In the South today, the sight of a Latina in a NASCAR T-shirt behind the register at an Asian grocery would hardly draw a second glance. That scenario, and our likely reaction to it, surely signals something important--but what? Here some of the region’s most respected and readable observers look across the past century to help us take stock of where the South is now and where it may be headed. Reflecting the writers’ deep interests in southern history, politics, literature, religion, and other matters, the essays engage in new ways some timeless concerns about the region: How has the South changed--or not changed? Has the South as a distinct region disappeared, or has it absorbed the many forces of change and still retained its cultural and social distinctiveness? Although the essays touch on an engaging diversity of topics including the USDA’s crop spraying policies, Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full, and collegiate women’s soccer, they ultimately cluster around a common set of themes. These include race, segregation and the fall of Jim Crow, gender, cultural distinctiveness and identity, modernization, education, and urbanization. Mindful of the South’s reputation for insularity, the essays also gauge the impact of federal assistance, relocated industries, immigration, and other outside influences. As one contributor writes, and as all would acknowledge, those who undertake a project like this “should bear in mind that they are tracking a target moving constantly but often erratically.” The rewards of pondering a place as elusive, complex, and contradictory as the American South are on full display here.

A native son and accomplished historian does not flinch from pointing out Alabama's failures from the past 100 years; neither is he restrained in calling attention to the state's triumphs in this authoritative, popular history of the past 100 years.

Atlanta is often cited as a prime example of a progressive New South metropolis in which blacks and whites have forged "a city too busy to hate." But Ronald Bayor argues that the city continues to bear the indelible mark of racial bias. Offering the first

This engagingly-written survey examines the changes and constants of Southern culture. Always with a keen eye and sharp wit, Daniel takes the reader through a variety of topics that relate directly to the Southern experience: rural life, violence, music, literature, civil rights, unionism, urbanization, xenophobia, migration, religion, cockfighting, and stock car racing. This engagingly-written survey examines the changes and constants of Southern culture. Always with a keen eye and sharp wit, Daniel stresses the diversity of Southern life, which includes not only regional variations but also divisions between black and white, male and female, rural and urban. From "separate but equal" to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and its legacy, Standing at the Crossroads explores the extraordinary changes that transformed the South. Daniel takes the reader through a variety of topics that relate directly to the Southern experience: rural life, violence, music, literature, civil rights, unionism, urbanization, xenophobia, migration, religion, cockfighting, and stock car racing.

The first book devoted to the history of African Americans in south Florida and their pivotal role in the growth and development of Miami, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century traces their triumphs, drudgery, horrors, and courage during the first 100 years of the city's history. Firsthand accounts and over 130 photographs, many of them never published before, bring to life the proud heritage of Miami's black community. Beginning with the legendary presence of black pirates on Biscayne Bay, Marvin Dunn sketches the streams of migration by which blacks came to account for nearly half the city’s voters at the turn of the century. From the birth of a new neighborhood known as "Colored Town," Dunn traces the blossoming of black businesses, churches, civic groups, and fraternal societies that made up the black community. He recounts the heyday of "Little Broadway" along Second Avenue, with photos and individual recollections that capture the richness and vitality of black Miami's golden age between the wars. A substantial portion of the book is devoted to the Miami civil rights movement, and Dunn traces the evolution of Colored Town to Overtown and the subsequent growth of Liberty City. He profiles voting rights, housing and school desegregation, and civil disturbances like the McDuffie and Lozano incidents, and analyzes the issues and leadership that molded an increasingly diverse community through decades of strife and violence. In concluding chapters, he assesses the current position of the community--its socioeconomic status, education issues, residential patterns, and business development--and considers the effect of recent waves of immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean. Dunn combines exhaustive research in regional media and archives with personal interviews of pioneer citizens and longtime residents in a work that documents as never before the life of one of the most important black communities in the United States.

Drawing on scores of interviews with black and white tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Robert Korstad brings to life the forgotten heroes of Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America-CIO. These workers confronted a system of racial capitalism that consigned African Americans to the basest jobs in the industry, perpetuated low wages for all southerners, and shored up white supremacy. Galvanized by the emergence of the CIO, African Americans took the lead in a campaign that saw a strong labor movement and the reenfranchisement of the southern poor as keys to reforming the South--and a reformed South as central to the survival and expansion of the New Deal. In the window of opportunity opened by World War II, they blurred the boundaries between home and work as they linked civil rights and labor rights in a bid for justice at work and in the public sphere. But civil rights unionism foundered in the maelstrom of the Cold War. Its defeat undermined later efforts by civil rights activists to raise issues of economic equality to the moral high ground occupied by the fight against legalized segregation and, Korstad contends, constrains the prospects for justice and democracy today.

James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters. Initially, ex-slaves attempted to create an educational system that would support and extend their emancipation, but their children were pushed into a system of industrial education that presupposed black political and economic subordination. This conception of education and social order--supported by northern industrial philanthropists, some black educators, and most southern school officials--conflicted with the aspirations of ex-slaves and their descendants, resulting at the turn of the century in a bitter national debate over the purposes of black education. Because blacks lacked economic and political power, white elites were able to control the structure and content of black elementary, secondary, normal, and college education during the first third of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, blacks persisted in their struggle to develop an educational system in accordance with their own needs and desires.