Center for the Study of the American South : newsletter

              Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 1
Summer 2011
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Center for the Study of the American South
The Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama
Center for the Study of the American South
Letter from the Director
Summer’s arrival gives the Center for the Study of the American South a welcome
opportunity to reach out and share the news of our busy year. The pace never slackens
it seems, as the South, the Center, and the University all keep growing with a rapidly
changing world. We’re embracing our new opportunities, and we thank all the many
friends who are sharing them with us.
We hope you’ll agree that the Center is booming. Audiences at our public programs
keep growing. Southern Cultures has a steady base of subscribers, 150,000 print and
online readers, and nearly 500,000 “hits” since going online. The Southern Oral History
Program has won more major funding for its study of the Long Civil Rights Movement and
is collecting interviews for the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American
History and Culture. Center scholars continue winning prizes, and with Center support,
Carolina students are taking southern studies in dozens of unexpected directions. Thanks
to your help, the study of the American South has never been stronger.
Inside the Center this year, we have welcomed a new External Advisory Board, headed
by Raleigh attorney John S. Russell, and a new strategic plan we prepared at the
Board’s suggestion. As the plan is implemented in the months and years ahead, we look
forward to even more engagement with southern communities, broader partnerships for
interdisciplinary research, and a wider global reach.
Some of our biggest news has involved the Southern Oral History Program. In April 2011,
Professor Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, acclaimed founder and director of the SOHP, capped a
lifetime of achievement with election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
nation’s most prestigious learned society. Almost simultaneously, however, she saddened
us all by announcing her decision to enter phased retirement, stepping down as SOHP
director, but remaining as its Senior Research Fellow. In addition, Dr. David Cline,
Associate Director of the SOHP, also resigned for an opportunity to teach and create a
public history program at Virginia Tech. Fortunately for all of us, Dr. Della Pollock of the
Department of Communication Studies will generously serve as interim director of the
SOHP. We warmly congratulate Jacquelyn and David for their new milestones, but now
we face the challenge of finding their successors.
Beside our good news, unfortunately, the realities of hard times and budget cuts still
loom across the Center’s path. Carolina’s appropriations have seriously declined in the
past two years and will drop by another 20 percent in fiscal 2011–12. Units like CSAS
will probably see even greater cuts, as campus leaders rightly shelter classroom teach-ing
first. The Center is already working with administrators to find every possible saving.
The Center’s programs have always depended on the support of generous friends like
you. As state funding recedes, we will rely even more on our friends and supporters to
keep moving ahead. Gifts in every amount help to ensure that our support of southern
research, education, and culture remains as strong as ever.
— Harry L. Watson
P.S.Make sure we have your email address as we go green and cut costs by switching
from printed newsletters like this one to all-electronic communications! Contact us at
csas@unc.edu.
welcome
Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 1
events
CSAS Events and Lectures
During the 2010–2011 academic year, the Center continued to
bring noted scholars and artists to the attention of broad public
audiences. Renowned photographer William Christenberry,
former South Carolina congressman John Spratt, noted oral
historian Alessandro Portelli, and John Maujewski, chair of the
history department at UC Santa Barbara, are but a few of the
speakers we have hosted in recent years.
Page 2 Center for the Study of the American South
events
Hutchins Lectures
Our Hutchins Lecture series, generously
supported by the Hutchins Family Foundation,
brings scholars in southern studies from around
the county to our campus. This year, we were
delighted to host many distinguished speakers,
including Trudier Harris, recently retired from
Carolina after a celebrated career of 29 years,
who offered a provocative interpretation of
James Baldwin’s complicated relationship with
the South; and Tom Rankin, director of Duke’s
Center for Documentary Studies, who shared
photographs from over 20 years of documenting
the sacred landscapes and spiritual traditions of
the Mississippi Delta.
We are now taping our Hutchins lectures. If
you missed any of our wonderful speakers
this year, please visit our Vimeo channel at
www.vimeo.com/uncsouth.
Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 3
The Love House and Hutchins forum has
provided a gracious backdrop for regular
art exhibitions, including Donn Young’s haunting
portraits of post-Katrina New Orleans, Jeff
Whetstone’s large-scale images of modern cave
graffiti, and Jimmy William’s evocative portraits
of blues musicians. In spring 2011, Robert Stone’s
photography exhibit of Sacred Steel musicians and
Theresa Gloster’s imaginative paintings of rural
African American life graced our gallery.
events
And we continued our popular Music on the
Porch series at the Love House, featuring
musical styles ranging from Hindustani-bluegrass
fusion to acoustic rock to hip-hop. Our artists
have included Catherine Edgerton of Midtown
Dickens, Pierce Freelon, Mandolin Orange, Ryan
Gustafson, and Phil Cook. Subtitled “Southern
Music Shaken and Stirred,” the series offers an
opportunity to reflect on both the rich history
and continuing evolution of Southern music,
while having a great time.
Page 4 Center for the Study of the American South
Scholarship and the Community
Over the past year we hosted several special one-time
events. “Hurricane Katrina Five Years Later”
brought together various campus organizations,
including the UNC School of Law, the Center
for Hazards and Natural Disasters, the School of
Government, and the Gillings School of Global
Public Health, to reflect upon the personal and
public policy impacts of the storm. We celebrated
the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Harper
Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird with a screening of the
film at the Varsity Theatre on Franklin Street. The
sold-out screening was followed by a discussion
with writers Lee Smith, Jill McCorkle, Randall
Kenan, Minrose Gwin, and Jaki Shelton Green,
moderated by law professor Gene Nichol. Guests
enjoyed the post-film reception at the Ackland
Museum, featuring period southern cakes. We
also honored the memory of civil rights leader
Pauli Murray on the 100th anniversary of her birth
with a panel discussion focusing on the denial
of her application to attend Howard Odum’s
program in applied social work in 1938–39 and
the attendant issues of institutional discrimination.
This event, conducted in collaboration with Duke’s
Pauli Murray Project, the Southern Historical
Collection, the Stone Center, the Women’s
Center, and the School of Information and Library
Science, was standing-room only.
Our lunchtime seminar series, “Tell About the South,” continues to bring faculty, graduate
students, and scholars together for discussions of original research about the South. Appearing
together, for example, were Faith Holsaert, a veteran member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee and co-editor of Hands On the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC,
and Professor Pat Parker of the Department of Communication Studies, who carries the work forward
with the Ella Baker Women’s Center for Leadership and Community, an organization committed to
empowering women and girls who live in Chapel Hill public housing.
events
Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 5
Awards
For two years in a row, former CSAS Postdoctoral Fellows have
won the prestigious Lillian Smith Book Award for their work at the
Center. Established by the Southern Regional Council to recognize
the finest new work on civil rights, social justice, and a changing
South, the Lillian Smith Award for 2010 went to Amy Louise Wood
for Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America,
1890–1940 (UNC Press, 2009). In 2011, Danielle L. McGuire won
the same prize for her own path-breaking study, At the Dark End
of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History
of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black
Power (Knopf, 2010). Most recently, SOHP staffer Jessie Wilkerson
won the Gender & History Graduate Student Paper Prize for her
paper “Where Movements Meet: Generations of Women’s Activism
in the Appalachian South” at the Berkshire Conference of Women
Historians in June 2011.
SOHP Founder and director Jacquelyn Dowd Hall was elected to the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, the nation’s most distinguished learned society, in the spring of 2011. A year earlier, CSAS
Senior Associate Director William R. Ferris accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mississippi
Institute of Arts and Letters. In October, Center Director Harry Watson delivered his presidential address,
“The Man With the Dirty Black Beard: Race, Class, and Herrenvolk Democracy in Antebellum Southern
School Reform,” to the Historical Society of North Carolina
Students and Fellows
The Center’s summer research grants have been awarded to UNC doctoral students pursuing topics
ranging from eighteenth-century Charraw Indians to the women leading the eugenics movement in early
twentieth-century North Carolina to Confederate veteran remembrances. Jennifer Dixon’s grant enabled
her to travel to Charleston, South Carolina, to perform archival and oral history research on black women
involved in the 1969 Charleston hospital workers’ strike. Vincent Joos’s grant helped him conduct
research in the Moldovian region of Romania, looking at the American influence on the emancipation of
Romany slaves in 1855; he interviewed community leaders, historians, and inhabitants of the region.
We bade farewell to the outstanding post-doctoral fellows of 2010 –11, Tammy Ingram and
Scott Matthews, and welcome our 2011–12 fellows LaKisha Michelle Simmons, and Anderson
H. Blanton. During her fellowship, La Kisha will be working on her book, “Within the Double Bind:
Black Girlhood and Sexuality in Jim Crow New Orleans, 1930–1954.” Anderson, an anthropologist
specializing in the material conduits of prayer and faith healing within the charismatic Christian context
in the American South, will be focusing on revisions to his manuscript, “Hittin’ the Prayer Bones: The
Materialities of Faith and Divine Communication in Southern Appalachia.”
events
Page 6 Center for the Study of the American South
The Long Civil Rights Movement:
The Women’s Movement in Appalachia
Historians at the Southern Oral History Program have spent
years studying the “Long Civil Rights Movement,” SOHP
Director Jacquelyn Hall’s conception of a civil rights movement
that was deeper, longer, and more diverse than the story many
of us learned about in high school. This concept introduces new
ideas and actors into the civil rights story, has begun to change
popular notions about the movement, which stretched back
long before Rosa Parks and extends beyond the well-known
travails and triumphs of the 1960s.
The latest phase of our work has led us to seek out a group
of civil rights pioneers who do not appear in many history
textbooks: the women of eastern Tennessee. We wanted to
know how civil rights activism worked in a rural environment;
what inspired women to bond together across racial lines; and
how these activists saw their mission in relation to the broader
civil rights movement.
Latest News
• We won a $150,000 contract
from the Smithsonian Institution
and the Library of Congress to
conduct a series of interviews
with Civil Rights Movement
veterans that will become part
of an exhibition in the
Smithsonian Institution’s new
National Museum of African
American History and Culture.
• We will share a $500,000 grant
from the Mellon Foundation
to continue work with UNC
Press and UNC Libraries on
the “Publishing the Long Civil
Rights Movement” Project. The
grant includes money to digitize
the remainder of the SOHP’s
collection of audio cassettes,
making the SOHP the only oral
history program to offer its entire
library online.
• This summer, we begin work
on “Breaking New Ground,”
a National Endowment for the
Humanities-funded project
documenting the history of black
land ownership in the South.
Southern
oral
history
program
Sociologist Helen Lewis
is a long-time social
justice activist. In this
excerpt, Lewis responds
to a question from SOHP
Research Assistant Jessica
Wilkerson about whether
she saw herself as part of
the women’s movement.
“I’m a part of the ‘long women’s
rights movement,’ I’d say. I
wanted to live in the 1830s and
to have been at Seneca Falls.
I really sort of identified with
all those early abolitionist
women. I just felt like that
is where I should have been,
that’s who I was. But I was in
the 1940s and 50s by then. So
when the women’s movement began
I just fell right in. The new
women’s movement. So I think
that I was one of those hanger-oners
that kept something
going, at least in myself,
during a period when there
wasn’t, as you would say, much
of a movement.”
Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 7
Southern
oral
history
program
Building a women’s movement in rural Tennessee was a real challenge. Activists faced
the usual obstacles, such as entrenched customs and discriminatory laws, but in the
rural South isolation played an even bigger role. Activists were simply so far away from one
another that many of them labored alone, out of touch with other women in the struggle.
Some remedied their isolation by moving to urban centers like Knoxville, but others, like
Marie Cirillo, set out to build a network.
A former Catholic nun,
Marie Cirillo left the
Church after 18 years in
order to work directly
with the people of
Appalachia, primarily on
environmental issues and
rural development. She
spoke with SOHP Associate
Director David Cline about
forming the Mountain
Women’s Exchange
collaborative in the late
1970s in order to connect
grassroots women in
Tennessee and Kentucky.
“We had our first meeting down in Newcomb with
seven nonprofit groups that were run by women in
this immediate area. One was a childcare, one
was a land trust, one was the Native American
Association, three of them were basically used
clothing and crafts kind of things. I’ll never
forget that first meeting … These women were so
excited to meet other women that were doing
things that you could hardly hear yourself
talk … So we ended up having meetings I think
once every three months. We started in the
morning and went through the afternoon and
used the song ‘Bread and Roses’ as our theme.
We decided that the morning was going to be
the bread — the work — and then from lunch on
would be the roses. After a couple of years we
decided that the one thing we all wanted that
we had tried and couldn’t do was a development
education, so they decided they would form a
nonprofit, and they called it Mountain Women’s
Exchange, because we were learning through this
exchange.”
Page 8 Center for the Study of the American South
Southern
oral
history
program
This summer, SOHP Associate Director David Cline traveled
to Kenya, where he co-led a Burch Honors Seminar for
exceptional Carolina undergraduates. With Della Pollock, a
professor in the Department of Communication Studies here
at UNC, and Peter Wasamba of the University of Nairobi
Department of Literature, David used oral history to engage
Carolina students in the challenges facing the rural poor of
Kenya. After an intensive study of Kenyan culture and oral history
methodology in Nairobi, the students recorded interviews in
the Coast Province, where the incursion of large-scale mining
and agriculture is threatening a long standing tradition of family
farming and a distinctive Swahili culture.
This seminar took place in an exhilarating space between the
gathering of history and the use of history. By collecting oral
testimonies and amplifying them with performances for and with
community members, students experienced how oral histories
provide unique insights to academics and policy makers, and
created a platform for locals to express satisfaction, frustration,
and new perspectives on specific policy outcomes. These oral
records will provide researchers with much needed data about
the efficacy of environmental and industrial policies, while
documenting deep historical background on the people of one of
Kenya’s most fascinating and culturally rich regions. UNC and the
University of Nairobi will be sharing the completed materials.
Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 9
Read The Photography issue online, order it in print,
or download the eBook at www.SouthernCultures.org
Southern
cultures
Milestone: Students and Scholars Acces
Southern Cultures Online half a Million Times
Worldwide Readership
Soars for the Center’s
Flagship Publication
Soon this year, readers from hundreds
of colleges and universities and over a
hundred countries will open Southern
Cultures for the 500,000th time, using
Project Muse and other Internet archives.
On the verge of closing in 1998, our award-winning
journal now boasts thousands of
loyal print and eBook subscribers and a
booming online audience.
Page 10 Center for the Study of the American South
Southern
cultures
The Council of Editors of Learned Journals has called Southern Cultures
“indispensable to a number of fields” and “a hallmark of what ambitious journals
should be attempting in the 21st century.” The quarterly covers all aspects of the
region’s mainstream and marginalized cultures through interviews, essays, articles,
personal reminiscences, and surveys on contemporary trends. Southern Cultures has
published numerous theme issues (which often include free CDs or DVDs) on such
topics as southern biography, sports, politics, tobacco, food, Hurricane Katrina, the Civil
Rights Movement, Native Americans, and the Global South, as well as four editions
entirely devoted to music. This year brings new theme issues on the South and the Irish,
photography, memory, and music, and 2012 will include special issues devoted to food,
politics, and music.
In over sixty issues across seventeen volumes Southern Cultures has published an
extensive array of award-winning scholars, authors, and icons. In addition to interviews
with Walker Evans, Alex Haley, B.B. King, Pete Seeger, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty,
William Christenberry, and Robert Penn Warren, the quarterly has published writing from
Doris Betts, David Cecelski, James C. Cobb, Peter Coclanis, Pat Conroy, Hal Crowther,
Drew Gilpin Faust, William Ferris, Allan Gurganus, Sheldon Hackney, Trudier Harris, Fred
Hobson, Doug Marlette, Melton McLaurin, Michael McFee, Robert Morgan, Michael
O’Brien, Michael Parker, Tom Rankin, Shannon Ravenel, Louis D. Rubin, Anne Firor Scott,
David Sedaris, Alan Shapiro, Bland Simpson, Lee Smith, Henry Taylor, Timothy Tyson,
Charles Reagan Wilson, C. Vann Woodward, and many others, as well as the original
letters of Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner.
The quarterly occupies a unique position among publications about the South by
targeting both an academic and an educated lay audience, and over the last decade
Southern Cultures has expanded its circulation in large part due to its emphasis on
reader-friendliness. According to the CELJ, “The rich array of photographs and graphics,
and the sincere and effective attempt at readerly appeal, go well beyond what is
attempted by most journals. This dimension of Southern Cultures is truly impressive.”
The quarterly’s editorial philosophy and its online availability have made it a staple
of classrooms worldwide and a favorite among students. Through the READ page at www.
SouthernCultures.org, visitors can search the quarterly’s contents by subject area. As a
result, online readership includes scholars and students of history, labor, sociology, politics,
literature, photography and art, music, women and gender studies, economics, environment,
oral history, religion, sports, African American studies, American Indian Studies, and many
other subjects. All of Southern Cultures’s last decade of essays, interviews, and features are
available through the website for classroom use, research, and more.
Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 11
Southern
cultures
Photograph by Walker Evans, courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The work of Walker Evans — along with that of William Eggleston, William Christenberry,
Susan Harbage Page, Michael Carlebach, and others — appears in the Southern Cultures
special summer issue on photography. Visit www.SouthernCultures.org.
Subscribe to Southern Cultures today.
visit www.SouthernCultures.org
call 1-919-962-4201
email UNCPRESS_Journals@unc.edu
Page 12 Center for the Study of the American South
facts
By the numbers…
4,500
1,000+
150,000
22,000
35
65
3,500
100
plus
16
interviews in SOHP collection
videos played on our video channel since
November 2010
readers of Southern Cultures online
visitors to the Center’s website in the past year
public events and performances per year
issues published by Southern Cultures
since the first one in 1993
average number of attendees of our
events annually
countries that have accessed
SOHP oral histories online
Fellowships or grants made per year
Summer 2011 Newsletter Page 13
staf
Center for the Study of the American South
Harry L. Watson, Director
William R. Ferris, Senior Associate Director
Sally Greene, Associate Director
Lisa Beavers, Events and Communications Manager
Dana Di Maio, Office Coordinator and Assistant to the Associate Director
Emily Wallace, Assistant to the Senior Associate Director
Robin Samuels, Business Manager
Southern Cultures
Harry L. Watson and Jocelyn R. Neal, Editors
Dave Shaw, Executive Editor/CSAS Publications Director
Ayse Erginer, Deputy Editor
Michael Chitwood, Poetry Editor
Aaron Smithers, Music Editor
John Shelton Reed, Founding Editor Emeritus
Southern Oral History Program
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Director, Southern Oral History Program
David Cline, Associate Director
Beth Millwood, Director of Outreach
Seth Kotch, Coordinator of Oral History Digital Initiatives
Support the Center
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our commitment to the university and the region with a
donation today. Please see the enclosed envelope to send
your donation, or visit www.uncsouth.org/content/support.
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on the cover: Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama. The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama
Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.