“This Black man called the Secretary of the Navy. And the Secretary of the Navy says to the judge: ‘Let him go.’” “They did not knuckle under to the institution of slavery or, following that, the institution of Jim Crow-ism,” reflected Edwin Caldwell Jr. on evaluating some two hundred years of his family’s history in »
“You were there at the U.S. Supreme Court. Your name is called in that body of people. It was just frightening.” For the better part of twenty years, county extension agent P. E. Bazemore spearheaded a lawsuit charging the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service with discriminating against its African American county agents in hiring, pay, »
“One, two, three. I just waded out . . . through the muck. And then I got in his sailboat. Of course I was wet, but you can’t ask William Faulkner to wring you out, I guess. It hadn’t occurred to me until this minute that I might have.” BILL FERRIS: Eudora, I want to »
“I love B. B. because he loves women. They can be mean, they can be bitchy, they can be carrying on, but you can tell he really loves them. He’s full of love. I would like to be the literary B.B. King.” My friendship with Alice Walker began in the fall of 1970 when I »
“I said, ‘Couldn’t we go a little slower?’ And he said, ‘With a white man sitting in this front seat with me? You won’t catch me going less than ninety miles an hour. Mister, you’ll just have to take it. I’m saving your life.’” By any measure Robert Penn Warren is one of America’s most »
“There are times when you come upon a scene and everything is right. It tells a story. It has a center of interest. It has emotion. It has people in it who are beautiful people–and I don’t mean Hollywood beautiful.” Billy E. Barnes is one of America’s most widely published photographers. His pictures have appeared »
“I almost lost my life trying to save my guitar.” B.B. King’s name is synonymous with the blues. At the age of eighty-one, the blues patriarch maintains a rigorous schedule of performances throughout the nation and overseas that would exhaust a much younger artist. King’s performances and recordings have shaped the blues for more than »
“We just said, ‘Whoa, what was that?’ and later saw this bullet hole.” Julian Bond has been on the cutting edge of social change since his days as a leader in the Atlanta sit-in movement in 1960. I had the opportunity to interview Bond in the fall of 1999 while I was an undergraduate at »
“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 »
“The Mexican guys said, ‘Let me do it, let me do it!’ and they were peerless.” Bill Smith is an innovative, southern-cuisine chef famous for creating such unexpected culinary juxtapositions as honeysuckle sorbet—hot summer in a cool bite. The dessert’s main ingredient really is the flower, thousands of them, all gathered by hand. His peculiarly »
“I first started learning about the world, and there was a place called the South. It was a distant, romantic place, like the Far West or the islands of the Caribbean.” Pete Seeger has long been my hero. As an undergraduate at Davidson College in the early sixties, I listened to his records and learned »
“I approach these things as a moralist, really, because honesty and truth are moral values, but beauty is something else. And it’s a word that should be used damn carefully.” Few books have touched me so deeply as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). I first read it as an undergraduate student at Davidson »