“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 »
“Virtually every American city accessible by water had some ornamental cast iron, but it was nowhere more exuberantly employed than in the Deep South.” Visitors frequently refer to Mobile’s historic ironwork as wrought iron, but the majority of it is cast iron. Cast iron, cheap and easy to produce in an infinite variety of shapes »
“‘You could buy all the dope you wanted in the drug store. Just ask for it, and you got it.’” At the end of the nineteenth century, the U.S. hunger for narcotics and cocaine was so notorious that one leading public-health official declared, “We are the drug-habit nation.”1 Today, Americans lustfully—if schizophrenically—consume huge quantities of »
“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my »
“Today, you can even get married at the Sam Davis home. Apparently some couples see no irony in tying the knot at a shrine to a lost cause.” On a recent Confederate Memorial Day at the Tennessee State Capitol, the General Joseph E. Johnston Camp No. 28, Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), performed a pathetic »
“Mr. Falkner quickly admitted he hasn’t written his ‘best novel,’ that it is yet to come.” University, Miss., Nov. 17.—William Falkner thinks Hollywood is an over-grown country town, hasn’t read “Gone With the Wind” and believes his best novel has yet to be written.
Essay
“Just as the history of the South is contradictory and contested, so too, is the identity of southerners.” Each region of the United States has a particular identity hewn from history and culture. Yet none is as distinctive as the American South, and none has been imbued with such historical weight in the nation’s making »
“What is it that makes people think of themselves as southerners? It isn’t just birth.” Aside from moonlight and magnolias, there can’t be many things more stereotypically southern than frilly ornamental ironwork veiling the balconies around some timeless antebellum square. In truth, only a few places in the South are famous for such vistas—Charleston, New »
“He’d go in his back woods and drink himself insensible with some of his sharecropper friends.” Harold Burson was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on February 15, 1921. His parents had moved to the city one year earlier from Leeds, in Yorkshire, England. Burson’s father taught him to read by the age of three using the »
Photo Essay
“Robinson’s photographs capture a history that proudly exposes their liberty, individuality, fraternity, and, above all, their joy.” Jack Robinson’s New Orleans Mardi Gras Photographs, 1952–1955 The 1997 discovery in Memphis of thousands of images taken by a southern photographer, Jack Robinson (1928–1997), has thus far attracted only slight attention from the art world and the »
University of North Carolina Press, 2005 One indication of a book’s value is its ability to invoke powerful images for the reader, images that it directly constructs and those it might encourage by extension. In the early part of I Am a Man!, the powerful image of white male supremacy remained foremost in my mind. »
“A dark secret hid itself under my overt appreciation for barbecue and bluegrass: I know next to nothing about NASCAR.” I loved sweet tea, fried chicken, and pulled pork sandwiches. I drove an American-made car and enjoyed old country music. I had a fishing license and drank domestic beer, preferably cheap, on a regular basis. »