“‘Blocks for Freedom’ helped dozens of poor Black Mississippi women fight for the right to vote—not with marches and sit-ins but through making clothes, selling lunches, and hosting concerts.” In 1966, two women from drastically different backgrounds launched an innovative campaign to protect African American women’s voting rights in Mississippi. Oberia Holliday was a thirty-four-year-old »
“It is tempting to think of universal voting rights as one of the fundamental pillars of our country, but access to the vote has been hard fought and remains under attack.” The Voting Rights Act (VRA), which was signed into law on August 6, 1965, was a significant victory for the Civil Rights Movement, southern »
Three days after I turned eighteen, my mom, who was born in Jim Crow Florida, took me to register to vote at the same precinct where I grew up watching her vote. The experience taught me at an early age that voting was my birthright, something adults—and Black women in particular—did as good citizens. I »
Dawoud Bey’s Untitled (The Light on the Trail) could be anywhere that is warm and wet enough to produce this tangle of plant life. But stay still in front of this photograph and really look. Somehow all of the wild growth frames an opening. And inside that rough circle, the light spirals clockwise toward the »
“Unsolved Mysteries was the portal to my imagination running wild, and fear was the pilot.” Wednesday nights were reserved for Unsolved Mysteries. A man’s disembodied voice warned viewers that we were about to watch something that “was not a news broadcast,” followed by a crescendo of synthesizers and Robert Stack’s gravelly voice and direct stare »
“Cheap, lurid, and often drawing from sensationalized news stories, pulp fiction enjoyed a heyday from the 1920s through the 1940s.” Middle Tennessee’s landscape is marked by its Central Basin, a region formed by the erosion of a geological dome once forced above the Earth’s surface from far below. On the outskirts of this crater’s perimeter »
“I grew up listening to the folks songs of my ancestors along the Scottish Borders.” I grew up listening to the folk songs of my ancestors along the Scottish Borders. When I left London for America, I discovered the songs again, preserved intact in the Appalachian South. Even as a child, I was drawn to »
“They drive by an old-timey church with one door for the men and a separate door for the women and a graveyard out back where the stones pop up like teeth in the night.” When Charlie sings, her sister Audra’s voice follows, the voice of a grown woman inside a little-girl body, high and lonesome »
“The children ogled the empty houses and sagging porches, fascinated by the veil of abandonment that smothered everything around them.” The trees stood silent, lining the street in stately rows. Survival was in their lineage. When the whipping winds, surging foodwaters, and battering rain had come, they had tightened their roots, clung to the dirt, »
“He noticed the sound of the footsteps quicken, but a swift glance behind him offered only the shadow of a person outlined by the light of the moon.” “Hey, sorry I can’t take you further down the road, man, you sure you gon’ be alright?” Tea smiled at his friend. He fully understood the trepidation. The »
“Mama Possum is a character cursed by her ancestors because she killed one of her children.” I was born in rural Mississippi in 1970, right after the Civil Rights Movement. In my formative years, I was thankfully unaware of the institutional struggles of racial oppression and violence that remained. My childhood was filled with barefoot »
“The Black woman is tossing an ambiguous object into a presumed hole in the ground, arguably to effect the desired outcome of her conjure spell. Indeed, both the woman and Walker are turning a hoodoo trick for the viewer.” Kara Walker is renowned for art that invokes the American South as an intrinsic site of »
Essay
