The “Achilles’ Heel” of Jim Crow: A Review of Landscapes of Exclusion
Overview Review In the years surrounding the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, state legislatures as well as county and municipal governments in the US South hastily built new “colored” schools in a desperate attempt to convince federal courts that separate could be equal. White officials tried in vain to give the appearance of […]
Joseph Crespino Interviews Thomas Mullen, Author of Darktown
Overview Introduction Thomas Mullen is the author of four novels, including The Last Town On Earth (2006), which received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize and was recognized by USA Today as the best debut novel of the year. Mullen’s books are notable for the range and variety of their historical settings and influences. Last Town […]
Slavery’s Traces: In Search of Ashley’s Sack
Overview Blog Post “Ashley’s Sack” is among the most resonant and enigmatic artifacts on display in the newly opened Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC. Evidently a seed sack made of unbleached cotton fabric dating to the mid-nineteenth century, it measures about thirty-three by sixteen inches. Patched repeatedly, […]
Changing Places, Changing Lives
Overview Review An odd thing has happened on the way to the antebellum American past. Capitalism reigns; cotton is king; and work and workers are no longer studied together. Instead, slaves have become permanent inmates of a carceral landscape: mute and nearly mummified human sacrifices to a commodity-producing global machinery. Damian Alan Pargas does not […]
LiFT Art Salon: Hammonds House II
My childhood family vacations included mandatory excursions to museums, libraries, and historical sites. To ensure that my little brother and I “enjoyed” cultural experiences of all stripes, we toured the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, Martin Luther King Jr.’s grave at the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Boston Children’s Museum. Much to my parent’s […]
Georgia Slavery, Georgia Freedom
Overview Review From colonial founders’ initial resistance to slavery to antebellum whites’ embrace of it, Watson W. Jennison‘s Cultivating Race charts the first hundred years of Georgia’s Anglo, African, and Native American shared experience. Beginning with the successes and struggles of Austin Dabney—a Revolutionary War hero of mixed ethnicity—Jennison draws readers into the complex world of […]
The Black Civil Rights Movement on the Border
Overview Review Lawrence Aaron Nixon, born in Marshall, Texas, in 1883—as Will Guzmán chronicles in Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands—grew to manhood at a time when whites in the Lone Star State, across the South, and indeed, across the entire United States, were vigorously undoing the gains achieved by blacks during the Civil War […]
LiFT Art Salon: Hammonds House
Overview I grew up in metro Atlanta watching revitalization efforts spread across the city’s many neighborhoods. The rebranding of City Hall East, Krog Street, and the Atlanta Railroad as Ponce City Market, Krog Street Market, and the celebrated Atlanta Beltline underscores a shared aesthetic at the heart of development projects that map new bastions of commerce onto existing urban footprints. Many mixed-use projects include residential neighborhoods replete with spaces […]
Brick by Brick: Atlanta’s Collier Heights
Overview Introduction In August 2015, the Collier Heights home of Herman J. Russell (1930–2014), African American construction and real estate executive, came on the Atlanta market for $675,000. The listing video characterizes Russell’s home as a hub for both real estate transactions, political strategy sessions, and community barbecues.1After two price reductions, as of January 2016, […]
Reframing Resistance: A Review of Freedom Now!
Overview Review I remember well seeing Charles Moore’s fire hose photographs from Birmingham in my hometown newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal. Six-years old in 1963, I had little understanding of the day’s news, but it was impossible not to notice the violent spray of water knocking and pinning down black protesters. How could water and firemen […]