“‘Now, Miss Daisy, somebody done bomb that temple back yonder, and you know it.’” The release of the film Driving Miss Daisy in 1989 made American moviegoers aware of the ongoing presence of southern Jewishness. 1 Alfred Uhry wrote the film’s screenplay from his 1987 autobiographically informed Pulitzer prize-winning play, the story of the relationship »
My students last summer had never heard of Jim Crow. U.S. Government is not an area in which I can claim expertise, but when I applied for a summer job with Duke University’s Talent Identification Program—a camp for academically gifted middle- and high-school students—someone in hiring thought my few years’ study of American history and »
John Wiley and Sons, 1998 Until this biography, students had to be content with only morsels of information from other publications about civil-rights activist Ella Baker, but Joanne Grant’s narrative traces Baker’s combative spirit back to the legacy of her grandparents, who were former slaves, and stresses a continuity of resistance within the African American »
Blackwell Ink, Inc., 2000 Nowadays, way too many of society’s “victims” are more poseurs. Not Ralph W. Johnson, who was at once victim and beneficiary of possibly the most eccentric practice ever to take root in the Jim Crow era. What a curious tale! For Ralph Johnson was a Black man who spent his entire »
In April of 2001, 750, 000 Mississippians went to the polls to decide whether to charge their state flag. The old flag, adopted in 1894, prominently incorporates the Confederate battle flag, and a committee set up by the governor had proposed to replace it with a pattern of twenty stars on a blue field. The »
Louisiana State University Press, 2001. One can hardly blame Martin Luther King Jr. for neglecting to mail his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to the eight white clergymen to whom it was addressed. That year, 1963, was a busy one for the civil rights leader, especially after the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) Birmingham campaign captured »
University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Eudora Welty explored the troubled mentality of Mississippi’s white segregationists when in 1963 she wrote a fictional New Yorker article from the viewpoint of the man who killed civil rights leader Medgar Evers. The assassin’s wife says to her husband as he returns from shooting the African American in the back: “Well, »
“‘Jackie took a lot of abuse, but there was no violence. Even if you count hard slides with raised spikes, that was nothing compared to what happened in the 1950s and ’60s during the Civil Rights movement.’” The year of 1947 was arguably the most pivotal in the history of major league baseball. Baseball historian »
“‘I must be measured by my soul — the mind is the standard of the man.’” Near the end of the exhilarating day of December 5, 1955, Martin Luther King Jr. stepped into the pulpit of Montgomery, Alabama’s Holt Street Baptist Church. With seven years of preaching behind him and “only twenty minutes to prepare »
University of Georgia Press, 2001 Recently, the Fox Family network has been airing episodes of their new show, “State of Grace,” which is about a young Jewish girl named Hannah Rayburn. Hannah’s family moves from Illinois to North Carolina, and she copes with being a “fish out of water,” as the show’s description says, with the »
“This Black man called the Secretary of the Navy. And the Secretary of the Navy says to the judge: ‘Let him go.’” “They did not knuckle under to the institution of slavery or, following that, the institution of Jim Crow-ism,” reflected Edwin Caldwell Jr. on evaluating some two hundred years of his family’s history in »
“At last Curtis could sense that he was closing in on the lost Confederates. It would be a two-mile trek through the seldom traveled woods outside Front Royal, Virginia, and it could easily result in a futile search for something no more than myth. As a known regional photographer, Curtis had been tipped by locals »