May 7, 1927

Richmond Croom Beatty (1905–1961) was a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, and a noted biographer, textbook author and scholar of American literature. The Oklahoma native attended Barker Elementary School and Central High School in Birmingham, then graduated from Birmingham-Southern College in 1924 and completed his master’s of arts at Vanderbilt in 1928 and his doctorate there in 1930. In college, Beatty starred in track and field, specializing in the hurdles and pole vault. He married the former Floy Ward on this day in 1927. Beatty was a cub reporter for the Birmingham Age-Herald before authoring biographies of William Byrd, Bayard Taylor, Thomas Babington Macaulay and James Russell Lowell. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1940 and was literary editor for the Nashville Tennessean before his death.

Read more at Bhamwiki. 

For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.