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"L" is for Lumpkin, Grace (ca. 1896-1980)

South Carolina From A to Z
SC Public Radio

"L" is for Lumpkin, Grace (ca. 1896-1980). Writer, social activist. A native of Georgia, Lumpkin’s family moved to Columbia in 1900. She earned a teacher’s certificate from Brenau College and then held various positions as a teacher, home demonstration agent, and social worker. In 1925 she moved to New York where she took a job with The World Tomorrow, a pacifist publication. After covering a Communist-led textile strike she went to work for a Soviet-affiliated trading company. In 1932, she published To Make My Bread based upon her witness to the Gastonia, North Carolina textile strikes of 1929. The book won the Gorky Prize and has been excerpted, anthologized, and republished numerous times. In the late 1930s, Grace Lumpkin broke with her radical associates and took refuge with an ardently anti-Communist organization, the Moral Rearmament Movement.

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Dr. Walter Edgar has two programs on South Carolina Public Radio: Walter Edgar's Journal, and South Carolina from A to Z. Dr. Edgar received his B.A. degree from Davidson College in 1965 and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1969. After two years in the army (including a tour of duty in Vietnam), he returned to USC as a post-doctoral fellow of the National Archives, assigned to the Papers of Henry Laurens.