KSU’s acceptance of writer’s land becomes campus controversy
Friday, July 17th, 2009
Corra White Harris
When Kennesaw State University announced at the end of last year that it had accepted a donation of the 56-acre homestead of Georgia’s first best-selling female novelist — a property containing the oldest building in Bartow County and valued at more than $3 million — it seemed like a coup.
The Georgia Writers Association, whose administrative offices are based at KSU, certainly thought so. The nonprofit group, which holds writing workshops and sponsors an annual book awards ceremony, thought the site would be an ideal place to hold its spring retreat. In fact, it was suggested, the event could even be named for the property’s once famous former owner, Corra White Harris.
No one in the group knew much of Harris save what was in the university press release: In the early years of the 20th century, she was considered one of the state’s most celebrated writers and its most popular female author. Her most famous work, the pseudo-autobiographical 1910 novel A Circuit-Rider’s Wife, had been made into a movie starring Susan Hayward. Harris wrote serialized fiction and essays for some of the top magazines of the day and is even credited with being America’s first female war correspondent, covering World War I for the Saturday Evening Post. She published 19 books in all and, in the years before her death in 1935, was a regular columnist for the Atlanta Journal.
Kevin Cantwell, an English professor at Macon State College who was then the association’s board president, says he decided to do some research into Harris’ writings so the group would know a little more about its prospective literary mascot.
It took only a few minutes on the Internet before he came across a bombshell — an inflammatory piece of writing that effectively launched Harris’ career.
Richard Vengroff, the dean of humanities and social sciences at KSU, was one of the first people an appalled Cantwell told about his discovery: a letter to the editor by Harris that ran in an 1899 issue of the Independent, a respected New York magazine.
Says Vengroff: “I’ve seen a lot of racist documents in my 35 years of teaching, but that letter is one of the worst things I’ve ever read.”
