“‘You’ve never been black, have you? No, if you’d been black, you wouldn’t ask no silly-ass question like that.’” The “South” is virtually inconceivable without sustained attention to race, yet most scholarly examinations of southern identity have focused almost exclusively on the experiences of white southerners, ignoring the experiences of other racial groups in the »
“You can’t be defensive about it. You don’t apologize for it.” In June of 1974, just four days after winning a runoff election in the Democratic primary, the newly minted candidate for Congress in Arkansas’s 3rd District, Bill Clinton, sat down with Jack Bass and Walter De Vries to discuss the campaign. In this interview, »
“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 »
“What does it mean – about the eagle flying on Friday?” On December 27, 1980, I traveled with blues singer James “Son Ford” Thomas to Houston, Texas, where we appeared together at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association on an oral and written literature panel that was organized by Michel Fabre. I spoke »
“I am glad she used what the women told us and made something different from it. She made people listen. I know it is fiction, and I know not everyone liked it, but she made people not forget. What more can you want?” For Telling Memories Among Southern Women, Mary Yelling interviewed about one-third of »
In the autumn of 1938 a photographer named Charles A. Farrell visited a seasonal mullet fishing camp at Brown’s Island, in Onslow County, North Carolina. What he discovered there captured his imagination: a remote hamlet of fishermen’s shanties far from civilization and two legendary clans of fishermen in relentless pursuit of one of the Atlantic’s »
The art works represented here are housed in the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. William Arnett, the Foundation’s founder, assembled the collection over a thirty-year period, during which he travelled throughout the South and interviewed the artists. Arnett selected the artworks illustrated here, offering a commentary on each one in a recorded conversation in 2013. In »
“‘The white testimony is a blank to me. I don’t think it meant anything. I don’t think it had any impact. As soon as Fannie Lou Hamer started, it was all forgotten.’” I first met Former Vice President Walter Mondale on October 14, 2010, at the Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He delivered »
“‘The myth of rampant hard-hearted hard cruelty, that has occurred to some extent. There are always some cruel people in the world, but fortunately they’re in the minority. That warm relationship between the races did exist in times of slavery and in times of segregation. Segregation, by the way, was a northern invention. Did you »
“‘That’s all I wants to do . . . to find something to can. I can stay in the kitchen from morning ’til night canning—’if I can find something to can, and have the jars, and the tops—’good tops, and lids. I loves to can.’” In a 2008 ethnographic celebration of American county fairs, Drake »
“‘What is most important . . . Is that Bulgarians know there are people on the other side of this globe who have the same problems, the same feelings, even the same words for things as we do.’” In May 1987, I traveled from Oxford, Mississippi, to Sofia, Bulgaria, to lecture on the American South »
“Look, I appreciate . . . all the praise and the glory, but it doesn’t change the way I feel about anything, really. I just do what I do and just hope the people enjoy it and just try to be myself in whatever I do.” On August 20, 2003, MTV News correspondent Kurt Loder »
