The American South

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Reagan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
American South ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Racial Tension ◽  
The American South

The American South: A Very Short Introduction explores the American South, a distinctive place with a dramatic history. It is a cultural crossroads, where Western Europe met West Africa in a colonial slave society. The Civil War and civil rights movement transformed the South and remain a part of a vibrant and contested public memory. Moreover, the South's pronounced traditionalism in customs and values have always contended with the forces of modernization and the continuing challenges of racial tension. This VSI looks at Southerners' diverse creative responses to these experiences, in literature, film, music, and cuisine, which have had worldwide influence.

Book Reviews

2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 911-912
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
The American South ◽  
William Robertson

Explores the economic gains experienced across racial boundaries in the wake of the civil rights movement of the American South. Discusses civil rights, economics, and the American South; the political economy of the Jim Crow South; southern business and public accommodations—an economic–historical paradox; desegregating southern labor markets; the economics of southern school desegregation; the economic consequences of voting rights; the downside of the civil rights revolution; and civil rights economics—historical context and lessons. Wright is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History at Stanford University.

scholarly journals Battle Cry: the American Library Association and Its Southern Chapters during the Civil Rights Movement

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven R. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
American Library Association ◽  
Cultural Barriers ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
American Library ◽  
The American South

The historiography of civil rights and libraries tells us little about the desegregation of the profession. During the Civil Rights Movement librarians in the American South encountered barriers to their professional participation due to Jim Crow cultural restrictions in the region. Despite activism by a few individuals, the American Library Association was not successful in compelling state and regional affiliates of the Association to integrate their ranks. Four state associations (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgie) actually severed their ties with ALA. Only after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were the cultural barriers removed to permit the southern associations to open their membership to all librarians. Soon after the signing of that legislation, ALA readmitted those southern chapters.

Staging Diaspora

2019 ◽  
pp. 120-163
Author(s):  
Rebekah J. Kowal
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American South ◽  
American Identity ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Sierra Leonean ◽  
Dance Company ◽  
The American South ◽  
Nigerian Students

Chapter 3 focuses on the artistic, cultural and political significance of Sierra-Leonean choreographer Asadata Dafora’s work in the mid-1940s. The first part of the chapter examines the import of three African dance festivals that Dafora directed and produced at Carnegie Hall on behalf of the African Academy of Arts and Research (AAAR), a pro-nationalist and anti-colonialist organization founded by Nigerian students living in New York City at the time. Seen in this light, Dafora’s performance of diaspora makes visible practices of black creativity and resistance, seeking to bridge Africanist solidarities toward the formation of a black American identity defined in global terms. The second part of the chapter analyzes the importance of a tour Dafora took with his dance company, Shogola Oloba African Dance Group, across the American South and Midwest, performing “Africa” for largely African American audiences on the eve of the civil rights movement.

The Voter Education Project, 1962–1964

Poll Power ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 57-89
Author(s):  
Evan Faulkenbury
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American South ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Voting Power ◽  
Education Project ◽  
Grassroots Movements ◽  
The American South

This chapter explores how the VEP empowered 129 separate African American voter campaigns during this period, spending over a million dollars, and registering 688,000 black southerners. This chapter argues that this surge of black voting power paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Wiley Branton led the VEP during this period, and their support, with philanthropic backing, energized thousands of black civil rights activists across the American South. This chapter chronicles how VEP money and support empowered grassroots movements across the South, and how the civil rights movement relied on the VEP.

scholarly journals “So sensual, so languid, and so private”: James Baldwin’s American South

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-29
Author(s):  
Jeff Fallis
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American South ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The South ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Essential Question ◽  
The American South ◽  
Legal Fact

James Baldwin has frequently been written about in terms of his relationship to geographical locations such as Harlem, Paris, St. Paul-de-Vence, Istanbul, and “the transatlantic,” but his longstanding connection to the American South, a region that served as a vexed and ambiguous spiritual battleground for him throughout his life and career, has been little discussed, even though Baldwin referred to himself as “in all but no technical legal fact, a Southerner.” This article argues that the South has been seriously underconsidered as a major factor in Baldwin’s psyche and career and that were it not for the challenge to witness the Southern Civil Rights movement made to Baldwin in the late 1950s, he might never have left Paris and become the writer and thinker into which he developed. It closely examines Baldwin’s fictional and nonfictional engagements with the American South during two distinct periods of his career, from his first visit to the region in 1957 through the watershed year of 1963, and from 1963 through the publication of Baldwin’s retrospective memoir No Name in the Street in 1972, and it charts Baldwin’s complex and often contradictory negotiations with the construction of identity in white and black Southerners and the South’s tendency to deny and censor its historical legacy of racial violence. A few years before his death, Baldwin wrote that “[t]he spirit of the South is the spirit of America,” and this essay investigates how the essential question he asked about the region—whether it’s a bellwether for America’s moral redemption or moral decline—remains a dangerous and open one.

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.

The Techniques of Disavowal

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-191
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
The Public ◽  
The One

This chapter considers the limitations of civil rights disobedience in transforming white citizens. Building on the work of James Baldwin, Charles Mills, and Elizabeth Spelman and chronicling a “failed” protest at the 1964 World’s Fair, this chapter attends to the discursive techniques of disavowal that white citizens and state officials used to dismiss black activism as inappropriate, irresponsible, gratuitous, and violent—thereby avoiding the claims such protest made upon them, while preserving their own innocence and moral standing. In stepping outside the South and the familiar set of events that make up the public memory of the “short” civil rights movement, this chapter also suggests that some aspects of campaigns like the one in Birmingham were enabled—and publicly legitimated—by the very techniques of disavowal that limited the movement’s radical potentialities.

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