It is fitting that in this 80th anniversary year of the 1933 rally the North Carolina NAACP is once again in the headlines, this time for its leading role in the recent Moral Monday protests at the state legislature. Continue Reading Sarah Caroline Thuesen: The North Carolina NAACP: 80 Years at the Forefront of Struggles for Equality
The elections in Virginia and New Jersey have been touted as indicators of where the Republican Party, and indeed the entire country, will head in 2014 and beyond. The North Carolina governor’s race in 1864 served a similar role. Though often overshadowed in discussions of Civil War politics by the U.S. presidential election of 1864, the North Carolina race, which pitted incumbent Zebulon Baird Vance against newspaper editor William W. Holden, tells an equally important story about shifting political winds. Continue Reading Jaime Amanda Martinez: Zeb Vance, Ken Cuccinelli, and Chris Christie: Governors as Bellwethers
I still rely on and value deeply these brick-and-mortar archives, but my research in Jim Crow Wisdom has taught me to value the archive of the imagination as well. Like any archive, the imagination is a place that is fundamentally about assemblage: a mixture of our best efforts to remember the past accurately, the eroding effects of time, and a desire for narrative clarity and poignancy. Relying on the imagination for its archival properties is central to this book and helps us develop a richer sense of memory and of history. Continue Reading Jonathan Scott Holloway: Where Does a Historian Find the Truth?
The modern civil rights movement fought for racial equality and to create an interracial “beloved community.” People in the movement did not make a distinction between action in the schools, the voting booth, or the streets toward those goals. Education was another arena for fighting racism and securing equal resources and opportunity. Seeing school desegregation as an integral part of the civil rights movement reminds us that an equal education is a basic human right that has been fought for but not yet achieved, and that overcoming racism in the classroom as in the community remains a moral imperative. For many local people, like Suzy Post, in Louisville and Jefferson County, the civil rights movement continues because the struggle to protect desegregation and through it achieve educational equity and better human understanding has not yet been won. Continue Reading Tracy K’Meyer: The Ongoing Struggle for Civil Rights in Schools
The film tells the story of Solomon Northrup (Ejiofor), a free man and fiddle-player from New York who was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery in Louisiana. It explores Northrup’s efforts to retain his dignity in the face of inhumanity as he longs for the family he was taken from and hopes for freedom throughout time in the employ of three different masters, ranging from a kindly preacher (Benedict Cumberbatch) to a cruel plantation owner (Fassbender). Remarkably, and horrifically, the story is a true one. Continue Reading Twelve Years a Slave: The Narrative Behind the Film
Even though the museum recognizes Smith’s protest, if only barely, her protest tells us something valuable about the production of history and the sanctification of certain experiences over others. Here, a single person with a particular set of memories and a determination to remember a figure of such importance as King in a specific way finds herself facing an institution with a public commitment to remembrance that has become her own horror. Continue Reading Jonathan Scott Holloway: Whose Dream? Whose History?
Even with all the criteria Farrell needed to meet, the final product is wonderfully authentic. Farrell explained, “The children look natural and unposed because I spent far more time on the little game we played than on the photography. The photography was incidental, and I think that only a few times were the children aware of the camera.” Continue Reading Tobe: Charles Anderson Farrell Photographs Digitized in New Collection
A historical examination of segregated schooling in North Carolina warns against a hasty retreat from efforts to create diverse classrooms and equitable opportunity. Continue Reading Sarah Caroline Thuesen: Jim Crow’s Roots, Jim Crow’s Remedies
When rumors of “development” encroach upon areas with rich historical backgrounds, they most likely will find a wall of resistance waiting. This is the current situation in the Virginia Peninsula, where the site of the Battle of Williamsburg is now vulnerable to such an unfortunate fate. Continue Reading Glenn David Brasher on Preserving the Battleground at Williamsburg
For historians of school desegregation, Louisville’s story challenges a narrative that has been dominated by resistance, disillusion, and failure. For citizens, these stories remind us how our predecessors struggled for equality in education and inspire us to keep up a fight that is far from over. Continue Reading Tracy E. K’Meyer: Busing and the Desegregation of Louisville Schools
Of course, white employers typically believed that their cooks loved them and cooked for them out of that love. When Ms. Deen claimed that she and Ms. Charles were “soul sisters,” she fell squarely into the tradition of declaring an employee to be just like a member of the family. Continue Reading Rebecca Sharpless on Paula Deen, Dora Charles, and the History of Southern Kitchens
In an interview with North Carolina Bookwatch host D. G. Martin, Cecelski describes the many threads he followed to unlock the mystery of Abraham Galloway, now proudly identifying him as a part of the pantheon of North Caorlina’s greatest heroes. Cecelski delves into the leadership Galloway exerted before, during, and after the Civil War. Continue Reading Video: David Cecelski on NC Bookwatch
Abolitionists, fed on the fictional fare of the tragic mulatto, expected New Orleans to be filled with “white” slaves catering to the sexual appetites of immoral men. Other visitors to the city, informed by sensationalized travelers’ accounts, hoped for a glimpse of one of its renowned kept women of color, and perhaps contemplated engaging one for themselves. Continue Reading Excerpt: The Strange History of the American Quadroon, by Emily Clark
Much like Marshall and Leimenstoll’s book, Dubrow describes the Smithsonian’s exhibit as, “doubly intriguing—combining his startlingly unique cabinets, bureaus, chairs, even a child’s Gothic-Classical style ‘commode’ (potty), architectural designs, with his extraordinary career.” Continue Reading Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery Hosts Thomas Day Exhibit
Atlanta’s white boosters embraced a new narrative about the city’s past which wiped clean the slaveholding past and adopted a message of openness to investment by northern capitalists Continue Reading William A. Link: Atlanta Rising After Sherman
It was not just careers that came to an end in Woodrow Wilson’s Washington. African Americans also lost a claim to their legitimacy as American citizens and participants in the national state. Marked as corrupt and untrustworthy, black Americans have struggled ever since to clear their names as honest and trust-worthy citizens, a struggle that continues into our own time. Continue Reading Eric S. Yellin: Woodrow Wilson’s Inauguration a Disheartening Anniversary
King’s letter scribbled on the edges of a newspaper is a democratic critique and draws attention to public aspect of faith traditions. In a democracy, faiths must always be self-critical and publicly criticized. Continue Reading Randal Maurice Jelks: Remembering “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
Only during the Poor People’s Campaign did activists of so many different backgrounds—from veterans of the labor and southern civil rights movements to Chicano, American Indian, antiwar, and welfare rights activists—attempt to construct a physical and spiritual community that addressed poverty and broader issues of social justice for longer than a one-day rally. Continue Reading Gordon K. Mantler: Remembering that Other March on Washington
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