by Harry L. Watson
“Next to football and religion, politics might well be southerners’ favorite sport.” In school we learn that American democracy had a southern birthplace, when Virginia elected its first House of Burgesses in 1619, a year before the Pilgrims signed their celebrated Mayflower Compact. And Virginia also gave us Thomas Jefferson, America’s favorite political philosopher. When »
by Ferrel Guillory
“Politically, the South is not an assembly of states, acting in unison, in the grip of one party. The region is not one South, undivided.” Twenty-four years ago, both the Democratic and Republican parties held their national conventions in cities of the American South. Democrats gathered in Atlanta to nominate Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts for »
by Ferrel Guillory
“Of all the women ever romantically linked to Strom Thurmond, none was as deadly as Sue Logue. The judge who sentenced her to the electric chair for murder called her crime ‘the most cold-blooded in the history of the state.'” In 2011, Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life, sat down with his »
by Seth Kotch,
Walter De Vries
“You can’t be defensive about it. You don’t apologize for it.” In June of 1974, just four days after winning a runoff election in the Democratic primary, the newly minted candidate for Congress in Arkansas’s 3rd District, Bill Clinton, sat down with Jack Bass and Walter De Vries to discuss the campaign. In this interview, »
by Jennifer E. Brooks
“The bill gained quick notoriety for outdoing Arizona, Georgia, and all other states in the restrictions and penalties levied on unauthorized immigrants, as well as on the citizens, community members, employers, and health and law enforcement agencies that assist, employ, or regulate them.” On June 1, 2011, the Alabama state legislature passed the “Beason-Hammon Alabama »
by Stephen J. Whitfield
“In the immediate postwar period, as though sensing that the revulsion from Nazism might be carried too far, senators from the South defied the American Creed. They opposed the campaign to sign the Genocide Convention, for example, which the United Nations had adopted in 1948.” In 1944 the Carnegie Corporation of New York sponsored the »
by Dwana Waugh
“Warren Brown recounts his hurried educational career. Unable to attend school until he was ten years old, Brown completed twelve grades in just seven years.” Before a packed crowd of over 700 parents, teachers, and students, R. R. Moton High School alumnus Willie Shepperson revealed the high stakes involved with public school desegregation. At the »
by Seth C. McKee
“The apparent partisan stability of contemporary southern politics belies a complex and dynamic process that makes it doubtful one party can persist as the dominant force in the most diverse region of the United States . . . This truly ain’t your daddy’s Dixie.” For decades, political scientists conducted election studies in which they singled »
by Tammy L. Brown
“How can a stolen body steal cane? Blazing sun—no sign of rain . . .” Sweetman cuts sugarcaneBlistering sun—no sign of rainStalks tower overheadCutting cane ’til he dead
