“He’d go in his back woods and drink himself insensible with some of his sharecropper friends.” Harold Burson was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on February 15, 1921. His parents had moved to the city one year earlier from Leeds, in Yorkshire, England. Burson’s father taught him to read by the age of three using the »
“The Mexican guys said, ‘Let me do it, let me do it!’ and they were peerless.” Bill Smith is an innovative, southern-cuisine chef famous for creating such unexpected culinary juxtapositions as honeysuckle sorbet—hot summer in a cool bite. The dessert’s main ingredient really is the flower, thousands of them, all gathered by hand. His peculiarly »
“I first started learning about the world, and there was a place called the South. It was a distant, romantic place, like the Far West or the islands of the Caribbean.” Pete Seeger has long been my hero. As an undergraduate at Davidson College in the early sixties, I listened to his records and learned »
“I approach these things as a moralist, really, because honesty and truth are moral values, but beauty is something else. And it’s a word that should be used damn carefully.” Few books have touched me so deeply as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). I first read it as an undergraduate student at Davidson »
“They had me park my car behind this house. They told me the next morning that a posse had formed downstairs in the courthouse and was going to, I guess, lynch me or whatever.” Born on June 24, 1920, Hosea T. “H. T.” Lockard attended LeMoyne College in Memphis, Tennessee, from 1940 to 1942. In »
“I think in a lot of areas an almost mystic thing happened, given the backdrop. When I was a boy there was a pretty strict segregation, and it was so much the historic custom that really relatively few people even questioned it. Then came the 1960s and their challenges to the system.” Alex Haley’s legacy »
“Periodically this jackass that y’all call Senator Jesse Helms was on the television talking about the outhouses that the colored folks had and laughing about the tubs that they had to bathe in.” Lemuel Delany is a retired funeral home director living with his wife and daughter in Raleigh, North Carolina. He comes from a »
“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 Oak Ridge Boys—you’ve heard of them—came into town, and they said, ‘Willie, we’d like for you to play.’” Willie Lowery has led a dual musical life (with, of course, much overlap) as both a southern musician and an Indian musician. As a southern musician coming of age in the 1950s and ’60s, Willie engaged »
“Pete thumbed his way all over that triangle from Maryland to Florida to Texas. Whenever he saw someone carrying a banjo or guitar, he would cotton up to them. And if they knew anything he didn’t know, he’d just find out what it was, learn to do it, and then go on to the next.” »
“I try to get the people in my hand, for them to love me, and once I get them in my hand, I can then tell them what I’ve come to tell them. And I come to tell them about the blues. It’s just like a preacher.” Bobby Rush’s musical career has taken him from »