Frye Gaillard


Frye Gaillard is an American historian and author.

Early life and education

Frye Gaillard was born in Mobile, Alabama on December 23, 1946. His parents were lawyer and later judge Walter Frye Gaillard, Sr., and Helen Amante Gaillard. Gaillard attended Vanderbilt University, graduating in 1968. During the 1960s Gaillard came into proximity with many of the most prominent political personalities of the decade. As a high school student in 1963, Gaillard witnessed the arrest of Martin Luther King in Birmingham, Alabama, during King's Birmingham campaign against racial segregation. While at Vanderbilt he came into contact with Stokley Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver, when the two Black Panthers were engaged to speak. Shortly after, in 1968, he invited Robert F. Kennedy to speak at Vanderbilt, 11 weeks prior to Kennedy's assassination.

Career

Gaillard started his career at the Race Relations Reporter in Nashville as managing editor from 1970 to 1972, then moved to the Charlotte Observer as a writer, editor and columnist, while teaching nonfiction writing at Queens College, both until 1990. While with the Observer he won awards from the North Carolina Press Association for spot news, features and investigative reporting. In 2004 he moved back to Mobile. As an author he won the 1989 Gustavus Myers Award for The Dream Long Deferred, and in 2007 the Alabama Library Association Book of the Year for Cradle of Freedom.
Gaillard's 2018 book A Hard Rain was inspired by David Halberstam's The Fifties, and documents the 1960s in part through Gaillard's experiences of the time. Gailllard has been author-in-residence at the University of South Alabama since 2007. He has written more than 25 books.

Published works