SOUTHERN CULTURES最新文献

Abstract:

This personal essay uses narration to explore a northern descendant's direct connection to the legacy of the Great Migration though the lenses of her southern family's homelands, traditions, and family lineages. Memory and storytelling are the tools the author uses to weave through time and place, from her and her parents' youths through adulthoods, in both the North and South, to lay claim upon a heritage that has been erased, obfuscated, and undervalued chiefly because of systemic discrimination and secondarily because of intergenerational silences tied to racialized violence, poverty, and grief. With the intent to expand beyond the limitations of biased and incomplete accounts of Black histories, the prose therein culls through the author's memories and tethers them to those of her ancestors aiming to reconcile the dissonance between her northern upbringing and her southern roots.

Abstract:

This article is an edited intergenerational conversation among Courtland Cox, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s; Nsé Ufot, former executive director of the New Georgia Project; and Charles V. Taylor Jr., executive director of the Mississippi State NAACP, on April 7, 2023. This discussion explores key issues in today's national politics, especially the role of southern Black and Brown voters and strategists, and calls for the emergence of a New Southern Strategy. Cox drew on his work with SNCC in Lowndes County, Alabama, in the 1960s, which focused on voter registration and the development of the Lowndes County Freedom Party, while Ufot discussed her work leading the New Georgia Project as they transformed Georgia's electorate, and Taylor highlighted his work on the 2015 Better Schools, Better Jobs Ballot Initiative 42 in Mississippi.

Abstract:

Georgia poll workers came under fire for alleged election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, but the accusations stood in stark contrast to the author's own experiences as a poll worker in North Carolina during the same election. The author, a photographer, visited a few precincts in central North Carolina to ask volunteers why they became poll workers and to discuss their duty to ensure all voters who showed up were able to cast a ballot and have it counted. Some poll workers talked about voting rights; many described their own voting history and the changes they've witnessed. Others talked about misinformation and the news media. All mentioned integrity, asking themselves: As a citizen and as a poll worker, what can I do to help ensure that each person in my community has the opportunity to vote on Election Day and have that vote counted?

Abstract:

This article introduces readers to the ongoing African American struggle for full voting rights from Reconstruction to the present. It explains some of the significant ways white supremacists (mis)used the legal and political system, along with violence and economic terrorism, to suppress the Black vote. The essay gives particular attention to the collective work of African Americans to secure voting rights during the modern Civil Rights Movement, with a focus on the organizing work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), mentored by Ella Baker. While many people give well-known leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson credit for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, SNCC workers immersed themselves in communities for bottom-up organizing to demand the vote and make it impossible for the country to continue to ignore the violent suppression of Black rights. The article concludes with contemporary voting rights challenges.

• Sea Turtle Sonnet
• Zeina Hashem Beck (bio)

After Cairokee

Our parents stayed during the civil war.Don't say we escaped, just that we too failed.We left Beirut on the verge of collapse& revolution. That clearing of hope,where would we be without it? Ask Ziad,who put the city on a stage & laughedat its slow ways of killing us with pillsor memory. So many of us screamin concerts & sleep. When in doubt, try kohl.The artist with Cairo in his name sings"This is a cause," friend, "& that's another:"save sea turtles & ignore oppression,poppies. When the dark times come, try yoga.Don't say we betrayed, just that we too feared. [End Page 134] Don't say we betrayed, just that we too fearedpoppies. When the dark times come, try yoga,save sea turtles & ignore oppression."This is a cause," friend, "& that's another."The artist with Cairo in his name singsin concerts & sleep. When in doubt, try kohlor memory—so many of us screamat its slow ways of killing us with pills.Who put the city on a stage & laughed?Where would we be without it? Ask Ziad& revolution, that clearing of hope.We left Beirut, on the verge of collapse.Don't say we escaped, just that we too failedour parents, stayed during the civil war.

zeina hashem beck is a Lebanese poet. Her third poetry collection, titled O, was published by Penguin Books in July 2022. It won the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry and was named a Best Book 2022 by Lit Hub and the New York Public Library.

notes

This sonnet references a song by "Cairokee," and the line This is a cause, and that's another is quoted directly from it. The song also mentions sea turtles as follows: They save sea turtles, they kill human animals. Cairokee, "Telk Qadeya (This Cause)," CairokeeOfficial channel on YouTube, November 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf3BvhjWTKg.

Ziad refers to Ziad Rahbani, Lebanese musician and playwright. "That clearing of hope" is a nod to a line by Al-Tughra'i, a line which Ziad satirizes in one of his plays.

Abstract:

This article examines a voting rights campaign known as "Blocks for Freedom" that was launched in 1966 to help a group of rural African American women in Clay County, Mississippi, protect their right to vote. These Black women faced significant obstacles to vote even after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Local white vigilantes and county administrators used violence and the threat of informal economic sanctions to punish Black citizens who registered to vote. "Blocks for Freedom" sought to circumvent these limitations by creating jobs for Black women that would offer a living wage and protect their ability to cast ballots. Led by poor women in Mississippi and civil rights advocates in New York City, this innovative campaign shows how grassroots activists encountered voter suppression techniques employed to dilute the Black vote after the Civil Rights Movement.

Abstract:

This article is a brief history of the struggle for Black voting rights and against determined opposition in Georgia since the end of the Civil War. After a brief period during Reconstruction when there was significant Black voting and Black representation in the Georgia legislature, Black people were systematically denied both voting rights and representation in the state of Georgia. After 1944, when the US Supreme Court ruled against the all-white primary, and especially after 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, white Georgia politicians tried any number of strategies to limit minority voting strength, from efforts to limit Black registration, to manipulating election districts and voting rules to keep African Americans from winning elective office. These efforts continued, and in many ways increased after the Supreme Court in 2013 ended the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Nonetheless, the increasing demographic power of metro Atlanta, with its large minority population, was a key in 2020 to the narrow victory of Joseph Biden in the presidential race in Georgia, and the election of two liberal Democratic US Senators, including the first African American and Jew elected in the state's history.