Essay
Like the rest of the nation, we at Southern Cultures and the Center for the Study of the American South are reeling with shock and horror at last weekend’s events in Charlottesville, Virginia. The invasion of this peaceful town, home of Thomas Jefferson himself and his iconic University of Virginia, by hordes of armed neo-Confederates »
Photo Essay
After her mother Jeroline Rice passed in 2003, Marian Waters sorted through boxes of photographs that her father Isaiah Rice had taken over the course of his adult life. Rice, who died in 1980, had taken hundreds of photographs of family, friends, and strangers in his Asheville, North Carolina community. While Waters always knew her »
Interview
A 1966 photograph of the Appalachian historian and activist Helen Matthews Lewis captures much about a woman who has been studying, writing about, and fighting for the people of Appalachia for three-quarters of a century. In the photo, Lewis sits outside of a mine entrance, hair emerging beneath a hard hat, with a big smile »
Interview
“‘That night, they blew up King’s motel, and every police car they had in Birmingham got torn up. I left. I didn’t have anything in common with Bull Connor.’” Early in the Hollywood movie Selma, a pivotal scene depicts a 1965 conversation between Martin Luther King Jr. and a young John Lewis. The leaders of »
University of North Carolina Press, 1992. University of North Carolina Press, 1993. The struggles of Black southerners during the early 1960s aroused concerned people across America to leave the relative comfort and safety of their homes and risk their lives in the struggle for freedom. Northerners Danny Lyon and Jon Daniels ventured southward in the »
“‘I never did see Decatur Street with an ice pick, with a pistol . . . But I saw men and women walking up and down the street—ice picks, and pistols, and knives—and then talk about the street. The street ain’t never cut nobody’s throat. It was you! It was you!’” Reverend J. M. Gates »
“Tupelo is one of the most-mentioned place names in southern geography. The author takes a look at Tupelo’s evolving image.” I am interested in landscape, local history, and sense of place. This is a common avocation for southerners; we identify strongly with our region. I am particularly fascinated by Tupelo, Mississippi. I was born there »
“Emmett Till has no voice in all that has been written about him. But how have Americans—white and black, male and female, liberal and conservative—written about the case and the boy, and how have these impressions changed over time?” The undisputed facts of the case are simple and few: In August 1955 Mrs. Mamie Till »
“Reminiscences and a gallery of photos documenting an unfinished journey that began thirty years ago.” On 16 September 1997, civil rights activist Bertha Luster called me from Marks, Mississippi. I had first met Ms. Luster and her six children in 1968 on the Mule Train, part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) Poor People’s »
“It will surprise no one to see that the two big stories of the twentieth-century South are the transition from an agricultural to an urban society and the transformation effected by the Civil Rights movement.” Spring 2001’s South Polls unveiled our list of “The Twenty Most Influential Southerners of the Twentieth Century.” Mike Burg, president »
“One of the best ways to play the game is avoid confrontation. The next is to make the adversary ridiculous.” John B. McLendon Jr. was one of the most talented and influential basketball coaches of the twentieth century. He first made his mark at Durham’s North Carolina College, now North Carolina Central University, where he »
“‘There were a lot of people who supported Clyde, but they just did not feel comfortable voicing any kind of support. There was this element of fear.’” During the spring of 1985, a battle raged in Buies Creek, North Carolina, on the campus of Campbell University, an affiliate of the State Baptist Convention of North »