Margaret Dunbar Cutright: A Case for Solomon: Bobby Dunbar and the Kidnapping that Haunted A Nation

Start: 08/20/2012 7:00 pm

Timezone: Etc/GMT-4

Mon 8/20 7pm-8pm

Margaret Dunbar Cutright discusses A Case for Solomon: Bobby Dunbar and the Kidnapping that Haunted A Nation

A Case for Solomon chronicles one of the most celebrated—and most misunderstood—kidnapping cases in American history. In 1912, four-year-old Bobby Dunbar, the son of an upper-middle-class Louisiana family, went missing in the swamps. After an eight-month search that electrified the country and destroyed Bobby’s parents, the boy was found, filthy and hardly recognizable, in the pinewoods of southern Mississippi.

The story of Bobby Dunbar, fought over by competing New Orleans tabloids, the courts, and the citizenry of two states, offers a case study in yellow journalism, emergent forensic science, and criminal justice in the turn-of-the-century American South. It is a drama of raw poverty and power and an exposé of how that era defined and defended motherhood, childhood, and community. First told in a stunning episode of National Public Radio’s This American Life, A Case for Solomon chronicles the epic struggle to determine one child’s identity, along the way probing unsettling questions about the formation of memory, family, and self.

Margaret Dunbar Cutright is the granddaughter of Bobby Dunbar, the victim of the kidnapping that is the subject of A Case for Solomon. She has researched the case for more than a decade, gathering and analyzing legal documents, family correspondence, and newspapers, and has had extensive and ongoing contact with descendants of all of the three families involved in the story. She lives in North Carolina.