University of North Carolina Press, 2007 In this groundbreaking book, Heather Andrea Williams marshals enormous primary evidence to reveal a previously untold story of African American self-help and self-determination in the quest for literacy before and after Emancipation. Drawing on expansive archival research and nuanced readings of legislation (Williams is a former attorney with the »
“A lush and exotic landscape–a setting encouraging and supporting heroic transformation–nurtures all endeavors.” In 1994 Bruce West began photographing the Mississippi Delta and surrounding areas. His interest in documenting the region arose from his ex-wife’s love of southern literature and because the South was the only part of the United States he had never traveled. »
“He crouched in the shade of the barn, thinking and mumbling, and the wind ripped the words from his mouth . . .” LexiconThe people are talking about budworms; they are talkingabout aphids and thrips. Under the bluff at Dismal Rock,there where the spillway foams and simmers,they are fishing and talking about pounds and allotments;they »
“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.” Lemuel Delany is a retired funeral home director living with his wife and daughter in Raleigh, North Carolina. He comes from a »
“Did you know that W. E. B. Dubois was a favorite author of the United Daughters of the Confederacy? They didn’t either, for they came to admire the outstanding African American intellectual under the cloak of invisibility.” At the end of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s wrenching novel of the African American experience, the nameless narrator »
“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.’” In 1937, a distinguished visitor touring the United States, the English »
“In 1987, Oprah Winfrey broadcast her television show from Forsyth County, Georgia, which had expelled its black population seventy-five years earlier.” Between 1890 and 1960, thousands of towns across the United States drove out their black populations or took steps to forbid African Americans from living in them, creating “sundown towns,” so named because many »
University of North Carolina Press, 2010 Anne Mitchell Whisnant begins her book with her own memories and early experiences of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I shall begin this review likewise: In my case, the year was 1958. With my wife, our two sons aged 6 months and 3½ years, and a newly granted degree »
“It’s a kind of monster, cobbled from parts of other creatures—” On Being Asked to Pray for a VanMy evangelical brethren have let me know,via the quarterly fundraising letter,that they can’t get the gospel aroundbecause their van has given up the ghost.God in the machine, help them.
“Although I had been around chitlins from time to time all through my childhood, I always considered the actual eating of them as a spectator sport. In the first place, they stank.” Chitlins, as all the world knows, are guts—specifically, the small intestines of pigs, cleaned and scrubbed through several changes of cold water with »
“I stood on the back porch and gazed across the fresh spring grass toward the squat little outhouse nestled at the edge of the meadow, behind the old chicken coop. All outdoor toilets are not the same, and ours has some unusually fine qualities.” I flushed with excitement. After generations of anticipation, the house finally »
University of North Carolina Press, 2007 When Alex Haley’s Roots appeared in 1976 it set off a storm of excitement among African Americans about the possibilities of tracing their ancestry to a particular African homeland. The success of the television series based on the book, which attracted more viewers than any series up to that »