South Books - Page 6

I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle

Charles M. Payne

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Brilliance that doesn't blind but illuminates 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful.

I agree with the earlier reviews but I'd like to provide some details about this book's strengths.
First, Payne places the people who made the Mississippi movement at the center the story. He tells the story of both the original local leaders who made it possible for the civil rights movement to happen in Mississippi and the activists who followed their lead in the 1960s.
Second, he extends the time span of the civil rights movement, showing that it would not have been possible without the "organizing tradition" referred to in the subtitle. Payne expertly traces the relationships and linkages between different generations of heroic troublemakers in Mississippi.
Third, he shows that the original radicals, and I mean those who wanted to change Mississippi from its roots, were those who had already challenged the system to achieve personal gain. "Bourgeois" blacks in Mississippi weren't uniformly complacent or fearful. Wisely, Payne does not use this fact to justify any notion of a "talented tenth" that ought to lead the masses.
Fourth, the chapter on Ella Baker is a stunning and riveting account of one heroic troublemaker who didn't receive enough recognition for her efforts.
Fifth, when Payne writes about what we typically consider the civil rights movement, he places you in the midst of the activists and makes you feel their exhileration, exhaustion, frustration, fear, and courage. Scholarly books never have this quality. At the same time, he does this in a historical context and with a critical eye which absolutely illuminate the raw material in a way that first-person and journalistic treatments rarely approach.
For these reasons, and many more, this is clearly the best of many excellent books on the civil rights movement. Some could fault Payne for placing less emphasis on the national and institutional dimensions of the freedom struggle. But, in the case of the black American struggle for freedom, Payne shows us the story begins with, and is carried by, people who tried to change their communities, not their nation.

Editorial Review:

This momentous work offers a groundbreaking history of the early civil rights movement in the South with new material that situates the book in the context of subsequent movement literature.

White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)

Kevin M. Kruse

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

During the civil rights era, Atlanta thought of itself as "The City Too Busy to Hate," a rare place in the South where the races lived and thrived together. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, however, so many whites fled the city for the suburbs that Atlanta earned a new nickname: "The City Too Busy Moving to Hate."

In this reappraisal of racial politics in modern America, Kevin Kruse explains the causes and consequences of "white flight" in Atlanta and elsewhere. Seeking to understand segregationists on their own terms, White Flight moves past simple stereotypes to explore the meaning of white resistance. In the end, Kruse finds that segregationist resistance, which failed to stop the civil rights movement, nevertheless managed to preserve the world of segregation and even perfect it in subtler and stronger forms.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that white flight meant nothing more than a literal movement of whites to the suburbs, this book argues that it represented a more important transformation in the political ideology of those involved. In a provocative revision of postwar American history, Kruse demonstrates that traditional elements of modern conservatism, such as hostility to the federal government and faith in free enterprise, underwent important transformations during the postwar struggle over segregation. Likewise, white resistance gave birth to several new conservative causes, like the tax revolt, tuition vouchers, and privatization of public services. Tracing the journey of southern conservatives from white supremacy to white suburbia, Kruse locates the origins of modern American politics.

The Jamestown Project

Karen Ordahl Kupperman

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Listen to a short interview with Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

Captain John Smith's 1607 voyage to Jamestown was not his first trip abroad. He had traveled throughout Europe, been sold as a war captive in Turkey, escaped, and returned to England in time to join the Virginia Company's colonizing project. In Jamestown migrants, merchants, and soldiers who had also sailed to the distant shores of the Ottoman Empire, Africa, and Ireland in search of new beginnings encountered Indians who already possessed broad understanding of Europeans. Experience of foreign environments and cultures had sharpened survival instincts on all sides and aroused challenging questions about human nature and its potential for transformation.

It is against this enlarged temporal and geographic background that Jamestown dramatically emerges in Karen Kupperman's breathtaking study. Reconfiguring the national myth of Jamestown's failure, she shows how the settlement's distinctly messy first decade actually represents a period of ferment in which individuals were learning how to make a colony work. Despite the settlers' dependence on the Chesapeake Algonquians and strained relations with their London backers, they forged a tenacious colony that survived where others had failed. Indeed, the structures and practices that evolved through trial and error in Virginia would become the model for all successful English colonies, including Plymouth.

Capturing England's intoxication with a wider world through ballads, plays, and paintings, and the stark reality of Jamestown--for Indians and Europeans alike--through the words of its inhabitants as well as archeological and environmental evidence, Kupperman re-creates these formative years with astonishing detail.

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Atlanta Then and Now (compact) (Then & Now Thunder Bay)

Michael Rose

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Editorial Review:

Atlanta is not only the South's leading city, but also a world-class metropolis. Rich in history and culture, the city has grown and changed dramatically over the last century, while still retaining strong ties to its past. Atlanta Then and Now provides a unique view of these changes. Black-and-white archival photos from the first half of the last century are shown side by side with photos of the same scene today. Five Points, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthplace, the State Capitol, and Peachtree Street are all here. The lovely homes and dogwood-filled neighborhoods are also featured.

On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation

Robert Whitaker

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

They shot them down like rabbits . . .

September 30, 1919. The United States teetered on the edge of a racial civil war. During the previous three months, racial fighting had erupted in twenty-five cities. And deep in the Arkansas Delta, black sharecroppers were meeting in a humble wooden church, forming a union and making plans to sue their white landowners, who for years had cheated them out of their fair share of the cotton crop. A car pulled up outside the church . . .
What happened next has long been shrouded in controversy.

In this heartbreaking but ultimately triumphant story of courage and will, journalist Robert Whitaker carefully documents—and exposes—one of the worst racial massacres in American history. Over the course of several days, posses and federal troops gunned down more than one hundred men, women, and children.

But that is just the beginning of this astonishing story. White authorities also arrested more than three hundred black farmers, and in trials that lasted only a few hours, all-white juries sentenced twelve of the union leaders to die in the electric chair. One of the juries returned a death verdict after two minutes of deliberation.

All hope seemed lost, and then an extraordinary lawyer from Little Rock stepped forward: Scipio Africanus Jones. Jones, who’d been born a slave, joined forces with the NAACP to mount an appeal in which he argued that his clients’ constitutional rights to a fair trial had been violated. Never before had the U.S. Supreme Court set aside a criminal verdict in a state court because the proceedings had been unfair, so the state of Arkansas, confident of victory, had a carpenter build coffins for the men.

We all know the names of the many legendary heroes that emerged from the civil rights movement: Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr. among them. Whitaker’s important book commemorates a legal struggle, Moore v. Dempsey, that paved the way for that later remaking of our country, and tells too of a man, Scipio Africanus Jones, whose name surely deserves to be known by all Americans.

The Waterfalls of South Carolina

Tim Cook, Ben Brooks

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

What a beautiful book! 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

The amazing thing about this beautiful book, to me, is the fact that these two guys (Brooks and Cook) wrote this book while they were still students at Clemson University. When I was a student, my weekends were never this productive. Heck, I couldn't even afford food. Any one who was able to produce such beautiful pictures on a student's budget merits my greatest admiration. Great directions, too. I really liked the inclusion of GPS coordinates for waypoints.

Moonshine Falls featured on Turner South 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 5 people found this review helpful.

If you haven't had a chance to view Turner South's "Three Day Weekend," make sure to tune in to the Greenville, SC "Three Day Weekend," featuring Moonshine Falls, one of the falls included in this book. This episode ran in early August, and provides an excellent testimonial for the beauty of upstate South Carolina.

Editorial Review:

The Waterfalls of South Carolina is an essential exploring companion for every visitor to this state's rugged mountains. Packed with stunning full-color photographs, folksy anecdotes and easy-to-follow directions, it will take you to 27 publicly accessible waterfalls in the South Carolina wilderness. Completely revised for its second edition, the guide now includes new photographs and previously hidden waterfalls even further off the beaten path.

Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South

Bertram Wyatt-Brown

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, hailed in The Washington Post as "a work of enormous imagination and enterprise" and in The New York Times as "an important, original book," Southern Honor revolutionized our understanding of the antebellum South, revealing how Southern men adopted an ancient honor code that shaped their society from top to bottom.
Using legal documents, letters, diaries, and newspaper columns, Wyatt-Brown offers fascinating examples to illuminate the dynamics of Southern life throughout the antebellum period. He describes how Southern whites, living chiefly in small, rural, agrarian surroundings, in which everyone knew everyone else, established the local hierarchy of kinfolk and neighbors according to their individual and familial reputation. By claiming honor and dreading shame, they controlled their slaves, ruled their households, established the social rankings of themselves, kinfolk, and neighbors, and responded ferociously against perceived threats. The shamed and shameless sometimes suffered grievously for defying community norms. Wyatt-Brown further explains how a Southern elite refined the ethic. Learning, gentlemanly behavior, and deliberate rather than reckless resort to arms softened the cruder form, which the author calls "primal honor." In either case, honor required men to demonstrate their prowess and engage in fierce defense of individual, family, community, and regional reputation by duel, physical encounter, or war. Subordination of African-Americans was uppermost in this Southern ethic. Any threat, whether from the slaves themselves or from outside agitation, had to be met forcefully. Slavery was the root cause of the Civil War, but, according to Wyatt-Brown, honor pulled the trigger.
Featuring a new introduction by the author, this anniversary edition of a classic work offers readers a compelling view of Southern culture before the Civil War.

Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign

Michael K. Honey

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A Measure of the Men 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 18 people found this review helpful.

This might be the finest book written on Martin Luther King: it certainly is the best one that I have read about him. Honey is a splendid writer, with a style that I find more accessible than Taylor Branch's. No doubt that Branch has written the seminal history of King and his times, but his writing can become tedious due to too much detail and meandering sentences.

Honey is an award-winning historian who has written two previous excellent books that demonstrate his skill as an oral historian. The outstanding feature of this book is the numerous interviews he conducted with important figures, which keep the book always absorbing.

King receives much attention, but Honey shows that the Memphis strike was led by local workers and union officials who were fighting to escape the living hell of dangerous working conditions (the strike grew out of the deaths of two sanitation workers who were mangled in a malfunctioning garbage truck when they sought shelter from a rainstorm).

In addition to the stories about the local workers and organizers, King is portrayed as an important influence who was struggling with internal fighting among black civil rights groups, includng the NAACP, the Urban League, SCLC, and SNCC, the FBI, Lyndon Johnson, who was angered by King's anti-war proclamations, and most whites who thought King was moving too fast. Any reader who questions King's leadership and selflessness, needs to read this book to have those views dispelled.

Ultimately, the Memphis strike paved the way for labor improvements throughout the South.

This superb book should be considered for all major book prizes. For King scholars, it is essential and for all other informed readers, it is an excellent narrative of King and his times.

Editorial Review:

"The definitive appreciation of the Memphis garbage strike, one of the pivotal human-rights moments in late twentieth-century America."—David Levering Lewis

Memphis in 1968 was ruled by a paternalistic "plantation mentality" embodied in its good-old-boy mayor, Henry Loeb. Wretched conditions, abusive white supervisors, poor education, and low wages locked most black workers into poverty. Then two sanitation workers were chewed up in the back of a faulty truck, igniting a months-long public-employee strike that would shake the nation. With novelistic drama and rich scholarly detail, this "first-rate chronicle" (Seattle Times) relates the riveting story of the 1968 strike that shook Memphis—and claimed Martin Luther King's life. 16 pages of illustrations.

Baroness of Hobcaw: The Life of Belle W. Baruch

Mary E. Miller

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Daughter of the "Wolf of Wall Street," Belle Baruch (1899-1964) could outride, outshoot, outhunt, and outsail most of the young men of her elite social circle. Unapologetic for her athleticism and interests in traditionally masculine pursuits, Baruch towered above male and female counterparts in height and daring. She is known today for the wildlife conservation and biological research center on the South Carolina coast that bears her family name. Belle's life reflects the world of wealthy northerners like the Vanderbilts and Luces who bought tracts of southern acreage. Miller details Belle's fox hunting at Hobcaw, show jumping at Deauville, flying her own plane, and traveling with Edith Bolling Wilson. She recounts Belle's efforts to win her mother's approval and her father's attention, as well as her unraveling relationships with friends, family, employees, and lovers - both male and female. Miller describes Belle's final success in saving Hobcaw from development as the overarching triumph of a tempestuous life.

Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids: A History of One of Florida's Oldest Roadside Attractions (Florida History and Culture)

Lu Vickers

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the postwar explosion of domestic tourism, Weeki Wachee  spring offered the quintessential vacation fantasy, a city of colorful mermaids in a natural crystal spring right off the West Coast highway in a sparsely inhabited Florida. In those early days, the mermaids had to stand alongside the highway to flag travelers down, but once word of their charms got out, travelers headed south to playgrounds in Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and Tampa found Weeki Wachee a tantalizing detour from the grueling two-lane road connecting vacationland with the work-a-day world to the north. Vickers shows how that local novelty became a stellar international attraction.

Founded in 1947 by Walton Hall Smith and Newt Perry, Weeki Wachee and its featured attraction, mermaids, combined the allure of pinup girls with the wholesome talents of variety entertainers to create a daily schedule of underwater acts ranging from eating bananas and performing ballet to staging underwater musicals. For nearly 60 years, these mermaids with their underwater talents have attracted crowds of vacationers, film crews, and celebrities. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as interviews with dozens of mermaids and other park employees, Vickers traces the park's rise to prominence. Brilliantly illustrated with 250 stunning photos, the resulting work shows what it was like to be a mermaid at Weeki Wachee in its heyday.