Author: Melanie Morrison
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781735143125
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 114
Book Description
In 1939, Melanie Morrison's mother, Eleanor, at age eighteen spent a winter weekend at the home of Lillian Smith on Old Screamer Mountain in North Georgia. Smith was a white Southern author who wrote scathing critiques of white supremacy. That weekend on Old Screamer Mountain was an unforgettable turning point in Eleanor's young life as she and her college friends stayed up late listening to Lillian read from her manuscripts and talk about the shriveled-up heart of whiteness. Seven decades later, in 2012, Melanie made a pilgrimage to the Lillian Smith Center on Old Screamer Mountain to write about the intergenerational legacies of lynching and how that reign of terror remains largely unacknowledged by the descendants of its white perpetrators. From the mountain, Melanie wrote letters to her mother describing the avalanche of emotions and epiphanies she was experiencing. She did not send those letters because Eleanor was living with significant dementia, but she intended to read excerpts to Eleanor when she returned home, hoping to retrieve pieces of her mother's history that dementia had erased. Letters from Old Screamer Mountain is an intimate testimony to the power of intergenerational legacies and the urgency to write what must not be forgotten.
Letters from Old Screamer Mountain
Author: Melanie Morrison
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781735143125
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 114
Book Description
In 1939, Melanie Morrison's mother, Eleanor, at age eighteen spent a winter weekend at the home of Lillian Smith on Old Screamer Mountain in North Georgia. Smith was a white Southern author who wrote scathing critiques of white supremacy. That weekend on Old Screamer Mountain was an unforgettable turning point in Eleanor's young life as she and her college friends stayed up late listening to Lillian read from her manuscripts and talk about the shriveled-up heart of whiteness. Seven decades later, in 2012, Melanie made a pilgrimage to the Lillian Smith Center on Old Screamer Mountain to write about the intergenerational legacies of lynching and how that reign of terror remains largely unacknowledged by the descendants of its white perpetrators. From the mountain, Melanie wrote letters to her mother describing the avalanche of emotions and epiphanies she was experiencing. She did not send those letters because Eleanor was living with significant dementia, but she intended to read excerpts to Eleanor when she returned home, hoping to retrieve pieces of her mother's history that dementia had erased. Letters from Old Screamer Mountain is an intimate testimony to the power of intergenerational legacies and the urgency to write what must not be forgotten.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781735143125
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 114
Book Description
In 1939, Melanie Morrison's mother, Eleanor, at age eighteen spent a winter weekend at the home of Lillian Smith on Old Screamer Mountain in North Georgia. Smith was a white Southern author who wrote scathing critiques of white supremacy. That weekend on Old Screamer Mountain was an unforgettable turning point in Eleanor's young life as she and her college friends stayed up late listening to Lillian read from her manuscripts and talk about the shriveled-up heart of whiteness. Seven decades later, in 2012, Melanie made a pilgrimage to the Lillian Smith Center on Old Screamer Mountain to write about the intergenerational legacies of lynching and how that reign of terror remains largely unacknowledged by the descendants of its white perpetrators. From the mountain, Melanie wrote letters to her mother describing the avalanche of emotions and epiphanies she was experiencing. She did not send those letters because Eleanor was living with significant dementia, but she intended to read excerpts to Eleanor when she returned home, hoping to retrieve pieces of her mother's history that dementia had erased. Letters from Old Screamer Mountain is an intimate testimony to the power of intergenerational legacies and the urgency to write what must not be forgotten.
Freedom's Daughters
Author: Lynne Olson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684850125
Category : African American women civil rights workers
Languages : en
Pages : 472
Book Description
Provides portraits and cameos of over sixty women who were influential in the Civil Rights Movement, and argues that the political activity of women has been the driving force in major reform movements throughout history.
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684850125
Category : African American women civil rights workers
Languages : en
Pages : 472
Book Description
Provides portraits and cameos of over sixty women who were influential in the Civil Rights Movement, and argues that the political activity of women has been the driving force in major reform movements throughout history.
How Am I to Be Heard?
Author: Margaret Rose Gladney
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469620340
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 569
Book Description
This compelling volume offers the first full portrait of the life and work of writer Lillian Smith (1897-1966), the foremost southern white liberal of the mid-twentieth century. Smith devoted her life to lifting the veil of southern self-deception about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Her books, essays, and especially her letters explored the ways in which the South's attitudes and institutions perpetuated a dehumanizing experience for all its people--white and black, male and female, rich and poor. Her best-known books are Strange Fruit (1944), a bestselling interracial love story that brought her international acclaim; and Killers of the Dream (1949), an autobiographical critique of southern race relations that angered many southerners, including powerful moderates. Subsequently, Smith was effectively silenced as a writer. Rose Gladney has selected 145 of Smith's 1500 extant letters for this volume. Arranged chronologically and annotated, they present a complete picture of Smith as a committed artist and reveal the burden of her struggles as a woman, including her lesbian relationship with Paula Snelling. Gladney argues that this triple isolation--as woman, lesbian, and artist--from mainstream southern culture permitted Smith to see and to expose southern prejudices with absolute clarity.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469620340
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 569
Book Description
This compelling volume offers the first full portrait of the life and work of writer Lillian Smith (1897-1966), the foremost southern white liberal of the mid-twentieth century. Smith devoted her life to lifting the veil of southern self-deception about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Her books, essays, and especially her letters explored the ways in which the South's attitudes and institutions perpetuated a dehumanizing experience for all its people--white and black, male and female, rich and poor. Her best-known books are Strange Fruit (1944), a bestselling interracial love story that brought her international acclaim; and Killers of the Dream (1949), an autobiographical critique of southern race relations that angered many southerners, including powerful moderates. Subsequently, Smith was effectively silenced as a writer. Rose Gladney has selected 145 of Smith's 1500 extant letters for this volume. Arranged chronologically and annotated, they present a complete picture of Smith as a committed artist and reveal the burden of her struggles as a woman, including her lesbian relationship with Paula Snelling. Gladney argues that this triple isolation--as woman, lesbian, and artist--from mainstream southern culture permitted Smith to see and to expose southern prejudices with absolute clarity.
Murder on Shades Mountain
Author: Melanie S. Morrison
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822371677
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
One August night in 1931, on a secluded mountain ridge overlooking Birmingham, Alabama, three young white women were brutally attacked. The sole survivor, Nell Williams, age eighteen, said a black man had held the women captive for four hours before shooting them and disappearing into the woods. That same night, a reign of terror was unleashed on Birmingham's black community: black businesses were set ablaze, posses of armed white men roamed the streets, and dozens of black men were arrested in the largest manhunt in Jefferson County history. Weeks later, Nell identified Willie Peterson as the attacker who killed her sister Augusta and their friend Jennie Wood. With the exception of being black, Peterson bore little resemblance to the description Nell gave the police. An all-white jury convicted Peterson of murder and sentenced him to death. In Murder on Shades Mountain Melanie S. Morrison tells the gripping and tragic story of the attack and its aftermath—events that shook Birmingham to its core. Having first heard the story from her father—who dated Nell's youngest sister when he was a teenager—Morrison scoured the historical archives and documented the black-led campaigns that sought to overturn Peterson's unjust conviction, spearheaded by the NAACP and the Communist Party. The travesty of justice suffered by Peterson reveals how the judicial system could function as a lynch mob in the Jim Crow South. Murder on Shades Mountain also sheds new light on the struggle for justice in Depression-era Birmingham. This riveting narrative is a testament to the courageous predecessors of present-day movements that demand an end to racial profiling, police brutality, and the criminalization of black men.
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822371677
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
One August night in 1931, on a secluded mountain ridge overlooking Birmingham, Alabama, three young white women were brutally attacked. The sole survivor, Nell Williams, age eighteen, said a black man had held the women captive for four hours before shooting them and disappearing into the woods. That same night, a reign of terror was unleashed on Birmingham's black community: black businesses were set ablaze, posses of armed white men roamed the streets, and dozens of black men were arrested in the largest manhunt in Jefferson County history. Weeks later, Nell identified Willie Peterson as the attacker who killed her sister Augusta and their friend Jennie Wood. With the exception of being black, Peterson bore little resemblance to the description Nell gave the police. An all-white jury convicted Peterson of murder and sentenced him to death. In Murder on Shades Mountain Melanie S. Morrison tells the gripping and tragic story of the attack and its aftermath—events that shook Birmingham to its core. Having first heard the story from her father—who dated Nell's youngest sister when he was a teenager—Morrison scoured the historical archives and documented the black-led campaigns that sought to overturn Peterson's unjust conviction, spearheaded by the NAACP and the Communist Party. The travesty of justice suffered by Peterson reveals how the judicial system could function as a lynch mob in the Jim Crow South. Murder on Shades Mountain also sheds new light on the struggle for justice in Depression-era Birmingham. This riveting narrative is a testament to the courageous predecessors of present-day movements that demand an end to racial profiling, police brutality, and the criminalization of black men.
A Lillian Smith Reader
Author: Lillian Eugenia Smith
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820349984
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Book Description
Bringing together short stories, lectures, essays, op-ed pieces, interviews, andexcerpts from her longer fiction and nonfiction, A Lillian Smith Reader offers thefirst comprehensive collection of her work.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820349984
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Book Description
Bringing together short stories, lectures, essays, op-ed pieces, interviews, andexcerpts from her longer fiction and nonfiction, A Lillian Smith Reader offers thefirst comprehensive collection of her work.
Georgia's Remarkable Women
Author: Sara Hines Martin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 149301725X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
Georgia's Remarkable Women: Daughters, Wives, Sisters, and Mothers Who Shaped History recognizes the women who helped to shape the Peach State. Female teachers, writers, entrepreneurs, and artists from across the state are illuminated through short biographies and archival photographs and paintings. Setting their own standards and following their passions, they continue to inspire new generations with their achievements. Meet Rebecca Latimer Felton, the first woman to sit as a U.S. senator; Juliette Gordon Low, the resilient founder of the Girl Scouts; Sarah Freeman Clarke, a painter who dared to pursue art and literature as a career; Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, the "Mother of the Blues," whose voice transcended race and class; and Margaret Mitchell, author of the enduring tale of survival, Gone with the Wind.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 149301725X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
Georgia's Remarkable Women: Daughters, Wives, Sisters, and Mothers Who Shaped History recognizes the women who helped to shape the Peach State. Female teachers, writers, entrepreneurs, and artists from across the state are illuminated through short biographies and archival photographs and paintings. Setting their own standards and following their passions, they continue to inspire new generations with their achievements. Meet Rebecca Latimer Felton, the first woman to sit as a U.S. senator; Juliette Gordon Low, the resilient founder of the Girl Scouts; Sarah Freeman Clarke, a painter who dared to pursue art and literature as a career; Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, the "Mother of the Blues," whose voice transcended race and class; and Margaret Mitchell, author of the enduring tale of survival, Gone with the Wind.
New South
Strange Fruit
Author: Lillian Eugenia Smith
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156856362
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Book Description
Prelude and aftermath of a lynching in Georgia, depicting the South's unsolved racial problem.
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156856362
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Book Description
Prelude and aftermath of a lynching in Georgia, depicting the South's unsolved racial problem.
Deep in Our Hearts
Author: Joan C. Browning
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820324197
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426
Book Description
Deep in Our Hearts is an eloquent and powerful book that takes us into the lives of nine young women who came of age in the 1960s while committing themselves actively and passionately to the struggle for racial equality and justice. These compelling first-person accounts take us back to one of the most tumultuous periods in our nation’s history--to the early days of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Albany Freedom Ride, voter registration drives and lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Summer, the 1964 Democratic Convention, and the rise of Black Power and the women’s movement. The book delves into the hearts of the women to ask searching questions. Why did they, of all the white women growing up in their hometowns, cross the color line in the days of segregation and join the Southern Freedom Movement? What did they see, do, think, and feel in those uncertain but hopeful days? And how did their experiences shape the rest of their lives?
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820324197
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426
Book Description
Deep in Our Hearts is an eloquent and powerful book that takes us into the lives of nine young women who came of age in the 1960s while committing themselves actively and passionately to the struggle for racial equality and justice. These compelling first-person accounts take us back to one of the most tumultuous periods in our nation’s history--to the early days of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Albany Freedom Ride, voter registration drives and lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Summer, the 1964 Democratic Convention, and the rise of Black Power and the women’s movement. The book delves into the hearts of the women to ask searching questions. Why did they, of all the white women growing up in their hometowns, cross the color line in the days of segregation and join the Southern Freedom Movement? What did they see, do, think, and feel in those uncertain but hopeful days? And how did their experiences shape the rest of their lives?
Women of Letters, the Southern Renaissance, and a Literature of Self-definition
Author: William Oliver Brantley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 492
Book Description
This dissertation provides an intertextual examination of selected nonfiction prose by six women writers of the Southern Renaissance. It situates their self-writing within a context of Southern feminism and the more inclusive discourse of modern American liberalism. Chapter One defines the socio-historical role of the "woman of letters" in the twentieth-century South, while Chapter Two explores the ways in which her work has been marginalized by recent intellectual histories. Chapter Three explains the significance of Lillian Smith's confessional tract, Killers of the Dream (1949; revised in 1961). Smith represents a sharp disruption of a conservative critical agenda that has dominated most appraisals of twentieth-century Southern writing. Smith's ethics, her analyses of women and autobiography, racism and sexism, provide useful points of reference for examining the other writers in this study, each of whom speaks with her own voice of dissent regarding gender norms, problems of race, and patriarchal power structures. The remaining chapters focus on connections between specific texts. Chapter Three defines the achievement of Ellen Glasgow's The Woman Within (1954) and Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings (1984), two autobiographies which center on the woman writer's inner life and which demonstrate the legitimacy of making this life the object of public attention. Chapter Four explores the ethical and political positions of Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time (1976) and Katherine Anne Porter's The Never-Ending Wrong (1977), two remarkably similar memoirs that define the individual in conflict with reactionary forces in modern American history. Chapter Five considers the nexus of gender, region, nation, and race in Zora Neale Hurston's problematic autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942; expanded with previously unpublished chapters in 1984). This chapter explores the tensions within a text that combines both liberal and conservative sentiments before showing how this synthesis becomes even more pronounced in Hurston's subsequent essays. By stressing the significance of a liberal tradition in Southern women's self-writing, this dissertation supplements and challenges prevalent attitudes about the Southern Renaissance and the predominant concerns of its women writers
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 492
Book Description
This dissertation provides an intertextual examination of selected nonfiction prose by six women writers of the Southern Renaissance. It situates their self-writing within a context of Southern feminism and the more inclusive discourse of modern American liberalism. Chapter One defines the socio-historical role of the "woman of letters" in the twentieth-century South, while Chapter Two explores the ways in which her work has been marginalized by recent intellectual histories. Chapter Three explains the significance of Lillian Smith's confessional tract, Killers of the Dream (1949; revised in 1961). Smith represents a sharp disruption of a conservative critical agenda that has dominated most appraisals of twentieth-century Southern writing. Smith's ethics, her analyses of women and autobiography, racism and sexism, provide useful points of reference for examining the other writers in this study, each of whom speaks with her own voice of dissent regarding gender norms, problems of race, and patriarchal power structures. The remaining chapters focus on connections between specific texts. Chapter Three defines the achievement of Ellen Glasgow's The Woman Within (1954) and Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings (1984), two autobiographies which center on the woman writer's inner life and which demonstrate the legitimacy of making this life the object of public attention. Chapter Four explores the ethical and political positions of Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time (1976) and Katherine Anne Porter's The Never-Ending Wrong (1977), two remarkably similar memoirs that define the individual in conflict with reactionary forces in modern American history. Chapter Five considers the nexus of gender, region, nation, and race in Zora Neale Hurston's problematic autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942; expanded with previously unpublished chapters in 1984). This chapter explores the tensions within a text that combines both liberal and conservative sentiments before showing how this synthesis becomes even more pronounced in Hurston's subsequent essays. By stressing the significance of a liberal tradition in Southern women's self-writing, this dissertation supplements and challenges prevalent attitudes about the Southern Renaissance and the predominant concerns of its women writers