African American History & Culture (part 2)
This is the second part of the special section of our website devoted to material we've published over the last ten years on African American History and Culture. (Part 1 is here.) (Book reviews are here.)
This archive will remain available for scholars and students year-round, and by scrolling down you'll find interviews with famous figures (and lesser known ones, too), as well as material which explores many aspects of the experiences of African Americans inside and outside the South.
To read these essays through Project Muse at no cost, you can follow the links below directly to the titles online. There also is related material under our Civil Rights subject heading, as well as under our Famous Southerners and our Interviews and Oral Histories.
Anatomy of a Quilt
The Gee's Bend Freedom Quilting Bee
by Nancy Sheper-Hughes
“Something akin to a bitter culture war took place each time I would bring out a sample of those decidedly un-Yankee Gee’s Bend quilts. ‘They don’t look right,’ we were told. ‘Who would want to sleep under something like this?’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 3, Fall 2004
John Henry: "Take this hammer, it won't kill you"
by John Douglas
“John Henry and his shaker apparently kept hammering and drilling, hour after hour, while the steam-powered drill got tangled up in the hard rock. Years later, a hammer with the initials ‘J. H.’ was found in the tunnel.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2004
John Henry: A desperate little man
by John Douglas
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2004
Hopes for John Henry Park
by John Douglas
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2004
The Fight for Racial Equality in the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service
by P. E. Bazemore
edited by Kieran Taylor
“You were there at the U.S. Supreme Court. Your name is called in that body of people. It was just frightening.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 4, Winter 2003
"Looking for Railroad Bill": On the Trail of an Alabama Badman
by Burgin Mathews
“Over the next two years, Morris Slater--known forever after as “Railroad Bill”--terrorized trains, illegally riding the south Alabama freighters, often robbing them of their goods and occasionally engaging in shootouts with resisting trainmen or police. Eventually, in one of those shootouts, he added murder to his record.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2003
Quoting, Merging, and Sampling the Dream: Martin Luther King and Vernon Johns
by Ralph Luker
“‘I must be measured by my soul--the mind is the standard of the man.'’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 2, Summer 2003
Images of African Americans in Southern Painting, 1840-1940
by A. Everette James
“Southern paintings showed African Americans as largely dehumanized caricatures, black stereotypes rather than distinct individuals.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 2, Summer 2003
by Lynn Casmier-Paz
“When I arrived at the Silver Spring Armory, I found the place jammed with brown and black people hawking rusted ‘Authentic Slave Shackles’ that only a consumer with a platinum credit card could purchase.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2003
The Phoenix Riot and the Memories of Greenwood County
by Daniel Levinson Wilk
“‘I was with my father when they rode up, and I remember starting to cry.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 4, Winter 2002: Ghosts
The Dying Art of Deer-Driving in the South Carolina Low-Country
by Ileana Strauch
“These images chronicle a century of tradition.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 4, Winter 2002: Ghosts
Graveyard Blues
by Rob Golan
“The soundtrack for my Revelation was a simple three-cord ditty.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 4, Winter 2002: Ghosts
Robert F. Williams and the Promise of Southern Biography
by Timothy B. Tyson
“But nonetheless I have been lurking in the shadows, plotting and sulking like one of William Faulkner’s vindictive barn-burners.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2002
Racial Violence, "Primitive" Music, and the Blues Entrepreneur: W. C. Handy's Mississippi Problem
by Adam Gussow
“‘My idea of what constitutes music was changed by the sight of that silver money cascading around the splay feet of a Mississippi string band.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2002
An Ironic Jim Crow: The Experiences of Two Generations of Southern Black Men
by Angela Hornsby and Molly P. Rozum
“This black man called the Secretary of the Navy. And the Secretary of the Navy says to the judge: ‘Let him go.’"
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2002
Jackie Robinson and Dixie Walker: Myths of the Southern Baseball Player
by Larry Powell
“‘Jackie took a lot of abuse, but there was no violence. Even if you count hard slides with raised spikes, that was nothing compared to what happened in the 1950s and ‘60s during the Civil Rights movement.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 2, Summer 2002
by Anthony Walton
“It took my experience in the North to teach me that I am first and last a southerner, as I was raised to be.”
by Franklin Forts
“When General Robert E. Lee is commemorated, what do we do with the fact that he was a racist?”
by Eliza Russi Lowen McGraw
“‘Now, Miss Daisy, somebody done bomb that temple back yonder, and you know it.’”
by Pamela Grundy
“One of the best ways to play the game is avoid confrontation. The next is to make the adversary ridiculous.”
by John Shelton Reed
“It will surprise no one to see that the two big stories of the twentieth-century South are the transition from an agricultural to an urban society and the transformation effected by the Civil Rights movement.”
by John Shelton Reed
“Unknown saints will have to get their reward in heaven, as usual.”
by Melton A. McLaurin
“On November 10, 1898, an armed mob of whites destroyed the state’s only daily African American newspaper by burning the building in which it was housed.”
by Lynn Barstis Williams
"‘Go to Alabama and you better watch out.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2000: Fifth Anniversary Issue
Goat Cart Sam, a.k.a. Porgy, an Icon of a Sanitized South
by Kendra Hamilton
Art, intellectual property, or both? The legacy of DuBose Heyward's most famous character.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 1999
Grave Matters
by Elizabeth Robeson
Zora Neale Hurston's correspondence with W. E. B. Du Bois in 1929 reveals her concern about how prominent African Americans of their era were honored after death.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 1999
The Souths of Sterling A. Brown
by Elizabeth Davey
Revealing a fuller African American experience.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1999
A Piece of Your Own: The Tenant Purchase Program in Claiborne County
by David Crosby, with Photographs by Roland L. Freeman
A newspaper account, an interview, and some historical context for a murder near Martin, Mississippi.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1999
"The Vampire That Hovers Over North Carolina": Gender, White Supremacy, and the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898
by Andrea Meryl Kirshenbaum
A provocative look at the manipulation of racial and sexual fears, culminating in a bloody riot a century ago.
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 1998
The Lady Was a Sharecropper: Myrtle Lawrence and the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union
by Elizabeth Anne Payne, with photographs by Louise Boyle
How one woman transcended regional and gender stereotypes in her pursuit of justice for tenant farmers, black and white.
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1998
Race, Sex, and Reputation: Thomas Jefferson and the Sally Hemings Story
by Robert M. S. McDonald
Did the "truth" about the president's affair with a slave woman matter to his contemporaries? The answer may surprise you.
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1998
The Black and the Gray
An Interview with Tony Horwitz
Were there really black Confederates? A Wall Street Journal reporter weighs the evidence.
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 1998: Politics
Another "Great Migration": From Region to Race in Southern Liberalism
by David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis
White liberals of the thirties and forties viewed the South's problems in terms of region rather than race. What happens when their views begin to change?
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 4, Winter 1997
Bringin' It All Back Home
photo essay by Roland L. Freeman, with additional photos by Robert T. Jones, Sr.
Twenty years of the Mississippi Delta Blues.
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 4, Winter 1997
"Deep River": The Life of Roland Hayes
by Gavin James Campbell
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 4, Winter 1997
Rituals of Initiation and Rebellion: Adolescent Responses to Segregation in Southern Autobiography
by Melton McLaurin
What can the autobiographies of black and white southerners coming of age in the segregated South tell us about race?
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1997: Writers on Art
Sense of Place: Blacks, Jews, and White Gentiles in the American South
by David Goldfield
Though their relationship with the South has often been ambiguous, Jews have made a home for themselves in the region.
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 1997
Twistin' at the Fais Do-Do: South Louisiana's Swamp Pop Music
by Shane K. Bernard
Like zydeco and Cajun music, swamp pop is vital to the cultural identity of Cajun and Creole country.
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 3-4, Fall/Winter 1996: Double Issue
Porch-Sitting as a Creative Southern Tradition
by Trudier Harris, photographs by Roland L. Freeman
Front porch-sitting is not what it used to be, but some traditions need preserving.
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 3-4, Fall/Winter 1996: Double Issue
The Law and the Code in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
by Robert O. Stephens
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 2, Winter 1995
Aunt Jemima Explained: The Old South, the Absent Mistress, and the Slave in a Box
by Maurice M. Manring
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 1995
Adventures in a "Foreign Country": African American Humor and the South
by Trudier Harris
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1995: Humor
White Honor, Black Humor, and the Making of a Southern Style
by Johanna Nicol Shields
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1995: Humor
"How 'bout a hand for the Hog": The Enduring Nature of the Swine as a Cultural Symbol in the South
by S. Jonathan Bass
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 3, Spring 1995
The Narrative of John Henry Martin
by Sherman A. James
Southern Cultures, The Inaugural Issue, 1993
AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE PART I
AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE (REVIEWS)