Civil Rights
Southern Cultures has published numerous essays and features about all aspects of the Civil Rights Movement, including a special Civil Rights theme issue. To read material about the Civil Rights Movement from this and other issues of Southern Cultures online at the Project Muse digital archive, you can follow the direct links below. You can also download some of these articles for Kindle or Nook. We start with material from our archives that we've just posted here for the first time, followed by our most recently published material.
We Shall Overcome
Film by California Newsreel
reviewed by Trudier Harris
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 1994
Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement
by Danny Lyon
and
Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama
by Charles W. Eagles
reviewed by Steven F. Lawson
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 2, Winter 1995
The South Moves Into Its Future: Studies in the Analysis and Prediction of Social Change
by Joseph S. Himes
reviewed by Dwight B. Billings
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 2, Winter 1995
Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom
by Richard H. King
reviewed by Charles W. Eagles
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 3, Spring 1995
The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at the University of Alabama
by E. Culpepper Clark
reviewed by Tinsley E. Yarbrough
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 1995
Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972
by Adam Fairclough
reviewed by Lawrence N. Powell
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 2, Winter 1996
Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South
by David S. Cecelski
reviewed by Michele Foster
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 2, Winter 1996
And Gently He Shall Lead Them: Robert Parris Moses and Civil Rights in Mississippi
by Eric R. Burner
Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
by John Dittmer
reviewed by Brian Ward
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 3-4, Fall/Winter 1996: Double Issue
Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1954-1968
by Alan Draper
reviewed by John Salmond
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 3-4, Fall/Winter 1996: Double Issue
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
Davison M. Douglas
Reading, Writing and Race: The Desegregation of the Charlotte Schools
reviewed by Robert A. Pratt
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 1998: Politics
Alexander S. Leidholdt's
Standing Before the Shouting Mob: Lenoir Chambers and Virginia's Massive Resistance to Public-School Integration
reviewed by Carl Tobias
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1998
Mark A. Fossett and M. Therese Seibert's
Long Time Coming: Racial Inequality in the Nonmetropolitan South, 1940-1990
reviewed by Robert A. Margo
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 1999: Scarlett O'Hara
Clarice T. Campbell's
Civil Rights Chronicle: Letters from the South
reviewed by Melton McLaurin
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1999
Bruce Adelson's
Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor-League Baseball in the American South
reviewed by Steven F. Lawson
"They saw themselves as heirs to Jackie Robinson's legacy."
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1999
Joanne Grant's
Ella Baker
Freedom Bound
reviewed by Edward O. Frantz
"Through Baker's eyes the reader finds a critical view of Martin Luther King Jr. and NAACP president Walter White."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 2, Summer 2000
To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America
by Robert R. Korstad and James L. Leloudis with photographs by Billy E. Barnes
reviewed by Michael K. Honey
"With poverty and unemployment at levels unprecedented since the Great Depression of the 1930s, as wages of those with jobs stagnate, as the federal government spends trillions for war and gives tax and bailout subsidies to the ultra-rich, we should be asking ourselves how it got to be this way and what can we do about it. To Right These Wrongs provides many of the answers."
Full Issue for Kindle, for Nook, or for Sony Reader
Southern Cultures, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2012
Voices from the Southern Oral History Program
Mountain Feminist:
Helen Matthews Lewis, Appalachian Studies, and the Long Women's Movement
from an interview by Jessica Wilkerson
compiled and introduced by Jessica Wilkerson and David P. Cline
"They didn't take us to jail. They pulled us out individually, and the policeman said to me, ‘What would your daddy think if he saw you dancing with a nigger?'"
$0.99 download for KINDLE or for Nook or for SONY LIBRARY READER
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
The Top Ten Southern Folk Singers
by Charles Joyner
"Frank Proffitt learned most of his repertoire of songs, hymns, ballads and banjo tunes from his family and sang them in a hickory-smoked baritone that flowed subtly and poignantly through his ballads like a quiet mountain stream."
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96), for Nook ($7.96), or for Sony Reader ($9.45)
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 3, Fall 2010: Music IV
Hello, America:
The Life and Work of Willie French Lowery
by Michael C. Taylor
"The Oak Ridge Boys--you've heard of them--came into town, and they said, 'Willie, we'd like for you play.'"
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96), for Nook ($7.96), 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
by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Eugene P. Walker, Katherine Mellen Charron, David P. Cline
“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
Learning from the Long Civil Rights Movement's First Generation:
Virginia Foster Durr
by M. Sue Thrasher, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Bob Hall, 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.”
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96) or for Nook ($8.35)
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2010: Southern Lives
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
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: Music III
Andrew H. Myers
Black, White & Olive Drab
Racial Integration at Fort Jackson, SC, and the Civil Rights Movement (review)
reviewed by Alex Macaulay
"What effect, if any, did armed forces integration have in the area around the South Carolina post during the Civil Rights Movement that followed in the fifties and sixties?" The answer seems to be 'not much.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009: Music III
Having His Say: Memories from Lemuel Delany Jr.
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: Music III
Remembering Cherokee Removal in Civil Rights–Era Georgia
by Andrew Denson
"Sanctifying a historic site almost always involves an effort to derive some kind of clear moral message from the events that have taken place there. At New Echota in the early 1960s, that interpretive effort focused on the story of Cherokee Removal, and the moral message was atonement."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2008: First Peoples
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
“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 because someone had hit her upside the head. And the next day we were marching again.'"
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
Memories of H. T. Lockard
with Elizabeth Gritter
"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."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008: Civil Rights
“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
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
Still Distinctive After All These Years:
Trends in Racial Attitudes in and out of the South
by Larry J. Griffin and Peggy G. Hargis
"Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the genuine heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, once said, 'So this ain’t just Mississippi’s problem. It's America’s problem.'"
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
Renee Christine Romano and Leigh Raiford, editors
The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (review)
reviewed by Carole Blair
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2007
Nick Kotz
Judgement Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws that Changed America
reviewed by Jack Bass
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2007
"Where Is the Love?":
Racial Violence, Racial Healing, and Blues Communities
by Gussow, Adam
"Does love have the power to heal our blues?"
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 4, Winter 2006: Music I
Paul Harvey
Freedom's Coming
Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era
reviewed by Matt J. Zacharias Harper
"If you think you understand how religion and race work in the South, then obviously no one has explained it to you properly."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (review)
reviewed by John Bodnar
"Fitzhugh Brundage's excellent book takes up the subject of public forms of remembering and commemoration in the South since the Civil War."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006
Steve Estes
I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (review)
reviewed by Larry Isaac
"Massacres of entire African American communities were motivated, in large part, by rumors that a black man raped a white woman."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2006: Tobacco
Interview: Julian Bond
with Elizabeth Gritter
"We just said, 'Whoa, what was that?' and later saw this bullet hole."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2006
Martin Luther King and the Southern Dream of Freedom
by Tyson, Timothy B.
"Southern culture, properly considered, actually more or less rules the world."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 2005
Remembering Harry Golden: Food, Race, and Laughter
by Hanchett, Tom
"'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
Ballad of Vertical Integration
a poem for Harry Golden
by Lee Ann Brown
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 2005
Jim Carrier
A Traveler's Guide to the Civil Rights Movement (review)
reviewed by S. Willoughby Anderson
“The gripping historical narrative will inspire travelers to chart their own course.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 4, Winter 2004
Kwame Ture
Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (review)
reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield
“In August 1967 the director of the FBI urged his agents to ‘prevent the rise of a messiah who would unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement.’"
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 4, Winter 2004
Barbara Ransby
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (review)
reviewed by Charles M. Payne
“I used to give a speech which began by claiming that Ella Baker invented the 1960s. That’s not as crazy as it sounds.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 3, Fall 2004
J. Mills Thornton
Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma
reviewed by Ralph Luker
“To understand the Montgomery bus boycott, Birmingham’s dramatic street confrontations, and the struggle for the enfranchisement of Selma’s African Americans, Thornton insists, we must immerse ourselves in the minute details of local politics before and after these events.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 3, Fall 2004
Christopher Metress, editor
The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative (review)
reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield
“After all, once Moses Wright pointed his finger at ‘Big’ Milam in court, the identity of the killers was not in doubt.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 4, Winter 2003
Georgia Scene: 1964
a poem
by John Beecher
“. . . dragging that 70-year-old white lady
down the courthouse steps
with her head going bam on every step. . .”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 4, Winter 2003
"I Played by the Rules, and I Lost":
The Fight for Racial Equality in the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service
P. E. Bazemore, with 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
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
Clive Webb
Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights (review)
reviewed by Eliza R. L. McGraw
“‘There is only one word to describe their madness—Godlessness.’”
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: Biography
Jonathan S. Bass
Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (review)
reviewed by Katherine Mellen Charron
“Most can remember that 1963 began in Alabama with Governor George Wallace’s famous inaugural declaration ‘segregation now…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 2, Summer 2002
David R. Davies
The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement (review)
reviewed by Berkley Hudson
“In the late 1960s, in an act of teen-aged defiance against the waning Closed Society, I took a hammer to remove a ‘colored reception room’ sign outside a white doctor’s office.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 2, Summer 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
Sarah-Patton Boyle
The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition (review)
reviewed by Melton Alonze McLaurin
“‘We’re all bastards; God loves us anyway.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2002
Shelly Romalis
Pistol Packin' Mama: Aunt Molly Jackson and the Politics of Folksong (review)
reviewed by Patrick Huber
“She boasted that she was the inspiration for the 1943 smash hit ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama’ written, she asserted, not by Al Dexter but by her husband’s cousin to commemorate her own handiness with a .38 Smith & Wesson.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 4, Winter 2001
Forty Defining Moments of the Twentieth-century South
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.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 2, Summer 2001
The Twenty Most Influential Southerners of the Twentieth Century
by John Shelton Reed
“Unknown saints will have to get their reward in heaven, as usual.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2001: Reed