The Fight for Racial Equality in the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service
by Kieran Walsh Taylor,
P. E. Bazemore
“You were there at the U.S. Supreme Court. Your name is called in that body of people. It was just frightening.” For the better part of twenty years, county extension agent P. E. Bazemore spearheaded a lawsuit charging the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service with discriminating against its African American county agents in hiring, pay, »
“. . . dragging that 70-year-old white lady down the courthouse steps with her head going bam on every step . . .” And so this cat he was from the GBI that’s the cracker FBI kept feeling up the chick’s legs with his electric cattle prod and making them wiggle and holler
“But I could walk in the classrooms, and I could name ninety percent of those kids’ parents, because I taught a lot of their parents. If a problem surfaced, I said, ‘Do you want me to talk to your mother and daddy about you?’” Robeson County, North Carolina’s public schools, like many other school districts »
Harvest Books, 2004 Jim Carrier’s Traveler’s Guide to the Civil Rights Movement begins the reader’s tour not in Birmingham or Selma or the Mississippi Delta. Starting instead with the Declaration of Independence in Washington, D.C., Carrier anchors his trail of civil rights struggle in the defining foundations of “civil rights” in this country. This keen »
Simon and Schuster, 2003 In August 1967 the director of the FBI urged his agents to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who would unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement.” J. Edgar Hoover identified two such aspirants. One was Martin Luther King Jr.—not exactly a “militant black nationalist.” The other prospect, however, was »
University of Alabama Press, 2002 If all the South were Alabama and you read the most important book on the Civil Rights movement, it would be Mills Thornton’s Dividing Lines. Historians of the movement everywhere will have to conjure with it.
“Southern culture, properly considered, actually more or less rules the world.” This essay was taken from a Martin Luther King Jr. Day address given by the author on January 17, 2005, in Columbus, Mississippi. The author would like to thank everyone on the Columbus Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy Committee, especially Wilbur Colom and Deborah »
University of North Carolina Press, 2007 If you think you understand how religion and race work in the South, then obviously no one has explained it to you properly. Lillian Smith tried to explain it in her 1949 Killers of the Dream: “We were taught . . . to love God, to love our white »
University of North Carolina Press, 2005 One indication of a book’s value is its ability to invoke powerful images for the reader, images that it directly constructs and those it might encourage by extension. In the early part of I Am a Man!, the powerful image of white male supremacy remained foremost in my mind. »
“Sanctifying a historic site almost always involves an effort to derive some kind of clear moral message from the events that have taken place there. At New Echota in the early 1960s, that interpretive effort focused on the story of Cherokee Removal, and the moral message was atonement.” Cherokee Removal is the most famous episode »
“The Klan was trying to put a damper on the Lumbees. They were not going to come here and run the Lumbees away from their home.” —James Jones On a frigid Saturday night in January 1958, Grand Dragon James “Catfish” Cole and fifty other members of the Ku Klux Klan gathered for a rally in »
University of Georgia Press, 2006 Roger Rosenblatt, a journalist and media commentator, remarked some years ago that “even when . . . we don’t understand, when people do things in vast numbers, it is interesting. And they are trying to tell us something, or they’re trying to tell themselves something.” Rosenblatt’s statement could have described »
