Can any good thing come from Auburn? / John Shelton Reed -- Revisiting race relations in an Upland South community : Lacrosse, Arkansas / Brooks Blevins -- Southern accents : the politics of race and the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 / Susan Youngblood Ashmore -- Is there a balm in Gilead? Baptists and reform in North Carolina, 1900-1925 / Richard D. Starnes -- The beginnings of interracialism : Macon, Georgia, in the 1930s / Andrew M. Manis -- Race, class, the Southern conference, and the beginning of the end of the New Deal coalition / Glenn Feldman -- "Wallaceism is an insidious and treacherous type of disease" : the 1970 Alabama gubernatorial election and the "Wallace freeze" on Alabama politics / Gordon E. Harvey -- Divide and conquer : interest groups and political culture in Alabama, 1929-1971 / Jeff Frederick -- The scholar as activist / Dewayne Key -- Evangelist for constitutional reform / Bailey Thomson -- The historian as public policy activist / Dan T. Carter.

Social and political history of the modern South.

"Red, Black, and White is the first narrative history of the American Communist movement in the South during the 1930s. Written from the perspective of the District #17 (CPUSA) Reds who worked primarily in Alabama, [the author's] purpose is to acquaint a new generation with the impact of the Great Depression on post-war black and white, young and old, urban and rural Americans. After the Scottsboro story broke on March 25, 1931 it was open season for old fashioned lynchings, 'legal' (courtroom) lynchings, and mob murder. In Alabama alone, twenty black men were known to have been murdered and countless others, women included, were beaten, disabled, jailed, 'disappeared,' or had their lives otherwise ruined between March 1931 and September 1935. In this collective biography, Mary Stanton--a noted chronicler of the Left and social justice movements in the South--explains what resources Depression Era Reds worked with before those of either the New Deal or the modern Civil Rights Movement became available. What emerges from this narrative is a meaningful criterion to evaluate the Reds' accomplishments. They failed in some measure at everything they attempted--from labor organizing to exposing courtroom lynchings and institutional racism. Stanton looks at the Reds' strategies which in many cases made things worse by uniting angry white supremacists over their constant condemnation of the Southern Way of Life. Through seven cases of the CPUSA's activity in the South, Stanton covers tortured notions of loyalty and betrayal, the Cult of White Southern Womanhood, Christianity in all its iterations, and the scapegoating of Blacks, Jews, and communists. Yet this still is a story of how Blacks, Jews, and communists fought back, and fought together, for social justice and change"

A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.

During the Civil War era, black and white North Carolinians were forced to fundamentally reinterpret the morality of suicide, divorce, and debt as these experiences became pressing issues throughout the region and nation. In Moments of Despair, Dav

Carry It On is an in-depth study of how the local struggle for equality in Alabama fared in the wake of new federal laws--the Civil Rights Act, the Economic Opportunity Act, and the Voting Rights Act. Susan Youngblood Ashmore provides a sharper definition to changes set in motion by the fall of legal segregation. She focuses her detailed story on the Alabama Black Belt and on the local projects funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the federal agency that supported programs in a variety of cities and towns in Alabama. Black Belt activists who used OEO funds understood that the structural underpinnings of poverty were key components of white supremacy, says Ashmore. They were motivated not only to end poverty but also to force local governments to comply with new federal legislation aimed at achieving racial equality on a number of fronts. Ashmore looks closely at the interactions among local activists, elected officials, businesspeople, landowners, bureaucrats, and others who were involved in or affected by OEO projects. Carry It On offers a nuanced picture of the OEO, an agency too broadly criticized; a new look at the rise of southern Black Power; and a compelling portrait of local citizens struggling for control over their own lives. Ashmore provides a more complete understanding of how southerners worked to define for themselves how freedom would come during the years shaped by the civil rights movement and the war on poverty.

Dixie's back in her hometown, but the last thing she's looking for is a reason to stay . . . Dixie Barnes has no desire to change the life she's built in LA, fast-paced and full of glamour, and a million miles from Moreover, Tennessee. When she's badgered into an impromptu hometown reunion, the thing she's most looking forward to is her flight back to her celebrity clients. She has no plans to rekindle relationships with the town's meddling citizens-those kind-hearted people she abandoned ten years ago-and she definitely doesn't intend to take up where she left off with Deke McAllister. Then she discovers the nerdy, gangly crush of her past has matured in every remarkable way possible. Perhaps getting reacquainted with Deke isn't such a bad idea after all. But loving that boy was the catalyst that had her leaving the water tower town she was so fond of. And the more quality time she spends with him, the more difficult she finds the notion of doing it again. She'll agree to amuse herself with him until it's time to leave. She'll enjoy his soul scorching kisses, and maybe even tangle with him in his sheets. But her heart won't be on the line this time. Deke's already been warned her days in Moreover are numbered. And this time she'll say good-bye before she boards her plane.