Lassiter Wins Award for the Other Side of Middletown

Eric Lassitre, The Other Side of Middletown, poses with former Indiana State Representative, Hurley Goodall and ethnographer Beth Campbell

Now scattered around the world, many students from Lassiter's seminar sent greetings and reported that the project had changed their lives.

Eric Lassiter received the 2005 Margaret Mead Award from The Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association. The award is given to projects that interpret anthropological data and principles in ways that make them meaningful to the public. The purpose of Lassiter's study, The Other Side of Middletown, was to recount "the largely unrecorded history of Muncie's black community which the (initial and subsequent) researchers downplayed."

Shaffer Chapel in Whiteley, a Muncie neighborhood, hosted the celebration as Lassiter and his students had consulted with community advisers there.