“Lynching and mayhem are not the only dimensions of southern history worth preserving.” I spoke once at a dinner meeting of the Military Order of Stars and Bars (MOSB), a Confederate heritage society that gathers every once in a while at a nearby Steak ‘n’ Ale restaurant. Most of the time, neo-Confederates and I leave »
Viking Penguin, 2003 In the summer of 1861, just a few months into the Civil War, Mary Boykin Chesnut wondered in her journal if anyone could say that they knew Robert E. Lee. “I doubt it,” she answered her own question. “He looks so cold and quiet and grand.” He looks cold and quiet and »
Harvard University Press, 2008 Fitzhugh Brundage’s excellent book takes up the subject of public forms of remembering and commemoration in the South since the Civil War. He sees well that the region’s collective memory was implicated in a wider political struggle for power and identity that would favor whites over blacks. The inevitable clash of »
“Are blacks to be proud of the film? Or is it just an expansive, self-indulgent joke that goes on too long?” C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, conceived and filmed by Kevin Willmott and presented by Spike Lee, is a mockumentary—that is, a film designed to spoof various historical television documentaries, especially work in the »
Photo Essay
“Robinson’s photographs give us something of an antidote to the smearing and demonization of homosexuals sanctioned and encouraged by government officials for political gain. Before the assassination of a president, before the rise of the homophobic radical right, before AIDS and the crucifixion of Matthew Shepard, very southern gay men in a very southern place »
“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.” Just over one hundred »
“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 »
Essay
“The Klan was trying to put a damper on the Lumbees. They were not going to come here and run the Lumbees away from their home.” —James Jones On a frigid Saturday night in January 1958, Grand Dragon James “Catfish” Cole and fifty other members of the Ku Klux Klan gathered for a rally in »
“Many people viewed the extreme disorder after Hurrican 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.” Many people viewed the extreme disorder after Hurricane Katrina as the failure of a comprehensive system of public works and »
“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.’” Traditionally, public commemoration in the South has been devoted largely to remembering the region’s role in the Civil War and the mythic Old South plantation culture supposedly lost »
“The South’s first people were neither black, nor white, and they have never disappeared.” People often think of the South as a place of two races, black and white. Slavery and segregation, Civil War and Civil Rights dominate historical memory. Whether good, bad, or indifferent, “race relations” always seem to imply relations between blacks and »
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 »