Obituary of Walter Anderson Jackson

-Chapel Hill- Walter Anderson Jackson, III, of Chapel Hill, NC passed away peacefully at Roanoke Memorial Hospital on February 20, 2015 as a result of injuries suffered in an automobile collision. Born March 21, 1950 in Memphis, TN, Walter was the only child of the late Naomi Wegley Jackson and Walter Anderson Jackson, Jr. After graduating magna cum laude with a B.A. from Duke University, he went on to obtain his Ph.D. in History at Harvard University. He joined History Department at N. C. State University in 1983 and had a distinguished career as a tenured professor specializing in U. S. intellectual history and black/white relations. He held fellowships from the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Studies and Charles Warren Center for American History at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, the Virginia Center for the Humanities, and the Mellon Faculty at Stanford. Walter was the author of more than twenty-five publications on intellectual history, American race relations, and the civil rights movement. His book Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938-1987 won the Anisfield-Wolf Prize in Cultural Diversity and the Gustavus Myers Human Rights Award. As one of the world's leading scholars on the life and work of Swedish sociologist and Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal, Walter was recently featured on PBS program "American Denial." At the time of his death, he was working at the Virginia Center for the Humanities, completing a double biography entitled Intoxicating Honesty: Gunnar and Alva Myrdal in Sweden and America, 1898-1945. Walter is remembered by all who knew him as a kind, compassionate and brilliant man. He adored his wife Rachida and daughter Sarah, who survive him. A funeral service will be held at 3:00 PM on Saturday, March 7 at the Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill, NC.