Violence, Violation, and Black Women’s Struggles for Civil Rights
by Adriane Lentz-Smith
“Much changed over the course of the freedom struggle in how African Americans pursued rights and how segregationists defended white democracy, but sexual violence remained central to asserting white power.” On August 26, 1965, Henrietta Wright drove to the Winona, Mississippi courthouse and registered to vote. A few hours later, she was facing the barrel »
Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Black Political Culture in Reconstruction-Era Mississippi
by Beth Kruse,
Rhondalyn K. Peairs,
Jodi Skipper,
Shennette Garrett-Scott
“Senior year, be good to me!” announced Mahoghany Jordan, a fourth-year general studies major at the University of Mississippi (UM), in a September 17, 2018 Facebook post. In the two images accompanying her post, an exuberant Jordan poses in the Square, the central business and entertainment hub of Oxford, Mississippi, home of the UM campus. »
I don’t know when exactly I learned that Tennessee was the deciding vote to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, the suffrage amendment that expanded women’s access to the ballot box. I think this history entered my consciousness in August 2006 when I saw a group of mostly white women in period attire—long »
“As we witness their labor and listen to the rising voices of women, we see resolute strength, vigilance, outrage, art, and agency.” On the occasion of this special issue focused on women—thanks to our whip-smart guest editor, historian Jessica Wilkerson—I am grateful for the virtual women’s community I access online in these continued months of »
Welcome to our virtual book tour. Since so many literary events have been canceled or postponed during the pandemic, we’re bringing authors directly to you. We hope you’ll get to know a writer or book to add to your reading list. We also encourage you to support your local bookshop. Michael Croley’s collection Any Other »
Peeling paint curls up from the walls in the corner of the Perry County Jail where Billie Jean Young stands, her hands hanging through the slim panes of a jalousie window. Prisoners used to hang their hands out like this, she tells me. “From outside, all you could see were hands.” The jail has long been abandoned, and is »
A Case for a “New Normal” in the Wake of Two Pandemics
by Shorlette Ammons
Route 1, Box 80. There, in Eastern North Carolina, a three-bedroom home provided shelter and solace for about two dozen members of my Ammons family at one time or another. The Bests were up the road to the left, and the Roses to the right, just before the “dangerous curve” that left many folks in »
I wanted to ask the trees. do you remember. were you there. did you shudder. did your skin cry out against the skin of my great uncle’s skin. was the smell of bark a different smell from the smell of meat flesh. human meat flesh. beloved father husband lover friend man flesh. could the air »
I. I have carried a photograph on my person for the past year now. Like my debit card, lip balm, or driver’s license, this photograph has become part of my daily essentials kit. In the black-and-white image, two women clad in patterned and madras print dresses and low kitten heels sit on a rock and »
Amy Sherald and Deborah Roberts are friends, fellow southerners, and tremendously talented artists. Each in her own way makes work that is meaningful without being didactic and encourages thoughtful, critical consideration. What better people to talk with about the bounds of representation and the possibilities of portraiture? In January 2020, they caught up by phone »
“A drawing is sometimes confirmation to me that the shenanigans needed for a complex work are justified, a visual consideration of a much bigger action.” This selection of drawings and sketches represents thoughts, visions, and various objects and observations, conveying my diverse spectrum of engagements over a few decades. Consider some of them “best laid »
“That these ancient mounds have stood firm despite millennia of extreme weather, erosion, and, occasionally, looters’ dynamite is a testament to the builders’ skill.” With the snap of the last stick came the end of the broken days and the beginning of Green Corn, a ceremony connecting Muscogee Creeks to their ancestors and purifying them »
Essay
