Interview
VALERIE BOYD: Everybody I’ve talked with, when I’ve told them that I’m interviewing Stacey Abrams, they’re so excited—and especially Black women. Every time I tell a Black woman I’m interviewing you, they get a dreamy look in their eyes that’s usually reserved for Michelle Obama. Well, maybe Oprah. But now there are three Black women »
Interview
REV. DR. WILLIAM J. BARBER II: My father . . . said, “When you feel overwhelmed by your moment, go back and read the moments that people faced that are worse than yours. What courage and hope and truth did they find in that moment?” I go back and I read Henry McNeal Turner and »
Essay
“Right field, where perennial All-Star Hank Aaron played, was, first, the site of the Sermon on the Mount and, later, Golgotha.” For twenty-five years, Southern Cultures has been the premier forum for interdisciplinary, public-facing scholarship on the American South. I’m honored to serve as a guest editor for one of the four twenty-fifth anniversary issues, »
Essay
“The South has seen its share of revolutions before.” Welcome to Left/Right, the third of four special issues to mark the twenty-fifth year of Southern Cultures. Backward/Forward and Inside/Outside are now behind us; Here/Away will cap the series. This time, our good friend Joseph Crespino, distinguished historian at Emory University, has come forward as our »
Fiction
The night I deployed, four inches of ice fell across the state of Arkansas. This was late December, in the dark days right after Christmas. My friends and I were home from the various colleges we’d escaped to after high school, and in the few days before we disappeared again we drank too much and »
Photo Essay
Join us (rain, Hurricane Dorian, or shine) TONIGHT, Thursday, September 5 at 5:30 PM, for the opening reception of “New Orleans Second Line Parades,” on view through December 2019 at the Center for the Study of the American South. On roughly forty Sundays a year, the hardworking members of New Orleans Social Aid and Pleasure »
Interview
In 2017, the Center for the Study of the American South hosted Philip Freelon & Pierce Freelon in conversation for the Charleston Lecture in Southern Affairs. We were grateful to have witnessed Philip Freelon’s generosity and deep humanity as he and his son discussed creativity, community, and the artistry of architecture (among other topics) in »
Poetry
I’ll tell you what, Papaw was a drunk, the sweetest man alive.Sober: A good husband; a loving father; he worked hard regardless,but I’ve never heard tell if he was able to keep a jobor if the family moved because of his drinking. On a binge, he beat Granny.He’d come home at 2am and beat her »
Photo Essay
This article appears in the Inside/Outside Issue (vol. 25, no. 2: Summer 2019) and has been condensed. To view the article in its entirety, visit Project Muse (link below). This is more than one story. This is twenty-five years of narratives from farmworkers, mostly in the Carolinas, told in labor camp kitchens, on trailer porch »
Memoir
We cannot understand the power and the meaning of food until we understand hunger. Hunger at its most basic is the lack of food, and therefore a body’s need and craving for food. If we are very lucky in this world, we feel hunger as a minor physical discomfort that can be readily sated: a »
Essay
“Every ‘inside’ has an ‘outside.’ Every boundary has a sentinel. Almost every backyard has a NIMBY.” In 1910, the Baltimore City Council made Jim Crow concrete. It passed an “ordinance for preserving order, securing property values and promoting the great interests and insuring the good government of Baltimore city,” which was intended to make it »
Music
Attendees at the 1970 Country Music Association awards were startled when Roy Clark announced that Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” beat out Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” for Song of the Year. Amid applause and some gasps, a dazed, disheveled, long-haired Kristofferson stumbled up the steps of the Ryman Auditorium, looking an awful lot »