Draft:Paul Morton Gaston: Difference between revisions

This is a draft Articles for creation (AfC) submission. It is not currently pending review. While there are no deadlines, abandoned drafts may be deleted after six months. To edit the draft click on the “Edit” tab at the top of the window. To be accepted, a draft should: It is strongly discouraged to write about yourself, your business or employer. If you do so, you must declare it. Where to get help If you need help editing or submitting your draft, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. These venues are only for help with editing and the submission process, not to get reviews. If you need feedback on your draft, or if the review is taking a lot of time, you can try asking for help on the talk page of a relevant WikiProject. Some WikiProjects are more active than others so a speedy reply is not guaranteed. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags.

American historian

Paul Morton Gaston (January 31, 1928 – June 14, 2019) was an American historian, civil rights activist, and writer, who focused on the US Civil Rights Movement and the post Civil War American South and taught for forty years at the University of Virginia.^{[1] [2]}

Paul M. Gaston was born and raised in Fairhope, Alabama, a Georgist “Single Tax” community founded in 1894 by his grandfather E. B. Gaston. From the age of two he attended the Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education, graduating high school in 1945.^[3] After high school he enlisted in the US Army and served eighteen months in South Korea.^[4]

In the fall of 1948 he enrolled at Southwestern at Memphis College (now Rhodes College), transferring to Swarthmore College after one year. He graduated from Swarthmore in 1952 with a BA in history and minors in economics and political science. After graduating Swarthmore he was awarded a Fulbright to study in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he wrote about Georgism and land value taxation in Denmark.^[5]

He returned to the U.S. in 1953 for doctoral studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he studied under Fletcher Melvin Green and wrote a dissertation on the New South movement.^[6]

Gaston was hired by the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History in 1957 where he taught until is retirement in 1997. In addition to his scholarly activities, he was instrumental in the forming of the Carter G. Woodson Institute of African-American and African Studies^[7] and bringing civil rights leader Julian Bond to join the faculty.^[8]

Early in his time at UVA he served as faculty adviser to a liberal, interracial student group, the Virginia Council on Human Relations, and helped bring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at the University in 1963.^[9][10]

Also in 1963, he participated in protests to integrate a local movie theater and restaurant and was beaten and arrested in the process.^[11]

Gaston’s most influential book, The New South Creed, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1970 and argued that the mythology of the New South developed after the Civil War helped cover up and perpetuate a racist and conservative society. It won the Lillian Smith Book Award in 1970 and historian George M. Fredrickson reviewed the book favorably in 1971.^[12] It has been in print continuously since 1970 and was reissued in a new edition by NewSouth Books in 2002.^[13]

Paul M. Gaston died in Charlottesville, Virginia on June 14, 2019 at the age of 91. ^[14]

On August 30th, 2024, the University of Virginia dedicated a new student dormitory (the “Gaston House“) in his honor.^[15] The dedication event was held shortly after police had forcibly cleared students from Grounds who were protesting the Gaza genocide. One of Gaston’s sons spoke at the dedication event and criticized the University for its hypocrisy in honoring Gaston for his history of non-violent protest while simultaneously calling the police to end a protest they disagreed with.^[16]