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  • William Warren Rogers Sr.
  • Warren Rogers

William warren rogers sr. (known as “bill”) was born the year the Stock Market crashed, 1929, in the small Lowndes County community of Sandy Ridge. He was raised in nearby Greenville by his father (a minister of the Christian Church) and mother, along with two brothers and a sister. He graduated from Greenville High School and, assisted by the Walter O. Palmer Scholarship, attended Auburn University. Various professors, including Malcolm McMillian, Jack Kendrick, Robert Rea, and Turner Ivey, instilled in him an appreciation for history and influenced his choice of a career. It was at Auburn, in a Spanish class, where he met Miriam Arnold, of Abbeville, Alabama, and they married in 1951. After graduating from Auburn (where Rogers also received a Master’s degree), he began pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of North Carolina. The history graduate program at the University of North Carolina was among the most respected in the nation; and one of the reasons was the presence of Fletcher M. Green. A demanding professor, Green molded a generation of historians. Rogers stood in both admiration and fear of the man who directed his graduate work.

Rogers took a detour from his academic progression in 1954 when he was drafted into the armed forces. Rogers did not care for military life, recalling with some amusement that he was the second worst soldier in the Army (his best friend being the worst), but he made the most of two years stationed in Stuttgart, Germany. He returned to Alabama and spent the next two years in Montgomery, researching at the State Archives and writing his dissertation. That study concerned agrarianism in Alabama in the late nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the Populist movement. In 1959 he became the Director of Florida State University’s program at Moody Air Force Base in [End Page 5] Valdosta, Georgia, and the next year joined the history department on the main campus at Tallahassee.

During his thirty–six years on the Florida State campus, Rogers taught a wide variety of classes. He quickly developed a reputation as a fine professor, and his infectious enthusiasm attracted students to his classes. The new faculty member’s abilities were recognized almost immediately in 1960–61 when he was awarded the prestigious Coyle Moore Award for Outstanding Teacher Award, given annually to a single recipient at Florida State.

He also began to publish articles and books, and William Warren Rogers became a respected scholar in the field of New South history. Soon after arriving at FSU, he was approached by Ms. Parker Poe, a philanthropist in nearby Thomasville, Georgia, about authoring a history of Thomas County and Thomasville. His first book examined the town and county before the Civil War, and since then he has authored six other monographs concerning the area. These monographs focus on the pulse of a wide white and black cross-section—the essence of southern communities—and have attracted recognition for their scholarly (as opposed to antiquarian) approach; the Thomasville books have contributed to local history’s elevation and scholarly relevance.

Alabama would provide the setting for several books, and Rogers often collaborated with Robert David Ward. Their long friendship began at Auburn, where they had met as undergraduates, and continued as they were fellow graduate students at the University of North Carolina. Ward taught at Georgia Southern University. The first fruit of their scholarship was Labor Revolt in Alabama: The Great Strike of 1894 (1965), which provided an account of some 8,000 striking miners (of the United Mine Workers union) in a state that was agrarian and firmly anti-union. The lives of black southerners in the nineteenth century have been particularly hard to document given the paucity of historical sources to draw from. Deep and meticulous primary research resulted in a searing book entitled August Reckoning: Jack Turner and Racism in Post Civil War Alabama (1973). A former slave who through word and act inspired blacks after the [End Page 6] Civil War and into the l880s in Choctaw County, Jack Turner was eventually lynched for allegedly promoting a racial uprising. Rogers and Ward developed an interest in Alabama...

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