Cultural Life in a “Chocolate City”: A Review of Natalie Hopkinson’s Go-Go Live
Review In Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City journalist and educator Natalie Hopkinson uses go-go—the ultra-local style of African American popular music that has dominated metro Washington, DC, since the 1980s—as a window into the life of a “Chocolate City,” a phrase popularized by funk artist George Clinton to describe […]
Telling the Raymond Andrews Story: The Making of Somebody Else, Somewhere Else
Somebody Else, Somewhere Else: The Raymond Andrews Story Somebody Else, Somewhere Else: The Raymond Andrews Story, 2010. I came to the work of Raymond Andrews in 2002, my final year as an undergraduate at Georgia State University. In a business writing class, we were generating mock resumes, cover letters, inter-office memos—that sort of thing. Our […]
“Looking Back and Moving Forward”: The Records of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library
The SCLC Collection Elaine Tomlin, Joseph Lowery leading a prayer during the 1982 Pilgrimage to Washington for Voting Rights, Peace, Economic Justice, North Carolina, 1982. Courtesy of SCLC records, MARBL, Emory University. Founded in 1957 by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders, including Ralph David Abernathy, Ella Baker, Joseph E. Lowery, […]
Lynching and Local History: A Review of Troubled Ground
Review Rowan County Court House and Jail, Salisbury, North Carolina, circa 1905-1915. Courtesy of the Durwood Barbour Collection of North Carolina Postcards, North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. On an August evening in 1906, a white mob stormed the county jail in Salisbury, North Carolina, seeking six black prisoners indicted that […]
Brown, Black, and White in Texas
Review “Let the Negro fight his own battles,” declared Felix Tijerina, a Mexican American civil rights activist in Texas and the national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), in 1957. Tijerina was responding to the suggestion by some LULAC colleagues that Mexican Americans ally with African Americans. “[The Negro’s] problems are […]
Medicine as Memory: Radcliffe Bailey at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art
Review Peter Harholdt, Radcliffe Bailey in his studio with Clean Up II, November 2010. Over the last two decades, Radcliffe Bailey has produced some of the most distinctive art in America. History is the subject—personal, racial, national. The idiom is complex, drawing from Rauschenburg and Basquiat, Bearden and Lawrence, articulated in painting, assemblage, drawing, and […]
“It’s Being Black and Poor”: Race, Class, and Desegregation at Pebblebrook High
Introduction Virginia Ward’s yearbook photo, Pebblebrook High School, 1970. Virginia Ward is not a small woman, but the fineness of her hands and the way her gray curls sweep around her ears make her seem so. She is missing her left front tooth and when she laughs, she leans backward and then forward again, as […]
Creolization as Cultural Continuity and Creativity in Postdiluvian New Orleans and Beyond
Introduction Doing fieldwork, public programs, and scholarly projects on expressive culture in Creole and other cultural settings in urban New Orleans and nearby French Louisiana over the last three decades suggests to me that creolization is part of the cultural continuity of community life and recreation of the social order—especially in the face of social […]
A Turning Point for Richmond: The Virginia Historical Society’s Civil War Exhibition
Review The Virginia Historical Society (VHS) in Richmond, Virginia, has mounted an ambitious, highly original, and innovative exhibition on the history of the Civil War, “An American Turning Point: The Civil War in Virginia.” The exhibit was organized with the partnership of the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission and supported with funding […]
Deep in the Cane: The Southern Soul of Gil Scott-Heron
Essay On the first Monday of October 1974, a belligerent crowd of two hundred whites besieged a local school bus filled with African American students attempting to depart Destrehan High School in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. Committed to preserving white supremacy at all costs, the angry mob hurled racist insults, glass bottles, and rocks toward […]