From Coca-Cola to Ebola, Racial Riots to Civil Rights, Epic Ashes to Olympic Torch – the Transformation of Emory, Atlanta, and the South

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-44
Author(s):  
Gary Hauk
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American South ◽  
Law School ◽  
The South ◽  
Emory University ◽  
History Of

Good evening, and welcome to Emory University and Emory Law School. I've been asked to give you an overview of the history of Emory, our home city of Atlanta, and in some ways the entire American South, and I've been asked to do this in less than thirty minutes. I thought I would do that with the help of PowerPoint slides, but unfortunately, we do not have the capacity to project those in this outdoor plaza. So—I will have to call on your imaginations and ask you to conjure up the images that otherwise would be shown on a screen. Let's begin.

Monumental Constructions: Statues, Identity, and Gabrielle Roy’s “L’arbre”

2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-117
Author(s):  
Holly Collins
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
Live Oak ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Significant Attention

Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans garnered significant attention for his book In the Shadow of Statues (2018), observing that many Confederate monuments were erected to buttress Jim Crow laws and serve as a warning to those who supported the civil rights movement. Likewise, there are a number of monuments in Québec that serve a particular political or religious purpose, seeking to reinforce a pure laine ideology. In this article, I explore the parallels between the literal and figurative construction and deconstruction of monuments that have fortified invented ideas on identity in francophone North America. Further, Gabrielle Roy’s short story “L’arbre,” which describes a “living monument,” tells the story of a racialized past in North America and unveils the falsities that have been preserved through the construction of statues that perpetuate racial myth. “L’arbre” examines the natural, unconstructed monument of the Live Oak: a tree that witnessed and holds the visible scars of the many terrible realities that took place in its shadows. I use Roy’s short story to show how she sought to deconstruct a whitewashed history of the post-Civil War American South and suggest that her broader corpus rejects determinism wholesale.

“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done”: Southern Religious History in Retrospect and Prospect

1998 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald G. Mathews
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious History ◽  
The South ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Many

One of the most distinguishing marks of the American South is that religion is more important for the people who live there than for their fellow citizens in the restof the country. When this trait began to identify the region is surprisingly unclear, but it has begun to attract attention from scholars of religion and society who have hitherto been esteemed as students primarily of areas outside the South. The study of religion in Dixie cannot but benefit from this change. After centuries of obsession with thickly settled, college-proud, and printexpressive New England—an area not noted for excessive modesty in thinking about its place in the New World—students of American religion are turning to a region whose history has sustained a selfconsciousness that makes its place in American religious history unique. For studying the American South begins with a dilemma born of ambiguity: whether to treat it as a place or an idea. Sometimes, to be sure, the South appears to be both; but sometimes it is “place” presented as an idea; and sometimes it is a place whose historical experience should have, according to reflective writers, taught Americans historical and moral lessons they have failed to learn. Confusion results in part from the South's contested history not only between the region and the rest of the United States but also among various competing groups within its permeable and frequently indistinct borders. Differences between region and nation will, however, continue to dominate conversation even though the myth of southern distinctiveness may mislead students as much as the myth of its evangelical homogeneity. If inquiry about religion in the South should be sensitive to the many faith communities there, the history of the South will still by contrast provide insight into the broader “American” society.

Monuments to Absence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Denson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American South ◽  
Tourist Attractions ◽  
Indian History ◽  
The Public ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South ◽  
Cherokee Removal ◽  
Past Wrongs

The 1830s forced removal of Cherokees from their southeastern homeland became the most famous event in the Indian history of the American South, an episode taken to exemplify a broader experience of injustice suffered by Native peoples. In this book, Andrew Denson explores the public memory of Cherokee removal through an examination of memorials, historic sites, and tourist attractions dating from the early twentieth century to the present. White southerners, Denson argues, embraced the Trail of Tears as a story of Indian disappearance. Commemorating Cherokee removal affirmed white possession of southern places, while granting them the moral satisfaction of acknowledging past wrongs. During segregation and the struggle over black civil rights, removal memorials reinforced whites' authority to define the South's past and present. Cherokees, however, proved capable of repossessing the removal memory, using it for their own purposes during a time of crucial transformation in tribal politics and U.S. Indian policy. In considering these representations of removal, Denson brings commemoration of the Indian past into the broader discussion of race and memory in the South.

scholarly journals Appalling! Terrifying! Wonderful! Blaxploitation and the Cinematic Image of the South

2019 ◽  
pp. 237-252
Author(s):  
Antoni Górny
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The South ◽  
Social Pathology ◽  
Black Characters ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Film Making ◽  
Race Problem

The so-called blaxploitation genre — a brand of 1970s film-making designed to engage young Black urban viewers — has become synonymous with channeling the political energy of Black Power into larger-than-life Black characters beating “the [White] Man” in real-life urban settings. In spite of their urban focus, however, blaxploitation films repeatedly referenced an idea of the South whose origins lie in antebellum abolitionist propaganda. Developed across the history of American film, this idea became entangled in the post-war era with the Civil Rights struggle by way of the “race problem film,” which identified the South as “racist country,” the privileged site of “racial” injustice as social pathology. Recently revived in the widely acclaimed works of Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained) and Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), the two modes of depicting the South put forth in blaxploitation and the “race problem” film continue to hold sway to this day. Yet, while the latter remains indelibly linked, even in this revised perspective, to the abolitionist vision of emancipation as the result of a struggle between idealized, plaintive Blacks and pathological, racist Whites, blaxploitation’s troping of the South as the fulfillment of grotesque White “racial” fantasies offers a more powerful and transformative means of addressing America’s “race problem.”

Where Is “the South”? Assessing the Meaning of Geography in Politics

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (5) ◽  
pp. 1100-1134
Author(s):  
Melanie J. Springer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
American South ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
The South ◽  
Research Strategies ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Many

The use of geographic classifications to make empirical or theoretical generalizations is common in political science research. Yet, in most cases, these groupings, in and of themselves, lack broader meaning. Offering an in-depth example of the American South, this study demonstrates the need to scrutinize the qualities we are actually interested in when using geographic classifications to explore political trends. The article begins by discussing the many ways that “the South” has been defined in the existing literature. Then, it evaluates the theoretical and empirical consequences of these various definitions using examples focused on discriminatory practices, voter turnout, and civil rights roll call votes. This evidence demonstrates the importance of grounding one’s definition in substantive metrics and historical context over and beyond basic geography. The study concludes with a discussion of its broader implications that apply to several topics of interest and research strategies.

Julius Chambers in New York

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Rosen ◽  
Joseph Mosnier
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American South ◽  
Law School ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Education Fund ◽  
Clear Vision ◽  
The American South ◽  
Legal Defense ◽  
Charles Hamilton Houston

Chapter 3 describes Chambers's two years in New York 1962-1964, the first at Columbia Law School and the second as the first-ever civil rights intern at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund ("LDF"). Earlier the LDF, under the leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, pioneered systematic strategic litigation for social change and led the legal campaign that culminated in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which signalled the beginning of the end of state-sponsored apartheid in the American South. In 1963 LDF director-counsel Jack Greenberg selected Chambers as the first intern for a new program designed to offer prospective civil rights attorneys front-line experience at LDF headquarters in New York City plus three years of subsequent modest funding to support the establishment of new Southern law practices as allies in civil rights litigation. Chambers found the year at LDF exhilarating. Working with LDF's highly-motivated and exceptionally talented staff attorneys, Chambers traveled the South to assist with LDF cases, gaining experience and a clear vision of his professional future.

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