UW–Madison’s Walter Stern, an assistant professor in the School of Education’s Department of Educational Policy Studies, received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend award to support his current book project, “A Legal Lynching in Louisiana: Gary Tyler and the Criminalization of Black Students during Desegregation.”
Stern’s project focuses on the case of Gary Tyler, a Black teenager who was imprisoned for nearly 42 years after being wrongfully convicted of fatally shooting a white student at their desegregated Louisiana high school in 1974. According to Stern, the project “explores the role that school officials, police, prosecutors, legislators, and judges played in denying state protection to Black youth.”
The NEH awards summer stipends to people pursuing advanced research in the humanities for academic and/or general audiences. This year the NEH received 700 applications, and it awarded 98 stipends. Six of these stipends went to people in Wisconsin — three in Madison.
With the support of this NEH stipend, Stern will be able to draft two chapters of his book manuscript this summer.