Essay
Charlie Thompson will launch GOING OVER HOME at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill, NC) on Tuesday, November 11, in conversation with SOUTHERN CULTURES art director & deputy editor Emily Wallace. Details below. Charles D. Thompson, Jr. was born in southwestern Virginia into an extended family of small farmers. As he came of age he witnessed the »
Interview
This interview first appeared in the Left/Right Issue (vol. 25, no. 3: Fall 2019). I’m not sure I’d be who I am today if I hadn’t come to Atlanta in 2011. I was born in Boston, went to Harvard and lived in Cambridge. I grew up on the south side of Boston, a Catholic town, »
Inteview
“Open your eyes, talk to us. We’ll tell you what we did wrong. We’ll tell you what we did right.” Jan Rader: There’s probably not a day goes by that somebody doesn’t come up to me and tell me a story. They come up and they say, “Thank you.” But what they really want is »
Interview
“At first, I thought three months was forever. I counted ninety-six days; “Oh God, that’s insane!” But imagine, now, I’ve already been here for more than four hundred days.” I have been living in this church for more than a year now, and it hasn’t been easy at all. It is exhausting, for me and »
Interview
AMY WRIGHT: Do you consider yourself a radical, meaning that you favor drastic political, economic, or social reform? JANISSE RAY: There’s no denying that I am a radical and that I favor far-reaching and extreme reform on many levels. We are at a place globally that requires drastic action. We need immediate action to mitigate »
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 »
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 »
Photo Essay
“These landscapes hold the remnants of five thousand distant voices.” If all photographs are abandonings, as the American critic Henry Allen once wrote, then how might we view photographs of lynching sites? Located for the most part in the geographic margins and the shadows of our collective memory, these landscapes hold the remnants of five »
Interview
Save the Date: Tish Hinojosa will join us the Nasher Museum of Art on November 1st to launch the Music & Protest Issue. More details below. San Antonio native Tish Hinojosa recently spoke with Brendan Greaves, guest editor of the Music & Protest Issue, about her long career as a writer and performer blending border, »
Interview
“I’m in my fifty-second year as an organizer—civil rights, environment, labor, community. You know, if it moves, I try to organize it.” I’m walking down the hall in the Library of Congress, wondering what I’m going to do, and I see a sign that says, “Archive of Folk Music.” I went in the really raggedy-ass »
Music
Jackie Shane is not an easy person to interview. She was one of the greatest soul artists of the 1960s. (“The greatest singer who ever lived,” says Skippy White, dean of the Boston soul scene over the last half century or so.) Designated male at birth in Nashville in 1940, she openly began to identify »