In 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, was the site of cataclysmic racial violence: Police commissioner "Bull" Connor attacked black demonstrators with dogs and water cannons, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his famous letter from the Birmingham jail, and four black children were killed in a church bombing. This incendiary period in Birmingham's history is the centerpiece of an intense and affecting memoir. A disaffected Birmingham native, Paul Hemphill decides to live in his hometown once again, to capture the events and essence of that summer and explore the depth of social change in Birmingham in the years since -- even as he tries to come to terms with his family, and with himself. -- back cover.

Between 1900 and the 1970s, twenty million southerners migrated north and west. Weaving together for the first time the histories of these black and white migrants, James Gregory traces their paths and experiences in a comprehensive new study that demonstrates how this regional diaspora reshaped America by "southernizing" communities and transforming important cultural and political institutions. Challenging the image of the migrants as helpless and poor, Gregory shows how both black and white southerners used their new surroundings to become agents of change. Combining personal stories with cultural, political, and demographic analysis, he argues that the migrants helped create both the modern civil rights movement and modern conservatism. They spurred changes in American religion, notably modern evangelical Protestantism, and in popular culture, including the development of blues, jazz, and country music. In a sweeping account that pioneers new understandings of the impact of mass migrations, Gregory recasts the history of twentieth-century America. He demonstrates that the southern diaspora was crucial to transformations in the relationship between American regions, in the politics of race and class, and in the roles of religion, the media, and culture.

Millions of southerners left the South in the twentieth century in a mass migration that has, in many ways, rewoven the fabric of American society on cultural, political, and economic levels. Because the movements of southerners--and people in general--are controlled not only by physical boundaries marked on a map but also by narratives that define movement, narrative is central in building and sustaining borders and in breaking them down. In Leaving the South: Border Crossing Narratives and the Remaking of Southern Identity, author Mary Weaks-Baxter analyzes narratives by and about those who left the South and how those narratives have remade what it means to be southern. Drawing from a broad range of narratives, including literature, newspaper articles, art, and music, Weaks-Baxter outlines how these displacement narratives challenged concepts of southern nationhood and redefined southern identity. Close attention is paid to how depictions of the South, particularly in the media and popular culture, prompted southerners to leave the region and changed perceptions of southerners to outsiders as well as how southerners saw themselves. Through an examination of narrative, Weaks-Baxter reveals the profound effect gender, race, and class have on the nature of the migrant's journey, the adjustment of the migrant, and the ultimate decision of the migrant either to stay put or return home, and connects the history of border crossings to the issues being considered in today's national landscape.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize–winnner and bestselling author of Caste chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

In this acerbic, eminently quotable book, humorist Roy Blount Jr. focuses on his own dueling loyalties across the great American divide. Scholarly, raunchy, biting, and affable, Blount takes on topics ranging from chicken fingers and yellow dog Democrats to Elvis's toes while sharing some experiences of his own: chatting with Ray Charles, meeting an Okefenokee alligator, imagining Faulkner's tennis game, and being swept up, sort of, in the filming of Nashville. His yarns, analyses, and flights of fancy transcend all standard shades of Red, Blue, and in between. Blount's sidesplitting, irreverent musings may not end our tacit Civil War at long last, but they do clarify, or aptly complicate, divisive delusions on both sides of the long–standing national rift. Long Time Leaving is a comic ode to American variety and a droll assault on complacency both North and South from one of the most definitive and esteemed humorists of our time.

This volume explores ideas of home, belonging and memory in migration through the social realities of leaving and living. It discusses themes and issues such as locating migrant subjectivities and belonging; sociability and wellbeing; the making of a village; bondage and seasonality; dislocation and domestic labour; women and work; gender and religion; Bhojpuri folksongs; folk music; experience; and the city to analyse the social and cultural dynamics of internal migration in India in historical perspectives. Departing from the dominant understanding of migration as an aberration impelled by economic factors, the book focuses on the centrality of migration in the making of society. Based on case studies from an array of geo-cultural regions from across India, the volume views migrants as active agents with their own determinations of selfhood and location. Part of the series Migrations in South Asia, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of migration studies, refugee studies, gender studies, development studies, social work, political economy, social history, political studies, social and cultural anthropology, exclusion studies, sociology, and South Asian Studies.