Connections To Place And To The Past

Malinda Maynor Lowery has always felt a deep sense of place — a quality her parents deliberately passed down to her 45 years ago, on the occasion of her birth, when they drove some 100 miles from their home in Durham to the hospital in Lumberton where Lowery was born.

Her parents understood that a real tie to their ancestral lands in Robeson County was as much a part of their Lumbee identity as their blood connection. Years later, Lowery sought to pass on that same lesson when she and her late husband, Lumbee musician and songwriter Willie French Lowery, returned to the same Lumberton hospital for the birth of their daughter Lydia in 2007.

As an associate professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of the American South, Lowery hopes to glean from the study of the past the insights needed to imagine — and help to build — a better, brighter, more inclusive future for all the region’s communities.

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This is story number 183 in the Carolina Stories 225th Anniversary Edition magazine.