Southern Cultures

African American History and Culture

CELEBRATING AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH WITH TWICE AS MUCH CONTENT IN 2012

To celebrate African American History Month in 2011, we launched this portion of our website, which is devoted to material we've published on African American History and Culture. This year, again coinciding with African American History month, we've doubled our available content. This section of our website will remain available for scholars and students year-round, and by scrolling down you'll find interviews with many 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. You also can click on $0.99 Kindle or Nook downloads for each of our most recent pieces.

This page is African American History and Culture (part 1).  African American History and Culture (part 2) is here. Our book reviews of works on African American History and Culture are here. Lastly, there is related material under our Civil Rights subject heading, as well as under Famous Southerners and Interviews and Oral Histories.

We open with our most recently published material.

Turned Inside Out
Black, White, and Irish in the South
     by Bryan Giemza
     "As a place where Black and Green were in perpetual contact, the Atlantic South furnishes an ideal case study in how these peoples moved with, against, and around one another."
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Southern Cultures, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2012

Bobby Rush: "Blues Singer-Plus"
     interviewed by William R. Ferris
     "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."
$0.99 download for Kindle, for Nook, or for Sony Reader.
Full Issue for Kindle ($4.95 with embedded tracks), for Nook ($4.95, CD shipped separately), or for Sony Reader ($5.88, CD shipped separately)
Southern Cultures Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 2011: Music

For the Records: How African American Consumers and Music Retailers Created Commercial Public Space in the 1960s and 1970s South
     by Joshua Clark Davis
     "Record selling certainly had its glamorous moments; retailers could regale younger customers with stories of nightlife and even rubbing elbows with famous musicians and celebrities."
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Full Issue for Kindle ($4.95 with embedded tracks), for Nook ($4.95, CD shipped separately), or for Sony Reader ($5.88, CD shipped separately) 
Southern Cultures Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 2011: Music

Poem with a Refrain from Charley Patton
     poetry by Travis Smith
     ". . . and now the guitar's high note
sings what he can't sing. . ."
Full Issue for Kindle ($4.95 with embedded tracks), for Nook ($4.95, CD shipped separately), or for Sony Reader ($5.88, CD shipped separately) 
Southern Cultures Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 2011: Music

Alice Walker on Cold Mountain
from "Personal in My Memory": The South in Popular Film
$0.99 download for KINDLE, for NOOK, or for SONY READER includes writing from Walker, as well as Randall Kenan and others
Full Issue for Kindle ($3.96), for Nook ($4.15), or for Sony Reader ($4.70)  
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011: Memory

Randall Kenan on Ode to Billie Joe
from "Personal in My Memory": The South in Popular Film
$0.99 download for KINDLE, for NOOK ,or for SONY LIBRARY READER includes writing from Randall Kenan, as well as Alice walker and others
Full Issue for Kindle ($3.96), for Nook ($4.15), or for Sony Reader ($4.70)   
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011: Memory 

Judge Thomas Ruffin and the Shadows of Southern History
     by Sally Greene
     "Ruffin was ideologically sympathetic to the Confederate cause and remained so to his death. ‘The power of the master must be absolute,' Ruffin wrote in State v. Mann (1829), ‘to render the submission of the slave perfect.' State v. Mann became the most notorious opinion in the entire body of slavery law."
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Full Issue for Kindle ($3.96), for Nook ($4.15), or for Sony Reader ($4.70)   
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011: Memory

Stereo Propaganda
     featuring full-color mixed media by Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier
     Old photographs meet new color, creating thoughtful new meanings.
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Full Issue for Kindle ($3.96), for Nook ($6.95), or for Sony Reader ($4.70)    
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2011: Photography II

Heroes of Hell Hole Swamp: 
Photographs of South Carolina Midwives by Hansel Mieth and W. Eugene Smith
     by Dolores Flamiano, featuring the original Life photographs
     (Due to copyright restrictions, the original Life photos are available in the print edition only.)
     Two mid-century LIFE photo essays reveal the power of editorial selection to lie--or reveal truth. 
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Full Issue for Kindle ($3.96), for Nook ($6.95), or for Sony Reader ($4.70)
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2011: Photography II 

Women Working
     photography and interviews by Susan Harbage Page
     When Susan Harbage Page worked in the early seventies alongside the women in this photo essay, in addition to friendships she also made a poignant record:"‘Rough. It is rough being a female.'"
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Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2011: Photography II

Blacks and Irish on the Riverine Frontiers
     by Christopher J. Smith
     "Those employed to do the specialized work of digging, blasting, and reinforcing the canals usually were recruited from trades in which such skills were already essential, including Lancashire tin, copper, and chalk miners, and, especially, the immigrant Irish."
Full Issue for Kindle ($6.95), for Nook ($6.95), or for Sony Reader ($6.95)     
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2011: The Irish

Home of the Double-Headed Eagle
The Visionary Vernacular Architecture of Reverend H. D. Dennis and Margaret Dennis
     by Ali Colleen Neff 
     "In the deep peripheral ravines settled by the descendants of local sharecroppers, The Home of the Double-Headed Eagle shoots up from a long row of kudzu-covered shotgun shacks and cracked pavement to entangle passersby."
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.69), for Nook ($8.25), or for Sony Reader ($9.45)   
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 2010 

Playing Chicken With the Train
Cowboy Troy's Hick-Hop and the Transracial Country West
     by Adam Gussow
     "‘My belt buckle is my bling-bling. It's just going to keep getting bigger.'"
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96), for Nook ($7.96), or for Sony Reader ($9.45)    
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 2010

"Fixin' To Die Blues": The Last Months of Bukka White
with an afterword from B. B. King on Bukka White's Legacy
     interviewed by David W. Johnson
     "There's a gang that would travel if you get on a freight train and couldn't get off. If I'd stayed on there I'd been getting killed."
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.69), for Nook ($8.25), or for Sony Reader ($9.45)     
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 3, Fall 2010: Music IV

Jimmy Anderson: Natchez Swamp Blues
     by Vincent Joos
     "I learned how to sing from the radio. I didn't care what kind of songs. I like music, period. Any kind, you know. Country-western or blues, I would jump on it."
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.69), for Nook ($8.25), or for Sony Reader ($9.45)       
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 3, Fall 2010: Music IV

“I train the people to do their own talking”:
Septima Clark and Women in the Civil Rights Movement
     from interviews by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and Eugene P. Walker, compiled by Katherine Mellen Charron and David P. Cline, introduced by Katherine Mellen Charron
     “They don't give the women any of the glory.”
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96) or for Nook ($8.35)   
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2010: Southern Lives

“My idol was Langston Hughes”:
The Poet, the Renaissance, and Their Enduring Influence
     from a talk delivered by Margaret Walker Alexander, edited and introduced by William R. Ferris
     “As a small child in the 1920s, I was very much affected by the Harlem Renaissance. As early as age eleven, I had read poetry by Langston Hughes.”
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96) or for Nook ($8.35)  
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2010: Southern Lives

Learning from the Long Civil Rights Movement’s First Generation:
Virginia Foster Durr
     from interviews by M. Sue Thrasher, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, and Bob Hall; compiled and introduced by Sarah Thuesen
     “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.”
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Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2010: Southern Lives

Albert Murray’s Magical Youth
     by David A. Taylor
     “‘In America they get away from race by saying ‘minority.’ But who the hell’s the best minority in the world? The hero! You know what I’m saying? That’s always a minority.’”
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96) or for Nook ($8.35)  
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2010: Southern Lives

Drum Head Stew:
The Power and Poetry of Terroir
     by Bernard L. Herman    
     "Oh Violet, keep the head on the fish, because I want my eyeballs."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I

Reading the Lupton African American Cookbook Collection
     by John T. Edge
     "'My cooking is referred to as yo-yo cooking, because the recipes found in this book will make your drawers drop down to your knees and pop back up to your neck.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I

Food for Thought: Race, Region, Identity, and Foodways in the American South
     by Beth A. Latshaw 
     "I've eaten it all my life, and I'm not dead yet."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I

The Devil and his Blues: James “Son Ford” Thomas
     with William R. Ferris
     “You can't always go by what them preachers say, because right now some of them drink more whiskey than me.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009: Music III

Southern Jazz Musicians
     by Charles Joyner|
     “John Coltrane played his hyperactive ‘sheets-of-sound’ with a scorching intensity, faster than most jazz fans could listen.” 
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009: Music III 

“When I Say Get It”
A Brief History of the Boogie
     by Burgin Mathews
     “‘I like to boogie-woogie,’ Madonna proclaimed.  ‘It’s like riding on the wind and it never goes away.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009: Music III

Winston-Salem Blues
Captain Luke, Macavine Hayes, and Whistlin’ Britches
     photographs by Joanna Welborn
     “A round of ‘chicken,’ or moonshine, was ordered, and Macavine and Whistlin’ Britches were one-upping each other with insults and dirty jokes. Captain Luke played it cool in the corner, sipping a can of Natural Light and smoking a cigar.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009: Music III

Blues Greats
     by William R. Ferris
     “The true Hootchie Kootchie Man, Muddy Waters summons all the powers of the voodoo doctor in his guttural, deep blues voice.” 
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009: Music III

Haunting America
Emmett Till in Music and Song
     by Philip C. Kolin
     “Dylan linked Till’s innocent blood to a Mississippi downpour—so much blood shed from the brutal beatings; Till’s killers ‘rolled his body down a gulf of bloody red rain.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009: Music III

The Discovery of an Architect: Duke University and Julian F. Abele
     by William E. King
     "In 1937, the English novelist Aldous Huxley was traveling through North Carolina by auto one hot summer day. He described 'a pleasant but unexciting land' when 'all of a sudden, astonishingly, a whole city of gray Gothic stone emerged from the warm pine forest.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009

Sundown Towns and Counties: Racial Exclusion in the South
     by James W. Loewen
     "In 1987, Oprah Winfrey broadcast her television show from Forsyth County, Georgia, which had expelled its black population seventy-five years earlier."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009 

"Time to Appreciate": The Mississippi Delta Region, 1994–2002
     by Bruce J. West
     "A lush and exotic landscape—a setting encouraging and supporting heroic transformation—nurtures all endeavors."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009

Having His Say: Memories of Lemuel Delany Jr.
     interviewed by Kimberly D. Hill
     "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."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009

How W. E. B. DuBois Won the United Daughters of the Confederacy Essay Contest
     by Bruce E. Baker
     "Nearly a century ago W. E. B. DuBois won an essay contest sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy—or at least, DuBois’s writing won the contest."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009

"Everything Changed, but Ain’t Nothing Changed"
Recovering a Generation of Southern Activists for Economic Justice
     by Sarah C. Thuesen 
     "'I took her to see the movie Norma Rae so that she could try to get some perspective on what kind of role she was playing. I think she appreciated seeing that and could see how the city would like to get rid of her because she had a whole lot more power than she imagined.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008: Civil Rights

Alex Haley: Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1989 
Angels, Legends, and Grace
     with William R. Ferris
     "I think in a lot of areas an almost mystic thing happened, given the backdrop. When I was a boy there was 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."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008: Civil Rights

The "Golden" Era of Civil Rights
Consequences of The Carolina Israelite
     by Stephen J. Whitfield
     "The Carolina Israelite was a remarkable solo act, a bold effort to liberate its southern white readers from the inertia of tradition, defying the odds that anyone producing a one-man newspaper in the mid-twentieth century was very likely to be a crank."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008: Civil Rights

"For Us the Living"
Visits to Civil Rights Museums   
     by Robert Hamburger 
     "'When I came to, I was laying on the seat of a car and my sister was leaning over me. I thought she was crying. I could feel her warm tears spilling down on my face. But they weren’t tears. She was bleeding. And the next day we were marching again.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008: Civil Rights

Truth, Reconciliation, and the Ku Klux Klan
     by David Cunningham 
     "The drive for minimal justice on behalf of black people had come to this: the ordinary white people of the South . . . on the edge of a collective nervous breakdown composed in roughly equal parts of ignorance, rage, and paranoia.."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008: Civil Rights 

Martin Luther King Jr. Streets in the South
A New Landscape of Memory
     by Derek H. Alderman
     "Martin Luther King Drives, Boulevards, and Avenues are important centers of African American identity, activity, and community—constituting what journalist Jonathan Tilove has called 'Black America's Main Street.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008: Civil Rights

What Was Found
     by Maura Fitzgerald
     "You'll wait in this city where they bury their dead and their Mardi Gras floats above ground. And there you'll rest next to a bust of a Saints quarterback, the last Viking king, a painted foam Tin Man and his oversized heart. And for an epitaph, a sign on a far wall to state the obvious: . . . the stuff dreams are made of."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 2, Summer 2008: Katrina

Broken Levees, Broken Lives, and a Broken Nation after Hurricane Katrina
     by Karen M. O'Neill
     "Many people viewed the extreme disorder after Hurricane Katrina as the failure of a comprehensive system of public works and emergency preparedness they assumed was designed to ensure safety and security. No such system exists."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 2, Summer 2008: Katrina

The First Century of Blues
One Hundred Years of Hearing and Interpreting the Music and the Musicians
     by R. A. Lawson
     "In 1961 Bob Koester, a producer with Chicago-based Delmark Records, made an amazing discovery. Sleepy John Estes, a bluesman who had achieved fame on the race record labels during the interwar years, was found to be still alive and residing on the outskirts of the small western Tennessee town of Brownsville."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2007: Music II

Elvis Presley and the Politics of Popular Memory
     by Michael T. Bertrand
     "'A Lonely Life Ends on Elvis Presley Boulevard,' blared the headline of a late-summer special edition of the Memphis Press-Scimitar. 'The King is Dead.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2007: Music II

The Color of Music
Social Boundaries and Stereotypes in Southwest Louisiana French Music
     by Sara Le Menestrel
     "One Cajun woman who grew up in the 1960s was convinced that the AM/FM options on her radio referred to the distinction between American Music and French Music."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2007: Music II

Extra! Chicago Defender Race Records Ads Show South from Afar
     by Mark Dolan
     "Lavishly illustrated ads told of broken love affairs, loneliness, violence, and jail, in concert with travel to and from the South--by train and boat, on foot and in memory."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2007: Music II

Texas Death Row and the Cummins Prison Farm in Arkansas
     by Bruce Jackson
     "No prison director in either of those states ever let me beyond the sally port without a guard watching me every moment."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 2007: Photography I

Julian Bond
     interviewed by Elizabeth Gritter
     "We just said, 'Whoa, what was that?' and later saw this bullet hole."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2006

And the Dead Shall Rise: An Overview
     by Steve Oney
     "In the 1913 South the novelty of a white jury convicting a white man largely on the word of a black man was enormous. Yet even so, it was only in the trial's aftermath that the deeper and more volatile issues came to the fore."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 2005

Teaching Southern Lit in Black and White
     by Michael Kreyling
     "I had to stop. It wasn’t funny, and the bravura failed to lift any literary hearts. In this reading in this place, these words, whatever I might think about their literary merits, described white men on horseback with dogs hunting a defenseless black man on foot."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 2005

Martin Luther King and the Southern Dream of Freedom
     by Timothy B. Tyson
     "Southern culture, properly considered, actually more or less rules the world."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 2005 

Jazz Funeral: A Living Tradition
     by Angelo P. Coclanis and Peter A. Coclanis
     "On a sweaty Saturday morning in late October 2004, a jazz funeral was held in New Orleans. Lloyd Washington had performed off and on in the postwar period in one of the many groups known as the Ink Spots that grew out of the original 1930s group of that name."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 2005

Remembering Harry Golden: Food, Race, and Laughter
     by Tom Hanchett
     "'I have a positive cure for this mental aberration called anti-Semitism. I believe that if we gave each anti-Semite an onion roll with lox and cream cheese, some chopped chicken liver with a nice radish, and a good piece of brisket of beef with a few potato pancakes, he’d soon give up all this nonsense.'" 
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 2005

Southerners All? 
     by Larry J. Griffin, Ranae J. Evenson, and Ashley B. Thompson
     "Exactly who is a southerner, exactly who wishes to be a southerner, and who is thought to have the right to claim southern identity are now highly uncertain."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2005

South to Death
     by Earl Higgins
     "Those who are given the power by law to exercise mercy become too intoxicated, overwhelmed by the power to end life; they can no longer grant the mercy advocated by the scriptural teachings they purport to follow. Matthew 5:7, for example, instructs, 'Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2005