“‘There were a lot of people who supported Clyde, but they just did not feel comfortable voicing any kind of support. There was this element of fear.’” During the spring of 1985, a battle raged in Buies Creek, North Carolina, on the campus of Campbell University, an affiliate of the State Baptist Convention of North »
“‘Now, Miss Daisy, somebody done bomb that temple back yonder, and you know it.’” The release of the film Driving Miss Daisy in 1989 made American moviegoers aware of the ongoing presence of southern Jewishness. 1 Alfred Uhry wrote the film’s screenplay from his 1987 autobiographically informed Pulitzer prize-winning play, the story of the relationship »
“Freezing time is a tricky science.” “Death suffuses all these pictures.” So says former fashion photographer Charlie Curtis, who has been working late on his time machine again. Readers of Southern Cultures will remember his “Signs of the South” photographic essay, which we published in our Summer 2000 issue. But unlike “Signs of the South,” »
“‘I have a pistol and I know how to use it. I’ve used it before.’” “Gentlemen, I won’t be dictated to by the union.” Six-foot-five, 240-pound Big Bill France loosened his tie, removed his glasses, and proceeded to put the “fear of God” into his workers. Before he had “this union stuffed down [his] throat,” »
“What’s next — a Charles Manson retrospective?” From time to time our readers send us pleasant reminders that there’s no reason for this publication to take itself at all seriously. For instance, we thought that the forum we’ve been offering in our “Letters to the Editors” might lend itself to thoughtful discussions of essays we’ve »
“Who could be freer than one of these stock-car racers moving easily and gloriously between the glamour of moonshining and the thrill of roaring engines on dirt tracks, with plenty of hard living, hard partying, and wild women at every stage?” “The power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the »
“How is it that a state with a reputation for moderation, even progressivism, elects Jesse Helms?” January 11, 1997, was a frigid Saturday with the sort of clinging cold that stings the ears and numbs the toes. Still, about five thousand citizens of North Carolina gathered outdoors on the wide lawn in front of Broughton »
“For relief, I take my eyes off the flag and glance down again at the groundskeeper, who is still pulling the cords to raise the trio of flags.” It is the spring of 1984 in Atlanta, and the groundskeeper at Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School is starting his morning routine. In my twelfth grade homeroom »
I remember my own father and uncles returning from World War II with stories of how southerners, particularly rural and working-class ones, were denigrated and ridiculed by conscripted urbanités for their speech, manners, attitudes. There was a general cultural attack at the time on “hillbillies.” This was the beginning of their sectional consciousness I am »
“This time, our pollster asks the question, ‘Do you agree or disagree that, if it could be done without war, the South would be better off as a separate country today?’” In his presidential address to the American Association for Public Opinion Research, which he titled “The Obligation of the 1950 Pollster to the 1984 »
“Caution in predicting the southern political weather might seem to be in order.” The young W. J. Cash penned these words after Herbert Hoover’s conquest of North Carolina, as well as three other southern states, in his 1928 presidential victory over New York’s Democratic Governor Al Smith. Cash was not the only observer foreseeing a »
“The author argues that the time has come to give up the Confederate battle flag as a public symbol. A sense of southern identity, though, should be preserved.” For most of this century, public memory in the South has cherished the noble Lost Cause. The Confederate monument in Yazoo City, Mississippi, erected in 1909 by »