Mississippi Delta
...of cheap labor, on which Delta plantations depended. By 1910, tenants operated ninety-two percent of Delta farms, and ninety-five percent of those tenants were African American. New ethnic groups also...
"We're Almost There": The Drive-By Truckers' Art of Place
...into the modern era by the cheap electricity and federal intervention of the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority. (There are two TVA songs in the Truckers catalogues.)2The two songs are...
Hillside Refuge: Tornado Shelters in Northeast Mississippi
...number of reported tornadoes in the state each year is twenty-five, with sixty-two the highest number reported in a single year, and five the fewest. The average number of tornado-related...
Television News and the Civil Rights Struggle: The Views in Virginia and Mississippi
...reported that the number was optimistic, as just six percent of programming time went to news. Yet both local and national news broadcasts remained powerfully resonant. Local segregationists wanted a...
Enslaved Labor and Building the Smithsonian: Reading the Stones
...his wife, Martha Custis Washington. After Mrs. Washington's death in 1802, a number of her slaves at Mount Vernon were inherited by Martha Custis Peter, adding to the Peter family...
Still Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease
...monthly payments can mean the difference between destitution and modest survival.4This estimate of the number of black lung beneficiaries is extrapolated from data on the number of claims filed each...
A Woman's Work: Jim Crow Modernity and the Remaking of the Carceral State
Review There's a gripping scene in Arthur Jafa's award-winning film, Dreams Are Colder Than Death, in which he pairs the image of a small group of African American boys acrobatically...
Social Justice Environmentalism
Essay In a 2017 essay, National Museum of African American History and Culture director Lonnie Bunch noted that, like much of black history, environmental activism by people of color is...
Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction: Victor Séjour's "The Mulatto"
Introduction Cyrille Bissette (1795–1858). Print by François Le Villain originally published in Joseph Elzéar Morénas's Précis historique de la traite des noirs et de l'esclavage colonial, contenant l'origine de la traite, ses progrès,...
Unquiet Emmett Till
Review Emmett Till continues to torment our imaginations. How could two (and almost certainly more) grown men, veterans, over six feet tall, see a fourteen year old kid as such...