“In the Neighborhood”: Towards a Human Geography of US Slave Society
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 the […]
Inside Poor Monkey’s
Introduction Poor Monkey’s sits in a cotton field in Bolivar County, west of the town of Merigold on the Hiter farm, land worked by members of the same family for generations. Monkey’s is the only surviving sharecropper shanty on this land, although there are remains of a few others nearby. In the early 1950s, Willie […]
Television News and the Civil Rights Struggle: The Views in Virginia and Mississippi
A General Note to Readers: I have intended this essay to be read and the films viewed together. Rather than narrate the films, I have presented an analysis of them and have introduced them to the reader at the appropriate moments. The essay is intended as a multimedia and hypertextual analysis and is argued in […]
African Americans in Atlanta: Community Building in a New South City
Community Building in a New South City Atlanta offers a sharp perspective of the Black experience in the urban South during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The emergence of its Black community reveals the constraints and opportunities that characterized Atlanta’s development as the leading city of the New South. Born a railroad terminus in the […]
African American Community Building in Atlanta: A Guide to the Study of Race in America
Introduction: Defining the Subject “The problem of the twentieth century,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote one hundred years ago, “is the problem of the color-line.” He was referring to the worldwide hierarchy of race that places lighter people over darker people. As educator, writer, and political activist he dedicated his life to the struggle […]
African Americans in Atlanta: Adrienne Herndon, an Uncommon Woman
Adrienne Herndon (1869–1910) Portrait of Adrienne Herndon, date unknown. (c) The Herndon Home. “It is simply inevitable that I should end up on the stage,” Adrienne stated in 1904 just before her Boston debut as a dramatic reader. “The footlights have beckoned me since I was a little child and I simply must respond. It […]
Plantation Romances and Slave Narratives: Symbiotic Genres
Introduction Many of the novels that we call plantation romances also bear a different name: we know them and see them discussed as “Anti-Tom novels,” written implicitly or explicitly to counter the negative view of the South that Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) popularized with such amazing force. Even before her novel appeared […]
Dirty Decade: Rap Music and the US South, 1997–2007
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 the […]
Geographies of Hope and Despair: Atlanta’s African American, Latino, and White Day Laborers
Introduction I left Guatemala May 28. I had problems crossing into Mexico from Guatemala. Mexican officials threw me back eight times but I kept trying. They tried to get me the last time but I jumped off a train and fell down a riverbank and they couldn’t catch me. I was in the army in […]
A City Divided
Introduction In spite of increasing animosity between workers and elites, blacks and whites, through the turn of the century, Atlanta’s residential landscape remained curiously heterogeneous in terms of race and class. Blacks and whites, business owners and laborers lived in close proximity in the late 1800s, often on the same block. If the home-owning whites […]