The Fred W. Morrison series in Southern studies

Burton traces the evolution of Edgefield County from the antebellum period through Reconstruction and beyond. From amassed information on every household in this large rural community, he tests the many generalizations about southern black and white families of this period and finds that they were strikingly similar. Wealth, rather than race or class, was the main factor that influenced family structure, and the matriarchal family was but a myth. This detailed treatment of the economics, patterns, and rhythms of rural life, including analyses of religion and religious themes in the agrarian community, will advance our understanding of rural history and race relations in the South.

"Lafayette County, Mississippi, was the primary inspiration for what is arguably the most famous place in American fiction: William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Falkner once explained that in his Yoknapatawpha stories he "sublimated the actual into the apocryphal." This history of Lafayette County reverses that notion, using Faulkner's rich fictional portrait of a place and its people to illuminate the past.". "Drawing on both history and literature, Doyle renders a researched portrait of Faulkner's home. "Yoknapatawpha was a place of the imagination, invented by Faulkner as a vehicle for developing a coherent body of fiction," Doyle writes, "but the raw materials from which he created this place and its people lay right at his front porch.""--BOOK JACKET.

Newt Knight was a man who defied social rules by deserting from the Confederacy, hiding in the swamp with runaway slaves and other deserters to fight the Rebels and declare Jones County, Mississippi as the Free State of Jones. Some of his men were captured and executed and, as in the movie, the women in their family cut them down. Women also aided the Knight Company. Newt also took a black wife who had several mixed race children. Free State of Jones is an excellent comprehensive study that begins with people in the back country of North Carolina during the Revolutionary War who settled Jones County bringing with them their sense of justice and attitudes toward tyranny. Bynum mines every available source to recreate the society of Jones County through the decades from settlement into the 20th century. Bynum describes the mixed race community created by the tangled and complicated extended families who intermarried and created their own schools living in defiance of the hardening Jim Crow attitudes. Bynum expertly places Davis Knight’s 1948 charge of miscegenation in the larger historical context of the period and expertly connects it to Newt Knight’s flaunting sexual racial norms of his day. Newton Knight has been portrayed as a principled American patriot fighting for civil rights for African Americans and his mixed race progeny and as an unprincipled, villainous traitor who betrayed his race, the Confederacy and transgressed racial boundaries. Whichever narrative a person believes reveals a great deal about that person’s attitude about race and the Confederacy.

This exceptional collection provides new insight into the life and works of North Carolina writer and activist Paul Green (1894-1981), the first playwright from the South to attract national and international attention for his socially conscious dramas. A native of Harnett County, Green was a devoted teacher of philosophy and drama at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He became a leading member of the generation of writers who launched the southern literary renaissance and played a significant role in creating an authentic drama of black life, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his play In Abraham's Bosom in 1927. From the 1930s until his death in 1981, he devoted much of his energy to the outdoor historical plays he called symphonic dramas, including his longest-running work, The Lost Colony (1937), which is one of several of his plays still performed before large audiences today. Concern for human rights characterized Green's life as well as his plays, and his efforts on behalf of the poor and uneducated led him to advocate the abolition of chain gangs and capital punishment. His crusades were an important contribution to the broader social developments fundamental to the emerging New South in the first half of this century. Laurence Avery has culled and annotated the 329 letters in this volume from over 9,000 existing pieces. Letters to such figures as Sherwood Anderson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, and Zora Neale Hurston appear throughout. Avery's introduction and full bibliography of the playwright's works and productions give readers a context for understanding Green's life and times. Carl Sandburg called Green "one of the best talkers in the U.S.A." and for Green, letters were just another form of conversation. They are alive with the intellect, buoyant spirit, and sensitivity to the human condition that enabled him to become such a powerful force in his day

A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.