Published: February 28, 2008 08:23 am      

Turner to speak at SCC Feb. 28

Local News

Dr. William H. Turner, the National Endowment for the Humanities chair in Appalachian Studies at Berea College, will speak at Somerset Community College for Black History Month on Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008, at 7 p.m.

The title of his presentation will be “Black History: The Stuff of A People’s Memory.”

Turner will speak in the Harold Rogers Student Commons Community Room on the SCC Somerset Campus-North. The public is invited and there is no charge for admission.

The late Alex Haley said of Turner: “Bill Turner knows more about black people in the mountains of the American South than anybody in the world.”

Turner was born and raised in a large coal mining family in Lynch in Harlan County, Ky. He was awarded a bachelor of science degree in sociology from the University of Kentucky and holds a doctorate from the University of Notre Dame, where he specialized in race and ethnic relations, African-American and Appalachian Studies.

During a distinguished career involving teaching, research and administration, Turner has served at Southern University, Fisk University, Howard University and the University of Kentucky.

Turner has also held post-doctoral appointments as a Senior Research Fellow at the Moton Center for Independent Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, interned as an Academy of Sciences Senior Ford Fellow at the National Center for Education Statistics through George Washington University, and at the Center for the Study of Civil Rights and Race Relations at Duke University.

From 2002-2004, Turner was interim president of Kentucky State University. He served as vice president for University Engagement and Associate Provost for Multicultural and Academic Affairs at the University of Kentucky from 2004-2007.

Turner, a freelance writer, worked for a decade with Roots author Alex Haley as a research assistant, while penning weekly op-ed columns on the politics of race through a consortium of black newspapers, as well as for the Journal, from Winston-Salem, N.C., from 1985 to 2002. He has authored more than one hundred essays, articles and papers; collaborated on videos and movies about Appalachia as a screen writer and producer; and his signature work, published in 1985, Blacks in Appalachia, remains the first and only book to combine African American and Appalachian studies. In 2005, he helped with the publication of African American Miners and Migrants, which tells the story of blacks in Harlan County, Ky.

The Christian Appalachian Project recognized Turner as its Citizen of the Year in 1994. In 2005, while serving as associate provost and vice president for Multi-cultural Affairs at the University of Kentucky, Turner was recognized with the President’s Award for Diversity. In 2006, he was inducted as a Notre Dame Black Exemplar; and, in 2007, was honored with the State of Kentucky’s Dr. Martin Luther King Citizen’s Award. Turner was inducted into the Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame in September 2007.

Turner and his wife, Vivian, live in Lexington. They are the parents of three adult children: Kisha, William Kenyatta and Hodari. They have four grandchildren.