Capturing the South

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott L. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The South ◽  
James Agee ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right

This expansive history of documentary work in the South during the twentieth century examines the motivations and methodologies of several pivotal documentarians, including sociologists Howard Odum and Arthur Raper, photographers Jack Delano and Danny Lyon, and music ethnographer John Cohen. It also explores the contentious history of documentary work in Hale County, Alabama, a place immortalized by writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans in their collaborative book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well by other documentary artists such as William Christenberry, Martha Young, and J.W. Otts. The work of these documentarians salvaged and celebrated folk cultures threatened by modernization or strived to reveal and reform problems linked to the region's racial caste system and exploitative agricultural economy. Images of alluring primitivism and troubling pathology often blurred together, neutralizing the aims of documentary work carried out in the name of reform during the Progressive era, New Deal, and civil rights movement. Black and white southerners in turn often resisted documentarians' attempts to turn their private lives into public symbols. Hale County, Alabama and other places in the region became not only an iconic sites of representation but also battlegrounds where black and white residents challenged the right of documentarians to represent them. The accumulation of influential and, occasionally, controversial documentary images of the South created an enduring, complex, and sometimes self-defeating mythology about the region that persists into the twenty-first century.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Scott L. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The South ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Frederick Law Olmsted

The introduction explores why the South became known as America’s “most documented” region beginning in the 1940s and into the twenty-first century. It argues that documentarians saw the region as a fertile place to do fieldwork for two main reasons. First, the region possessed unique and seemingly fragile folk cultures in need of preservation before modern influences erased them. Second, the region possessed seemingly endemic problems associated with its racial caste system and agricultural economies that needed documentation, study, and reform. The introduction also provides an overview of how historians and theorists defined “documentary” throughout the twentieth century and how and why some black and white southerners resisted the intrusion of documentarians into their lives. Additionally, it traces the history of documentary fieldwork in the South from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century and demonstrates how the tradition’s dominant themes developed during this time, particularly in the travel writings and sketches of Basil Hall, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jonathan Baxter Harrison and others. Finally, it highlights the distinguishing features of twentieth-century documentary by emphasizing the role of Progressive and New Deal reform impulses, the Folk Revival and Civil Rights Movement, and the development of portable recording technologies.

Fade In, Crossroads

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Gone With The Wind ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White

Fade In, Crossroads is a history of the relations between southerners and motion pictures from the silent era to midcentury. In providing a narrative of the South’s contributions to the film medium from the late nineteenth century through the golden age of Hollywood, it considers the many southerners who worked as inventors, executives, filmmakers, screenwriters, performers, and critics during this period. It explores early production centers within the South as well as the effects of the migration of millions of black and white southerners beyond the region to such destinations as Los Angeles, where they made inroads in the growing film industry. It is also the story of how the rise and fall of the American film industry coincided with the rise and fall of the South’s most important modern product and export—Jim Crow segregation. This work looks at important southern historical legacies on film: the Civil War film tradition (which includes the two most successful films of all time, The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind); the notorious tradition of lynching films during an era of prolific lynching in the South; and the remarkable race film industry, whose independent African American filmmakers forged an important cinematic tradition in response to the racial limitations of both the South and Hollywood. It also examines the activities of southern censorship officials, who utilized the medium in the service of Jim Crow, and traces the influence of film on future Civil Rights Movement figures.

The Southern Manifesto

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kyle Day
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
The South ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Federal Judiciary ◽  
Complete Study ◽  
Post War

The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregation is the first complete study of the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, popularly known as the Southern Manifesto. On March 13, 1956, ninety-nine members of the Eighty-Fourth United States Congress promulgated the Southern Manifesto, formally stating opposition to Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the emerging Civil Rights Movement. This book explores a crucial aspect of post-war American history in general and the Civil Rights Movement in particular, most notably that of efforts by southern segregationists to construct a quasi-legal and political defense against the desegregation decisions of the Federal judiciary. This promulgation was also a response to the increasing support by American public opinion to advocates of desegregation, as well as the increasing isolation of the South and its traditional social structures. The Southern Manifesto was seminally important in creating the concerted and ultimately successful effort by white southerners to oppose the implementation of the Brown decision, a movement that came to be known as massive resistance. This study treats the Southern Manifesto as a document in and of itself, analyzing its text, its authors, its supporters and opponents. The Southern Manifesto, therefore, explains where the formation of the segregationist majority came from and how it became the standard for the South during this period, and thus creates a useful window through which to view the racial dynamics of postwar America.

The Bounds of Their Habitation

2021 ◽  
pp. 43-67
Author(s):  
J. Russell Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The South ◽  
Significant Percentage ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Political Responses ◽  
Biblical Texts

Chapter 2 explicates the theology behind southern evangelicals’ resistance to civil rights. It explains why conservative white Christians opposed civil rights reforms, arguing that a significant percentage of these Christians constructed a theology from both the natural world and biblical texts in which God was viewed as the author of segregation, and one who desired that racial separatism be maintained. Referencing letters, sermons, pamphlets, and books, this chapter documents how segregationist theology was crafted, defended, and deployed throughout the 1950s and 1960s in the South. It also demonstrates how such a theology supported a segregationist Christianity that became common in southern white churches, proving influential in shaping the social and political responses white southerners had to the civil rights movement.

Creating a Ministry of Presence

2018 ◽  
pp. 37-55
Author(s):  
Rebecca Tuuri
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Women ◽  
Team Member ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
National Council ◽  
The South ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Freedom Summer ◽  
Ministry Of Presence

In the fall of 1963, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) took steps to become more directly involved in the civil rights movement when Dorothy Height travelled with a small interracial team of elite clubwomen to investigate the abuse of activist children imprisoned in Selma. The team moved behind the scenes and tried to establish ties with local black and white women to better support the movement. After the Selma trip, white team member Polly Cowan developed plans to bring additional teams of interracial middle and upper class women down to the South. At a March 1964 Atlanta meeting of black and white southern clubwomen, Clarie Collins Harvey, a black businesswoman and clubwoman from Jackson, Mississippi, invited Cowan and the NCNW to provide support to civil rights efforts in Jackson. Her invitation led Cowan and Height to develop plans for Wednesdays in Mississippi to help with Freedom Summer.

Desegregating Dixie

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Newman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Secular Change ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Schools ◽  
Black Catholics ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Church

This book draws on a vast range of archives and many interviews to uncover for the first time the multifaceted and complex response of African American and white Catholics across the South to desegregation. In the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the southern Catholic Church contributed to segregation by confining Africans Americans to the back of white churches and black schools and churches. However, papal adoption and dissemination of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ in the mid-1940s, pressure from some black and white Catholics and secular change brought by the civil rights movement, sometimes with federal support, increasingly led the Church to address racial discrimination behind and outside its walls. Far from monolithic, white Catholics in the South divided between a moderate segregationist majority and minorities of hard-line segregationists and progressive racial egalitarians. While some bishops felt no discomfort with segregation, prelates appointed from the late 1940s tended to be more supportive of religious and secular change. Some bishops in the peripheral South began segregation before or in anticipation of secular change, while elsewhere, and especially in the Deep South, they often tied Catholic to secular desegregation. African American Catholics were diverse and more active in the civil rights movement than often assumed. While some black Catholics challenged racism in the Church, many were conflicted about the manner of Catholic desegregation generally imposed by closing black institutions. Tracing its impact through the early 1990s, Newman reveals how desegregation seldom brought integration.

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