Release date: March 24, 2008
Contact: Beverly Cox Clark at 404-712-8780 or beverly.clark@emory.edu

AJC's Tucker to Deliver Emory's Hamilton Lecture April 2

Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist and editor Cynthia Tucker will deliver the annual Grace Towns Hamilton Lecture at Emory University at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 2 in the Winship Ballroom of the Dobbs Center, 605 Asbury Circle, Emory. Tucker will address "The Politics of Inclusion" in her talk.

Tucker is the editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist whose work appears in dozens of newspapers. She is also a popular television commentator. Tucker’s wide-ranging interests are evident in her twice-weekly column, in which she has taken on topics such as voting rights, immigration reform, the importance of education and the war on drugs. In her capacity as editorial page editor, she is responsible for guiding the development of the newspaper's opinion policies on national and international affairs as well as state and local issues.

Tucker has won many awards and honors, including the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award, the University of Alabama’s Clarence Cason Writing Award and Colby College’s Elijah Lovejoy Award. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007.

The Grace Towns Hamilton lecture series, sponsored by the Department of African American Studies and the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory, honors the life and legacy of Grace Towns Hamilton. A native Atlantan, Hamilton in 1966 became the first African American woman elected to a state legislature in the South, and the first African American to be elected to the Georgia Legislature since Reconstruction.

From 1943 to 1961, Hamilton also served as executive director of the Atlanta Urban League, the local affiliate of the National Urban League. Hamilton was one of the few women to hold such a post at that time. Under her direction, the Atlanta Urban League increased African American voter registration, gained greater funding to black schools, and assisted in the creation of a new hospital in Atlanta for black people, and new housing for middle-income blacks. Her success with the Atlanta Urban League led to her historic election to the Georgia Legislature in 1966.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information call 404-727-6847.

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