“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, »
Interview
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 »
“The apparent partisan stability of contemporary southern politics belies a complex and dynamic process that makes it doubtful one party can persist as the dominant force in the most diverse region of the United States . . . This truly ain’t your daddy’s Dixie.” For decades, political scientists conducted election studies in which they singled »
“Warren Brown recounts his hurried educational career. Unable to attend school until he was ten years old, Brown completed twelve grades in just seven years.” Before a packed crowd of over 700 parents, teachers, and students, R. R. Moton High School alumnus Willie Shepperson revealed the high stakes involved with public school desegregation. At the »
“In the immediate postwar period, as though sensing that the revulsion from Nazism might be carried too far, senators from the South defied the American Creed. They opposed the campaign to sign the Genocide Convention, for example, which the United Nations had adopted in 1948.” In 1944 the Carnegie Corporation of New York sponsored the »
“The bill gained quick notoriety for outdoing Arizona, Georgia, and all other states in the restrictions and penalties levied on unauthorized immigrants, as well as on the citizens, community members, employers, and health and law enforcement agencies that assist, employ, or regulate them.” On June 1, 2011, the Alabama state legislature passed the “Beason-Hammon Alabama »
“Of all the women ever romantically linked to Strom Thurmond, none was as deadly as Sue Logue. The judge who sentenced her to the electric chair for murder called her crime ‘the most cold-blooded in the history of the state.’” In 2011, Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life, sat down with his »
“Perhaps because the modern Civil Rights Movement and television news came of age together, the younger medium was destined to become an iconographic feature of the civil rights genre.” Midway through the 2011 film adaptation of The Help, Charlotte Phelan storms into the “relaxing room” of her plantation home and turns off the television set »
“Like The Help, Can’t Quit You, Baby focuses on the layers of habit, antipathy, resentment, suspicion, attachment, and silence linking white employer and black employee—but in ways that are far more unsettling.” In the afterword to the bestselling 2009 novel The Help, titled “Too Little, Too Late,” author Kathryn Stockett voices a certain trepidation about »
“Culture products – literary texts, television series, films, music, theatre, etc. – that look back on the Movement tell us at least as much about how contemporary culture views its own racial politics as they do about the past they purport to represent, often conveying the fantasy that the United States has triumphed over and »
“The more one examines the reception of The Help, the less one is able to categorize the reception as divided between blacks and whites or academics and general readers or those who have worked as domestics and those who haven’t.” The reception of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009) calls to mind the reception of two »
“When real representational samples of African Americans and Latinos are included—and the default assumption of ‘southern’ as white is challenged—there are very few differences of note between the South and the rest of America.” In 2001 the talented up-and-coming rock band Drive-By Truckers released Southern Rock Opera, a critically acclaimed album that was produced only »