Katharine DuPre Lumpkin


Katharine DuPre Lumpkin was an American writer from Macon, Georgia. She is a member of both the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and the Georgia Women of Achievement.

Background

Katharine DuPre Lumpkin was born on December 22, 1897, to Annette Caroline Morris and William Wallace Lumpkin. Her father was a veteran of the Civil War. Her siblings included writer Grace Lumpkin. Between 1912 and 1915 she attended Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. She graduated from Columbia University with an MA in sociology in 1919. She died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on May 5, 1988.

Career

Lumpkin was a writer.
She was descended from a slaveholding family. Her grandfather owned approximately 1000 acres of land and 50 slaves in Oglethorpe County, Georgia. About this Lumpkin has written that her grandfather "made his plantation provide for all his needs. On a place of this size he had to do so if he were to have any net cash income". On southern slaveholders she has written that:
Above all, he would know his slaves, each by name and each for his good points and foibles, most of them being inherited, or the children of those who had been handed down. He would expect constantly to guide and discipline and keep them contented by skillful handling. First and last, he would know that every plan, every decision, every quandary nagging his mind, save those of marketing his cotton and purchasing supplies from the outside, resolved itself into a human problem, if it could be so called: the problem of managing his black dependents. He would know he was master in all things on his plantation, everything, nothing excepted, including the life of his slaves. With it he would know that his station was secure as a southern gentleman.

In her autobiography, Lumpkin describes her shock upon learning that her all-white chapter of the Young Women's Christian Association would be addressed by a black woman named Miss Jane Arthur. She later said that "the heavens had not fallen, nor the earth parted asunder to swallow us up in this unheard of transgression". She compared it to the biblical story from the Book of Samuel about the man who had defied the law by touching the sacred Tabernacle of Jehovah. In realizing that nothing fundamentally distinguished Miss Arthur from a white woman, she said that she had touched the "tabernacle of our sacred racial beliefs" and "not the slightest thing had happened".

Death and legacy

Lumpkin died age 90 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on May 5, 1988.
In 2016, Lumpkin was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. In 2020 she was inducted into the Georgia Women of Achievement Hall of Fame.