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Mentor, teacher, friend-Francis Sheldon Hackney fulfilled all these roles with integrity, grace, and a rare intelligence leavened by wit, humility, and compassion. His strength of character, which stood him in good stead during a long and distinguished career as a university administrator, was firmly grounded in a lifelong study of southern history and related issues of race, regional culture, civil rights, social justice, national identity, and democracy. While Sheldon was destined to spend most of his life north of the MasonDixon Line, the American South-his native region-was always the focal point of his search for a "usable past." Fascinated by the ironies and complexities of southern history, he pursued a complex understanding of southern myths and mores not only for the sake of scholarship but also as a means of promoting social change and humanistic values.
Sheldon Hackney was bom in Birmingham, Alabama, on December 5, 1933, the third son of Cecil Fain Hackney, a reporter and editor for the Birmingham Age-Herald, and Elizabeth Morris Hackney. Following his graduation from Ramsay High School, he spent one semester at BirminghamSouthern College before enrolling at Vanderbilt University in the fall of 1952. Majoring in history, he graduated in 1955 but spent an additional year taking postgraduate courses in southern history. College life in Nashville nurtured his doubts about the wisdom and morality of Jim Crow institutions; and even though there were no African American students at Vanderbilt, he came to embrace racially liberal ideas reinforced by occasional crosstown visits to Fisk University.
In 1956 Sheldon entered the United States Navy, and a year later he married Lucy Durr, a...