Scales Intimate and Sprawling: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Geography of Marriage in Virginia
Introduction Peggy Winn had every reason to believe freedom meant stability for her family, stability in a new place. Under slavery, she had lived in the southern section of Albemarle County, Virginia, on the Cleveland farm. Winn had been born in the same county and avoided the most devastating effects of the slave trade: the […]
“Rights Still Being Righted”: Scottsboro Eighty Years Later
Review Scottsboro, Alabama 2011 marks the first public commemoration in Scottsboro of the anniversary of the arrests that irrevocably linked the town’s name with Jim Crow. The stories of the nine young black men riding through Alabama on the Depression-era rails from Chattanooga to Memphis in search of work are often obscured today and absent […]
The Color of Democracy: A Japanese Public Health Official’s Reconnaissance Trip to the US South
Introduction Map of Yoshio Koya’s destinations, 2011. From February to April 1950, the head of the Institute of Public Health in Tokyo, Yoshio Koya, was sent by the US-led Occupation Army to the US South to study public health, specifically birth control services. US officials were alarmed at the rapid increase in population in postwar […]
Goin’ to Chicago and African American “Great Migrations”
Introduction Filmed during the 1990s and released on PBS in 2000, Goin’ to Chicago is a sixty minute film about the largest internal movement of people in United States history—the Great Migration. Between 1916 and 1970, six million African Americans left the cotton fields and segregation of the rural South for northern, midwestern, and western […]
“Holding on to Those Who Can’t Be Held”: Reenacting a Lynching at Moore’s Ford, Georgia
Introduction Map marking Walton County, Georgia For the past half decade I have been fascinated and puzzled by an extraordinary annual event, a reenactment each late July of the horrific 1946 lynching of four young African Americans at Moore’s Ford, near Monroe in Walton County, Georgia. Since 2005 hundreds of people have gathered at several […]
Tuskegee Airmen: Brett Gadsden Interviews J. Todd Moye
Interview Photographer unknown, Tuskegee Airmen gathered at a U.S. base after a mission in the Mediterranean theater, February 1944. Courtesy of the United States National Archives and Records Administration. Part 2: Gadsen discusses segregation and the Tuskegee Airmen as well as the NAACP’s efforts to desegregate the military Part 3: Gadsen explores the significance of […]
Low Country Travelers: An African American Car Club of Charleston County, South Carolina
John McWilliams, Hampton Plantation, McClellanville, South Carolina, 1973. In the early 1970s, John was teaching photography at Georgia State University when we discovered McClellanville through Robert Frank’s photograph “Barber shop through screen door – McClellanville, South Carolina” in The Americans. During the discussion of this iconic image, one of John’s students from nearby St. Stephens […]
Shaping a Southern Soundscape
Review As a scholar born in the US South who has spent much of my career teaching southern history, I have often longed for a moratorium on romanticized discussions of southern identity as much as I have hoped for at least a temporary ban on men in cowboy hats recording songs about the joys of […]
The Worst of Times: Children in Extreme Poverty in the South and Nation
Essay A just-released report from the Southern Education Foundation—”The Worst of Times: Children in Extreme Poverty in the South and Nation“—finds that more than 5.7 million children lived in extreme poverty in the United States in 2008—surviving on less than seven or eight dollars per day. Almost one in every twelve children was in a […]
The Other Side of Paradise: Glimpsing Slavery in the University’s Utopian Landscapes
Introduction Mark Auslander, The white section of the Oxford City Cemetery, Oxford, Georgia, 2000. My title, “the other side of paradise,” is taken from a commentary by Ms. Emogene Williams, one of the matriarchs of the African American community of Newton County, Georgia, as she led me and my students in 2000 across the Oxford […]