William K. Scarborough facts for kids

William Kauffman Scarborough was a professor emeritus of history at the University of Southern Mississippi. He was the Charles W. Moorman Distinguished Alumni Professor in the Humanities from 1996 to 1998.

He was an outspoken opponent of school integration and supporter of massive resistance, believing white people to be the "superior race" and black people to be "genetically inferior." He was a member of the Citizens' Councils.

Scarborough was a featured interviewee in the Stanley Nelson Jr. film Freedom Summer. Scarborough spoke at the Citadel on the subject of the secession of South Carolina.

Personal

Scarborough earned his B.A at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1954. He served in the Navy 1954-56 as a gunnery officer on the USS New Jersey (BB-62). He earned his M.A. at Cornell and his doctorate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1962. He taught for a year at Northeast Louisiana University before taking employment at Southern Miss, where he remained. The records of his work, 27 feet and 8500 documents, including materials associated with the Citizens' Councils, are archived at the University of North Carolina libraries.

Scarborough died in May 2020.

Selected publications

• Heritage, not hate. Let's keep the state flag
• Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South
• Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South
• Slavery — The White Man's Burden