On August 16, 2023, Beverly Lowry discussed her book Deer Creek Drive: A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta as part of the History Is Lunch series.
In 1948 Idella Thompson was viciously murdered in her Leland home, stabbed at least 150 times and left face down in a bathroom. Her daughter, Ruth Dickins, was the only other person in the house. She told authorities a Black man she didn’t recognize had fled the scene, but no evidence of the man’s presence was uncovered.
When Dickins herself was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, the community exploded. Petitions pleading for her release were drafted, signed, and circulated, and after only six years, the governor of Mississippi granted Ruth Dickins an indefinite suspension of her sentence and she was set free.
At the time of the murder Lowry was a ten-year-old living in nearby Greenville, and she weaves her family’s history into the close examination of the crime, its aftermath, and the ways it affected her own upbringing.
Beverly Lowry was born in Memphis and raised in Greenville. She attended the University of Mississippi before earning her BA in English literature from Memphis State University. After working as an actor in New York City, Lowry moved to Texas and taught at the University of Houston. She was later director of George Mason University’s creative nonfiction program. Lowry is the author of six novels and five works of nonfiction, the latest of which is Deer Creek Drive. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2007 she received the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration’s Richard Wright Award for Excellence in Literature.
History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi. The weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North Street in Jackson and livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook.
