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 »
Interview
Meet the Southern Oral History Program, our colleagues at the Center for the Study of the American South, UNC-Chapel Hill. From its founding in 1973, the Southern Oral History Program has explored the history and culture of the American South by talking to its activists, politicians, educators, laborers, innovators, business leaders, and more. After more »
Interview
“‘That night, they blew up King’s motel, and every police car they had in Birmingham got torn up. I left. I didn’t have anything in common with Bull Connor.’” Early in the Hollywood movie Selma, a pivotal scene depicts a 1965 conversation between Martin Luther King Jr. and a young John Lewis. The leaders of »
“Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art” was co-curated by Trevor Schoonmaker (Nasher Museum of Art) and Miranda Lash (Speed Art Museum). Before the show opened in September 2017, we sat down with Schoonmaker and artists Stacy Lynn Waddell and Jeff Whetstone, both featured in the exhibition. “We have no idea what it »
Honoring William Christenberry (1936–2016) Bill Christenberry was like a spiritual brother who explored his homeland in Hale County, Alabama, with a keen eye. Each summer he returned to document and photograph these familiar worlds. With his meticulous eye, he showed the weight of time on this landscape, tracking change as paint faded and peeled on »
In the summer of 2015, we filmed a short interview with Dorothy Allison, discussing the idea of southern mothers in conjunction with Keira V. Williams’s essay, “‘Between Creation and Devouring’: Southern Women Writers and the Politics of Motherhood.” Today, in collaboration with our 21c Fiction Issue, we bring you excerpts of our conversation. “Life constructs or mitigates »
At the age of 51, Jesse Whitaker began drawing pencil sketches of his memories of being a schoolboy in eastern North Carolina. The collection of his sketches that follows and his accompanying thoughts about the events taking place during that time are vehicles through which southerners can understand his life and his sense of place »
“One of the best ways to play the game is avoid confrontation. The next is to make the adversary ridiculous.” John B. McLendon Jr. was one of the most talented and influential basketball coaches of the twentieth century. He first made his mark at Durham’s North Carolina College, now North Carolina Central University, where he »
“‘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 »
Southern Cultures: So, how did you get interested in this business of Black Confederates? Tony Horwitz: I kept hearing about them wherever I went while researching my book. “Black Confederates” has become something of a mantra in certain southern circles. At Sons of Confederate Veterans meetings, there would be talk of erecting a monument to »
“‘Honey, in our way of life, there ain’t no banker’s hours, and I don’t find in the Bible there’s no such thing as an eight-hour day.’” In 1986, as I began conducting oral histories with older southern farmers about changes in rural life, I asked an agricultural extension agent in Florence, South Carolina, to recommend »