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party. In 1968, Cleaver wrote '' Soul on Ice'', a collection of essays that, at the time of i ...

, when the two Black Panthers were engaged to speak. Shortly after, in 1968, he invited

Robert F. Kennedy Robert Francis Kennedy (November 20, 1925June 6, 1968), also known by his initials RFK and by the nickname Bobby, was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 64th United States Attorney General from January 1961 to September 1964, ...

to speak at Vanderbilt, 11 weeks prior to Kennedy's assassination.

Career

Gaillard started his career at the ''Race Relations Reporter'' in Nashville as managing editor from 1970 to 1972, then moved to the ''Charlotte Observer'' as a writer, editor and columnist, while teaching nonfiction writing at Queens College, both until 1990. While with the ''Observer'' he won awards from the North Carolina Press Association for spot news, features and investigative reporting. In 2004 he moved back to Mobile. As an author he won the 1989 Gustavus Myers Award for ''The Dream Long Deferred'', and in 2007 the Alabama Library Association Book of the Year for ''Cradle of Freedom''. Gaillard's 2018 book ''A Hard Rain'' was inspired by

David Halberstam David Halberstam (April 10, 1934 April 23, 2007) was an American writer, journalist, and historian, known for his work on the Vietnam War, politics, history, the Civil Rights Movement, business, media, American culture, Korean War, and late ...

's '' The Fifties'', and documents the 1960s in part through Gaillard's experiences of the time. Gailllard has been author-in-residence at the

University of South Alabama The University of South Alabama (USA) is a public research university in Mobile, Alabama. It was created by the Alabama Legislature in May, 1963, and replaced existing extension programs operated in Mobile by the University of Alabama. The first ...

since 2007. He has written more than 25 books.

Published works

* ''Race, Rock and Religion: Profiles from a Southern Journalist'', 1982 * ''The Catawba River'', with Dot Jackson, 1983 * ''Becoming Truly Free: 300 Years of Black History in the Carolinas'', with Richard Maschal and others, 1985 * ''The Unfinished Presidency: Essays on Jimmy Carter'', 1986 * ''The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina'', 1988 * ''Watermelon Wine: The Spirit of Country Music'', 1989 * ''The Secret Diary of Mikhail Gorbachev'', 1990 * ''Southern Voices: Profiles and Other Stories'', 1991 * ''Kyle at 200 M.P.H.: A Sizzling Season in the Petty/NASCAR Dynasty, with Kyle Petty, 1993 * ''Lessons from the Big House: One Family's Passage through the History of the South'', with Nancy Gaillard, 1994 * ''The Way We See It: Documentary Photography by the Children of Charlotte'', with Rachel Gaillard, 1995 * ''The 521 All-Stars'', with Bryon Baldwin, 1999 * ''If I Were A Carpenter: Twenty Years of Habitat for Humanity'', 1996 * ''The Heart of Dixie: Southern Rebels, Renegades and Heroes'', 1996 * ''Carmel Country Club: The First 50 Years'', 1997 * ''Voices from the Attic'', 1997 * ''As Long as the Waters Flow: Native Americans in the South and East'', with Carolyn Demerit and others, 1998 * ''Mobile and the Eastern Shore'', with Nancy Gaillard, 2003 * ''Charlotte's Holy Wars: Religion in a New South City'', 2005 * ''Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America'', 2006 * ''Prophet from Plains: Jimmy Carter and His Legacy'', 2007 * ''In the Path of Storms: Bayou la Batre, Coden and the Alabama Coast'', with Sheila Hagler and others, 2008 * ''With Music and Justice for All" Some Southerners and Their Passions'', 2008 * ''Alabama's Civil Rights Trail: An Illustrated Guide to the Cradle of Freedom'', 2010 * ''The Books that Mattered: A Reader's Memoir'', 2012 * ''The Quilt: And the Poetry of Alabama Music'', with Kathryn Scheldt, 2015 * ''Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family's Civil War Letters'', with Steven Trout, 2015 * ''Go South to Freedom'', with Anne Kent Rush, 2016 * ''A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost'', 2018 * ''The Slave Who Went to Congress'', with Marti Rosner and others, 2020

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gaillard, Frye 1946 births American political writers American male non-fiction writers Writers from Alabama 20th-century American historians 21st-century American non-fiction writers 21st-century American historians 20th-century American non-fiction writers 20th-century American newspaper editors Vanderbilt University alumni Living people 20th-century American male writers 21st-century American male writers