Growing up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South

In this bluesy poetic prose, the author engages poetry, personal narrative, and performance to reflect on how hip hop served as a soundtrack for her transition to womanhood in the rural south. She uses lyrics from Killing Me Softly (originated by Roberta Flack in the 70s and repopularized by The Fugees in 1996) and other songs from the 90s to tell stories about growing up, love, loss, depression, and abuse situated within her race, culture, sex, and social class. She muses how the cadences of sound and the words of songs helped her become a writer and feminist. She also reflects on how her formal and informal education has informed and been informed by her relationship to hip hop, which at times has fluctuated from fixation to disillusionment.

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Southern Strivings

10.5406/illinois/9780252036309.003.0002 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Erik S. Gellman ◽

Jarod Roll

Keyword(s):

Meaning In Life ◽

Life Stories ◽

Jim Crow ◽

Young Men ◽

Growing Up ◽

Agricultural Labor ◽

Rural South ◽

Family Survival ◽

Jim Crow South

This chapter details the respective backgrounds of the two preachers under discussion, highlighting the similarities in their life stories—particularly their shared frustrations growing up as ambitious, talented young men in the rural South. Their youths were defined by the tensions between family survival and an individual sense of calling, between agricultural labor and adventure, and between physical hunger and the thirst for deeper meaning in life. Moreover, the laws and culture of the Jim Crow South also held sway over both their lives, and made Claude Williams's youth at once very similar to, yet completely separate from, Owen Whitfield's experience. Both men would, however, come to the same religious calling as they came of age.

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America's Forgotten People and Places: Ending the Legacy of Poverty in the Rural South: Discussion

Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics ◽

10.1017/s1074070800020423 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 32 (2) ◽

pp. 357-361

Author(s):

Ntam Baharanyi ◽

Robert Zabawa ◽

Evelyn Boateng

Keyword(s):

Economic Development ◽

Historically Black ◽

Development Strategy ◽

Black Belt ◽

Land Grant University ◽

Social Scientists ◽

Rural South ◽

Economic Development Strategy ◽

Rural Economic Development ◽

Southern Black Belt

AbstractThese comments discuss the presentations by Christy, Wenner, and Dassie (“A Microenterprise-Centered Economic Development Strategy for the Rural South: Sustaining Growth with Economic Opportunity”) and Freshwater (“What Can Social Scientists Contribute to the Challenges of Rural Economic Development?”) in three sections. These are (1) a brief overview of the Southern Black Belt and its rural development needs, (2) an assessment of the microenterprise-Centered economic development strategy for the rural South, and (3) a quick review of what social scientists can contribute to the challenges of rural economic development. This approach also emphasizes the authors’ background at a historically black land-grant university, and the belief that as goes the Black Belt, so goes the rural South.

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Sociological Discourses on Color, Class, and Gender, from Depression to World War II

Brown Beauty ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479875108.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 225-260

Author(s):

Laila Haidarali

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Coming Of Age ◽

African American Youth ◽

Black Belt ◽

Growing Up ◽

World War ◽

The Great Depression ◽

Color Class ◽

African America ◽

And Gender

This chapter daws on three published sociological works: Franklin E. Frazier’s, Negro Youth at the Crossways (1940), Charles S. Johnson’s, Growing Up in the Black Belt (1941), and Charles H. Parrish’s, Color Names and Color Notions (1946). These sociological views on color showed brown identity as an emergent social ideal and image of African America, and in varying degrees drew crucial connections of brownness to values associated with an ascendant middle-class status. These sociologists are presented as racial liberals who offered concrete and critical assessments of the rising idealization of brown complexions among African American youth coming of age between the Great Depression and World War II.

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