Sherman Adams was born in Atlanta and immigrated to Sweden in the 1960s, where he became a prominent activist and journalist. His memoir, Mitt Amerika (My America), published in 1980, is still well known in Sweden. It gives an account of Adams’s childhood during Jim Crow. The memoir was published in Swedish from an English manuscript and has also been published in Danish and Russian. Adams produced over 70 signed articles for the Swedish press in the three decades of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Most of them dealt with race relations in the United States, although Adams regularly also commented on Swedish society. Taken as a whole, this corpus provides a review of major incidents and issues in the US civil rights movement and a way to chart the activism of Adams in Sweden during these years. An overview will focus on some of the best known causes Adams concerned himself with as well as a consideration of the breadth and major characteristics of Adams’s journalistic writing.
Presented by Professor Jay Lutz, Emeritus Professor of French at Oglethorpe University
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