Memorializing the Freedom Riders
Overview Essay Another Mother’s Day has come and gone and still no officially supported memorial honors the Freedom Riders at the site where civil rights workers braved the vicious firebombing of their bus near Anniston, Alabama, on Mother’s Day in May 1961. Momentum is growing to construct a suitable memorial at the site—one of the […]
Southern Memory, Southern Monuments, and the Subversive Black Mammy
Overview Southern Memory, Southern Monuments, and the Subversive Black Mammy Question and Answer Wallace-Sanders responds to questions about the photographs she uses, the proposed Mammy Memorial Institute, the political responses to the proposed mammy memorial in Washington DC, and the mammy figure within Lost Cause discourse. Interested in submitting your work to Southern Spaces? […]
Walking into History: The Beginning of School Desegregation in Nashville
Overview Introduction At high noon, Nashville time, on Monday, May 17, 1954, all nine justices of the United States Supreme Court in Washington joined in a declaration that legally-sanctioned racial segregation in the public schools is a violation of the US Constitution’s promise of equal protection of the laws. The unanimous decision, covering five consolidated […]
They Never Witnessed Such a Melodrama
Overview Essay On a spring evening in 1911, a mob of about fifty white men in the small city of Livermore, Kentucky, lynched Will Potter on the stage of the local opera house. Potter was the black manager of a segregated poolroom where Clarence Mitchell, a young white liveryman, and a friend had come to […]
Routes of Reconciliation: Visiting Sites of Cultural Trauma in the US South, Northern Ireland, and South Africa
Overview Introduction During the summer of 2008, I travelled to Northern Ireland and South Africa as part of “Race, Religion, and Reconciliation,” a project which brought together three faculty members and eighteen graduate students from the University of Mississippi, the University of Ulster, and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Spatial issues loomed large in these divided […]
The Morning with Many Tongues
Overview Readings Sean Hill reads the poem “Just as Sure.” Poem text. Sean Hill reads the poem “Nigger Street 1937.” Poem text. Sean Hill reads the poem “The State House Aflame 1833.” Poem text. Sean Hill reads the poem “In Memory Hill Cemetery.” Poem text. Interview with Natasha Trethewey In these excerpts from a December 17, 2008 conversation, Sean […]
New Patterns of Segregation: Latino and African American Students in Metro Atlanta High Schools
Overview Latinos, the largest minority group in US public schools, are surpassing African Americans as the most segregated racial or ethnic group nationally. This isolation is well documented in states like California, Texas, and Florida with historically high levels of Latino immigration, but less is known about how these newcomers are met in nontraditional destination […]
“In the Neighborhood”: Towards a Human Geography of US Slave Society
Overview Essay For over thirty years, historians in the United States have written about slavery in terms broached by John Blassingame’s path-breaking book The Slave Community (1972). Blassingame, George Rawick, Lawrence Levine, and many other contemporary scholars brought slave culture and society to the foreground of historical writing.1John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in […]
Dirty Decade: Rap Music and the US South, 1997–2007
Overview Introduction Introduced in a 1995 song by the Atlanta-based group Goodie Mob, the idea of the “Dirty South” spread quickly throughout the rap music subculture and industry, and by the early years of the twenty-first century moved into more general usage in a variety of contexts not directly related to rap. The concept of […]
Mourning Medgar: Justice, Aesthetics, and the Local
Overview Presentation Part 2: Gwin explores temporal and spatial dimensions of mourning, posing questions of how to mourn and celebrate Evers Part 3: Gwin situates aesthetic and ethical responses from Baldwin, Moody, Welty, and Walker, highlighting attention to the local Part 4: Gwin recounts how Evers’s death spurred Baldwin, as emissary to Mississippi and as […]