Berkley Hudson

Born, Columbus, Mississippi where my Daddy ran Main Street Service Station, "Don't Cuss. Call Russ." My mother's family ran Sanitary Laundry & Dry Cleaners. (Clothes Dirty? Dial 630!) Left Mississippi after Ole Miss undergrad. Went to Columbia University journalism school, NYC.

Worked 25 years as journalist including at The Bulletin, Bend, Oregon; the Providence Journal and then the Los Angeles Times. Late-bloomed mass comm & folklore PhD @UNC Chapel Hill. Professor, Missouri School of Journalism where I edited Visual Communication Quarterly and chaired Race Relations Committee.

National Endowment for Humanities supported decades-long efforts to research, publish & exhibit UNC Press-Duke University Center for Documentary Studies book--Pruitt's Possum Town: Photographing Trouble & Resilience in American South. Images by a white man, O.N. Pruitt, during an era of racial segregation illuminate not only the past but the present, revealing complex layers of culture, history & memory.