SouthTalks: “You Asked for the Facts: Bobby Kennedy at the University of Mississippi”

“You Asked for the Facts: Bobby Kennedy at the University of Mississippi”

Documentary Film discussion and Q&A with Mary Blessey and W. Ralph Eubanks

This event is a partnership with the Oxford Film Festival. Screen the film and join the Q&A here: https://watch.eventive.org/oxfordac/play/5f60f719ed263d0098d405b7. The film is free to the first 100 participants. It will change to a pay what you can model after receiving 100 viewers.

In 1966, four years after the historic enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, students devised a plan to get around Mississippi’s “Speaker Ban” and bring Robert F. Kennedy to the university to reveal the truth about phone calls with former governor Ross Barnett.

Ralph Eubanks will discuss the film with director and alumna of the University of Mississippi, Mary Blessey.

Mary Blessey is an independent documentary filmmaker based in her hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi. She attended Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi and earned her M.A. in Southern Studies and an M.F.A. in Documentary Expression from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. She recently produced and directed the historical documentary film “You Asked For the Facts: Bobby Kennedy at the University of Mississippi,” which premiered its first advance screening at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in December 2019 and has been chosen as an official selection at the March on Washington Film Festival, the Montclair Film Festival, The San Diego International Film Festival, and several others. “You Asked For the Facts” is Blessey’s first feature-length documentary.

Ralph Eubanks is a visiting professor of Southern Studies, English, and the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College. Eubanks is author of The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South and Ever Is A Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past, which Washington Postbook critic Jonathan Yardley named as one of the best nonfiction books of the year. He has contributed articles to the Washington Post’s Outlook and Style sections, the Wall Street Journal, WIRED, The New Yorker, and National Public Radio. He is a recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and has been a fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia and served as director of publishing at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., from 1995 to 2013.