Diversity and Its Discontents: A Review of Behind the White Picket Fence
Overview Review Sarah Mayorga-Gallo‘s Behind the White Picket Fence explores how race, class, and ethnicity shape daily life and power sharing in “Creekridge Park,” a pseudonymous multiethnic neighborhood located in Durham, North Carolina. In the early twentieth century, the neighborhood was predominantly white working- and middle class, but as the housing stock aged in the late 1980s, more African American […]
Highlighting Charleston’s African American History through the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative
Overview The Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI) is an online public history project hosted by the Lowcountry Digital Library at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. With grant support from the Humanities Council of South Carolina and a major award from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, LDHI launched in 2014 as a collaborative project […]
Contesting the Roadways: The Moore’s Ford Lynching Reenactment and a Confederate Flag Rally, July 25, 2015
Overview July 25, 2015 saw two competing events on the roads of northeast Georgia. Civil rights activists marked the sixty-ninth anniversary of the Moore’s Ford lynching, the killing of four young African Americans near Monroe, Georgia on July 25, 1946. As they have every year since 2005, a multiracial group of performers staged a reenactment […]
Dancing Around the “Glaring Light of Television”: Black Teen Dance Shows in the South
Overview When Chuck Willis released his single “Betty and Dupree” in 1958, he and Atlantic Records wanted to keep teenagers across the country dancing the Stroll. Willis’s “C. C. Rider” (1957) sparked the popularity of the dance and earned Willis the nickname “The King of the Stroll.” Like much of American popular music, Willis and […]
Opening Remarks: 2014 Callaloo Conference
Overview Welcoming Comment from Natasha Trethewey Natasha Trethewey, Welcoming Comment, 2014. About the Speaker Natasha Trethewey is a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet (Native Guard, Mariner Books, 2006) and former poet laureate of the United States (2012–2014). She directs the Creative Writing Program at Emory University. Many of her poems first appeared in various forms in Callaloo, […]
Segregation’s New Geography: The Atlanta Metro Region, Race, and the Declining Prospects for Upward Mobility
Overview Atlanta metro region is known by many titles: as the “capital of the New South” thanks to a robust economy and rising population;1Obie Clayton, Cynthia Hewitt, and Gregory Hall, “Atlanta and ‘The Dream’: Race, Ethnicity, and Recent Demographic and Socioeconomic Trends,” Past Trends and Future Prospects of the American City: The Dynamics of Atlanta, […]
Africana Archives: Making Art at the Schomburg
Overview Howard Dodson, Making Art at the Schomburg: Africana Archives as Sites of Art Making (Part 1 of 3), 2014. Art making has been a critical aspect of the human experience since time immemorial. Among the earliest evidence of human beings as art makers are the rock carvings and engravings found throughout the African continent […]
Hijacking Public Housing: A Review of New Deal Ruins
Overview Review The image on the front cover of New Deal Ruins reverberates prophetically. In March 1972, after only two decades of occupancy, the first of Pruitt-Igoe‘s thirty-three public housing towers came tumbling down in St. Louis, Missouri. Looming over heaps of wires, steel, and concrete slabs, other hollowed out high-rise buildings awaited similar destruction. […]
“I Used That Katrina Water To Master My Flow”: Rap Performance, Disaster, and Recovery in New Orleans
Overview The government blew the levees /I used that Katrina water to master my flow. —Hollygrove Mikey, “Make Medicine Sick”1”Hollygrove Mikey, The Ca$hius Clay Tape,” http://hollygrovemikey.bandcamp.com/. Lil Wayne plays the guitar, Washington, DC, January 15, 2008. Photograph by Flickr user Georgetown Voice. Courtsey of Georgetown Voice, Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0. Big Freedia […]
Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World
Overview Review In this impressive volume edited by Cécile Vidal a collection of historians seek to recover a “marginalized” past (16) within American history. Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World examines the dynamic societies of colonial Louisiana shaped by a succession of European empires over the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries before emerging […]