“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 »
Southern Cultures: So, how did you get interested in this business of Black Confederates? Tony Horwitz: I kept hearing about them wherever I went while researching my book. “Black Confederates” has become something of a mantra in certain southern circles. At Sons of Confederate Veterans meetings, there would be talk of erecting a monument to »
“‘Honey, in our way of life, there ain’t no banker’s hours, and I don’t find in the Bible there’s no such thing as an eight-hour day.’” In 1986, as I began conducting oral histories with older southern farmers about changes in rural life, I asked an agricultural extension agent in Florence, South Carolina, to recommend »
“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 »
“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, »
“One, two, three. I just waded out . . . through the muck. And then I got in his sailboat. Of course I was wet, but you can’t ask William Faulkner to wring you out, I guess. It hadn’t occurred to me until this minute that I might have.” BILL FERRIS: Eudora, I want to »
“I love B. B. because he loves women. They can be mean, they can be bitchy, they can be carrying on, but you can tell he really loves them. He’s full of love. I would like to be the literary B.B. King.” My friendship with Alice Walker began in the fall of 1970 when I »
“I said, ‘Couldn’t we go a little slower?’ And he said, ‘With a white man sitting in this front seat with me? You won’t catch me going less than ninety miles an hour. Mister, you’ll just have to take it. I’m saving your life.’” By any measure Robert Penn Warren is one of America’s most »
“There are times when you come upon a scene and everything is right. It tells a story. It has a center of interest. It has emotion. It has people in it who are beautiful people–and I don’t mean Hollywood beautiful.” Billy E. Barnes is one of America’s most widely published photographers. His pictures have appeared »
“I almost lost my life trying to save my guitar.” B.B. King’s name is synonymous with the blues. At the age of eighty-one, the blues patriarch maintains a rigorous schedule of performances throughout the nation and overseas that would exhaust a much younger artist. King’s performances and recordings have shaped the blues for more than »
“We just said, ‘Whoa, what was that?’ and later saw this bullet hole.” Julian Bond has been on the cutting edge of social change since his days as a leader in the Atlanta sit-in movement in 1960. I had the opportunity to interview Bond in the fall of 1999 while I was an undergraduate at »