​"When Robert F. Kennedy's plane touched down at Nashville's Municipal Airport, a 30-foot banner stretched across the lobby entrance. It read, "Suddenly there's hope for America."

In a yearlong series of stories and videos, the USA TODAY NETWORK will peel back the layers of a complex and textured year to reveal how, for good or ill, 1968 informs who we are. 

Frye Gaillard recalls the fateful year:

Journey to the Wilderness
A Documentary

Acclaimed journalist Frye Gaillard wades into the heritage-vs-hate debate about how we view the Confederacy with a first-person memoir. The former reporter for The Charlotte Observer and author of over 20 books on the history and culture of the South reflects on his own family’s 250-year history of membership in the Southern aristocracy which included owning hundreds of slaves. The film is a parallel journey. Through his letters to and from home it follows the war through the eyes of Gaillard’s great uncle Franklin, a Confederate officer who fought with Robert E. Lee through every major battle from Bull Run to The Wilderness. It simultaneously traces Gaillard’s life long struggle through his distinguished career to “navigate” his “way into and through the tangled web” of his “own conscience and heritage.” Frye Gaillard is the recipient of numerous awards for writing, including The Lillian Smith Book Award for best Southern non-fiction and the Humanitarian Award presented by the NAACP Legal and Educational Fund for writing on the subject of civil rights. The film is an adaptation of his 2015 book by the same name published by New South Books.
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​Watch the Trailer

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Alabama Remembers Vietnam

Alabama Public Television conducted a series of deeply personal interviews with 12 Alabamians from all walks of life that experienced Vietnam from home or abroad.
Frye Gaillard on Vietnam:

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Frye Gaillard: With Music and Justice for All

Frye Gaillard needs to be better known among a broader audience. He’s certainly established himself in the South with his incisive, candid, never-pull-any-punches journalism.
Continue to nodepression.com

"Gaillard remains one of the most trenchant voices in journalism because he continues to point out with razor-sharp insight the ways that music is inextricably woven into the fabric of its culture."

Faculty Appointment, War and Memory Center

Frye Gaillard has been named to the interdisciplinary faculty of the Center for the Study of War and Memory at the University of South Alabama. Founded in 2012, the one-of-a-kind center studies the collective memory of war and its impact on society, both in the United States and abroad. Steven Trout, director of the Center, wrote the Foreword for Gaillard’s 2015 book, Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family’s Civil War Letters. The book will soon be a documentary film.

John Egerton Scholar In Residence

Chosen in 2016  by the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. Egerton, one of the founders of SFA, was an award-winning Southern author who, as Gaillard notes, “wrote as well as anybody ever has” about Southern history, race relations, and culture. Among Egerton’s best-known books were Speak Now Against the Day, Southern Food, and The Americanization of Dixie. “For most of my adult life, and for much of his, John Egerton was a mentor and friend,” said Gaillard, “and I am pleased to be recognized in a way that honors his memory.” Gaillard gave the concluding address at the SFA’s Summer Symposium, held this year in Egerton’s hometown of Nashville.

University of South Alabama Common Read

With the choice of his book, Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America, as the 2015-16 Common Read book for the University of South Alabama, Frye Gaillard has begun a year’s worth of campus programming on the history and legacy of the civil rights movement – conducting readings and campus-wide discussions, hosting visiting speakers, and delivering guest lectures in multiple classes. Gaillard’s Writer in Residence position at the university also includes public programming throughout Alabama and the South, discussing his books and issues of importance. In the past three months, he has been a part of programs in Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Virginia, with readings and discussions from Cradle of Freedom; The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina; The Books That Mattered: A Reader’s Memoir; Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family’s Civil War Letters; and Watermelon Wine: Remembering the Golden Years of Country Music.

OTHER AWARDS

• 2017 Arty, Mobile Arts Council Literary Artist of the Year Award.
• 2016 Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Literary Scholarship
• 2013 Common Read selection, Spalding University MFA Program, The Books that Mattered
• 2013 Regional Emmy Award for In the Path of the Storms, a documentary film produced by the Alabama Center for Public Television
• 2013 Fifty in Fifty Award for Cradle of Freedom, chosen by the University of South Alabama as one of the top 50 works of scholarship during the university’s first 50 years
• 2013 UMS-Wright Arts Hall of Fame induction
• 2012 Clarence Cason Award for Non-Fiction Writing, presented by the University of Alabama
• 2011 Vanderbilt Student Media Hall of Fame induction
• 2011 Progressive Book Club featured selection, Black History Month With Music and Justice for All
• 2009 American Library Association “Best of the Best of University Presses,” With Music and Justice for All
• 2008 Progressive Book Club selection, With Music and Justice for All
• 2007 Non-Fiction Book of the Year recognition, Alabama Library Association, Cradle of Freedom
• 2006 Irene Blair Honeycutt Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Literary Arts, Presented by Central Piedmont Community College
• 2005 Lillian Smith Book Award for best Southern non-fiction, for Cradle of Freedom
• 2004 CASE Award for education writing, “The Long Road Home,” published Fall 2004 Vanderbilt Magazine
• 2002 Humanitarian Award, presented by the NAACP Legal and Educational Fund, North Carolina Committee, for writing on the subject of civil rights
• 2002 President’s Award, presented by the Southeastern Library Association, for co-founding of Novello Festival Press

Contributions to Anthologies, Encyclopedias, and Other Books

Conversations with Will D. Campbell, University Press of Mississippi
American Crisis, Southern Solutions, NewSouth Books
Chronicles of American Indian Protest, Fawcett Books
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 17, University of North Carolina Press
The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Rutledge Hill Press
The Encyclopedia of Alabama, Auburn University
The Remembered Gate: Memories by Alabama Writers, University of Alabama Press
Close to Home: Revelations and Reminiscences by North Carolina Authors, John F. Blair, Publisher
Discovering North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press
The North Carolina Century, Levine Museum of the New South
Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas, Novello Festival Press
No Hiding Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Charlotte-area Writers, Down Home Press
Literary Mobile, Negative Capability Press
Spinning Words Into Gold: A Hands-On Guide to the Craft of Writing, Main Street Rag Press
Cornbread and Sushi: A Journey Through the Rural South, Holocene Publishing
Educating the Disadvantaged: 1971, AMS Press
Will Davis Campbell At Home In The World, Perspectives in Religious Studies, 2012
Behind the Public Veil: The Humanness of Martin Luther King, Jr., by Lewis V. Baldwin, foreword by Frye Gaillard, Fortress Press
The Poetry of Faith: Sermons Preached in a Southern Church, by Stephen F. Dill, edited with an introduction by Frye Gaillard, NewSouth Books
The Way It Was, by Tom Peacock, foreword by Frye Gaillard, Main Street Rag Press
Hub City Music Makers, by Peter Cooper, foreword by Frye Gaillard, Hub City Press
To Live and Write in Dixie, by P.T. Paul, foreword by Frye Gaillard, Negative Capability Press