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Vol. 16, No. 2: Southern Lives

  //  summer 2010

As Harry L. Watson puts it, “If there are truly many Souths, there must be many kinds of southerners.” In this issue, we take a look at many Southern Lives: Bill Carter dresses for all occasions; Virginia Foster Durr opens her home to recently released inmates; Michael McFee tours the Billy Graham Library; Septima Poinsette Clark celebrates fellow Civil Rights pioneers; Albert Murray goes on the record about Ralph Ellison’s style; and Margaret Walker Alexander reveals her take on Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker.

Table of Contents
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Front Porch: Southern Lives

by Harry L. Watson
“Stereotypes from Dixie crowd American fiction, film, music, and consciousness, and we all know people who seem to fit one of the molds.” If there are truly many Souths, there must be many kinds of southerners. To be various they must be individuals, but as recognizable southerners, they must also fit some generalizations. Stereotypes from »
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Becoming Billy Carter: Clothes Make the Man (and His Many Characters)

by José Blanco F.
“The regulars at the station had great fun with the press. The station was home to some of the greatest liars and bullshit artists in the history of the world, and tabloid reporters were nothing more than a light snack before lunch for them.” The building standing at 105 E. Church Street in Plains, Georgia, »
Interview

THEIR OWN TALKING

Septima Clark and Women in the Civil Rights Movement

by David P. Cline, Katherine Mellen Charron, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Eugene P. Walker
This article first appeared in vol. 16, no. 2 (Summer 2010) and is excerpted here. To access the full article, visit Project MUSE. Septima Poinsette Clark is a name that should be as familiar to us as Rosa Parks. Both women contributed significantly to the African American freedom struggle, and striking similarities exist in their »
Interview

“My Idol Was Langston Hughes”

The Poet, the Renaissance, and Their Enduring Influence

by William R. Ferris, Margaret Alexander Walker
I met Margaret Walker Alexander in the fall of 1970 when I taught my first class at Jackson State University. She and I both taught in the English Department, and I will never forget a lecture that Margaret gave to my students on Zora Neale Hurston. She and Zora had traveled similar roads as southern »
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Learning from the Long Civil Rights Movement’s First Generation: Virginia Foster Durr

by Sarah Thuesen, Bob Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, M. Sue Thrasher
“So I took each in turn, and they told me why they hated white folks. This took quite a while, because they were extremely articulate about why they hated white folks.” “You think you are the first generation who’s ever done this; you ought to go out and learn some things.” Louisville activist Anne Braden, »
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Just As I Am Not: A Poet Visits the Billy Graham Library

by Michael McFee
“Do they keep an eye out for the possible wayward soul (like, say, a middle-aged guy with scraggly graying hair who stays at the margins of the group and keeps scribbling in a little black book) and hope—no, pray—that the cheerful performance of their duties and the powerful unfolding of Billy Graham’s life and message »
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So Then

by Murray B. Shugars
“So, you get up and pilfer a cigarette from your lover’s pack, smoke it in blue moonlight pushing through the bare kitchen window. Someone is listening.” So, you lie awake beside a lover of many years,and the tabby cat kneads the blanket.You have only three days’ leave.
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Albert Murray’s Magical Youth

by David A. Taylor
“‘In America they get away from race by saying ‘minority.’ But who the hell’s the best minority in the world? The hero! You know what I’m saying? That’s always a minority.'” It’s a short walk from the 125th Street subway station to the Harlem home of Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch’s literary father and the man »
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