Join Leta McCollough Seletzky to talk about “The Kneeling Man.”
AUTHOR TALK DETAILS
2/15/2024 at 7:00pm
CARONDELET HIGH SCHOOL JEAN HOFMANN CENTER FOR INNOVATION
1133 Winton Dr.
Concord, CA 94518
About the Author:
Leta McCollough Seletzky is a National Endowment for the Arts 2022 Creative Writing Fellow. A litigator turned essayist and memoirist, she has written for The Atlantic; The New York Times; The Washington Post; O, The Oprah Magazine; and more. She grew up in Memphis, Tennessee and lives in Walnut Creek, California.
About the Book:
The intimate and heartbreaking story of a Black undercover police officer who famously kneeled by the assassinated Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr–and a daughter’s quest for the truth about her father
In the famous photograph of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of Memphis’s Lorraine Motel, one man kneeled down beside King, trying to staunch the blood from his fatal head wound with a borrowed towel.
This kneeling man was a member of the Invaders, an activist group that was in talks with King in the days leading up to the murder. But he also had another identity: an undercover Memphis police officer reporting on the activities of this group, which was thought to be possibly dangerous and potentially violent. This kneeling man is Leta McCollough Seletzky’s father.
Marrell McCollough was a Black man working secretly with the white power structure, a spy. This was so far from her understanding of what it meant to be Black in America, of everything she eventually devoted her life and career to, that she set out to learn what she could about his life, his actions and motivations. But with that decision came risk. What would she uncover about her father, who went on to a career at the CIA, and did she want to bear the weight of knowing?
