Vincent Harding: Storied Into Being, A Biography

FAIN: FT-285897-22

Tobin Miller Shearer
University of Montana (Missoula, MT 59801-4494)

Research and writing the first biography of civil rights activist and scholar Vincent Harding (1931-2014).

This project will lay the archival foundation for the first biography of civil rights activist and scholar Vincent Harding. A summer stipend will allow me to travel to Atlanta, spend a month working with his papers, and invest another month in processing and prioritizing my findings in order to develop the biography’s structure. To date, little scholarship has been completed on Harding himself. Even though Harding wrote for King, helped plan the 1972 National Black Political Convention, and authored the highly esteemed black history There Is A River, Harding remains largely absent from civil rights scholarship. A Harding biography will bring readers into the backstory of the long Black Freedom Struggle, extend the trajectory of that struggle into the 21st century, and make possible a much richer and complete assessment of the ways in which religious conviction and practice shaped the civil rights movement and the racial justice struggles that followed.06