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My Tour Through the Asylum: A Southern Integrationist's Memoir

Dr. William Dufford
Courtesy of USC Press

Immortalized in the writings of his most famous student, best-selling author Pat Conroy, veteran education administrator William E. Dufford has led an the life of a stalwart champion for social justice and equal access for all to the empowerment of a good public education. In My Tour Through the Asylum: A Southern Integrationist's Memoir (USC Press, 2017), Dufford and his collaborators, Aïda Rogers and Salley McInerney, recount the possibilities that unfold when people work through their differences toward a common good.

A quintessential Southern storyteller now in his nineties, Dufford reflects on his own transformation through education, from his upbringing in the segregationist Jim Crow Era–South of the 1930s and 1940s to becoming an accomplished integrationist, respected by his former colleagues and students. He is joined in conversation with Walter Edgar by his co-authors.

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Dr. Walter Edgar has two programs on South Carolina Public Radio: Walter Edgar's Journal, and South Carolina from A to Z. Dr. Edgar received his B.A. degree from Davidson College in 1965 and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1969. After two years in the army (including a tour of duty in Vietnam), he returned to USC as a post-doctoral fellow of the National Archives, assigned to the Papers of Henry Laurens.