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 »
Interview
This feature is part of a series collaboration with the “50 for 50” project, an initiative of the North Carolina Arts Council in celebration of their 50th anniversary. Phil Freelon, best known for leading the design team of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and his son Pierce Freelon, Durham-based hip-hop artist »
Interview
“‘Dealing directly with nature is a very chancy proposition. She’s a sort of a jealous thing.’” My Florida childhood was muddy, awash in alligators, salt spray, and briny oysters. I grew up on—and in—northeast Florida’s Matanzas River, a marshy estuary snaking from St. Augustine in St. Johns County southward into Flagler County. Layers of history »
Interview
Jim Shaffer’s shop is dusty and smells like a horse stable—a comforting olfactory association that I suddenly realize has less to do with horses than with the rolled and bundled straw I see stacked high along the walls. Though the pole barn that houses Shaffer’s Charleston Broom and Mop Company is just a few miles »
Interview
Interview
I met Margaret Walker Alexander in the fall of 1970 when I taught my first class at Jackson State University. She and I both taught in the English Department, and I will never forget a lecture that Margaret gave to my students on Zora Neale Hurston. She and Zora had traveled similar roads as southern »
Interview
A 1966 photograph of the Appalachian historian and activist Helen Matthews Lewis captures much about a woman who has been studying, writing about, and fighting for the people of Appalachia for three-quarters of a century. In the photo, Lewis sits outside of a mine entrance, hair emerging beneath a hard hat, with a big smile »