Willis Duke Weatherford
Willis Duke Weatherford

Author: Andrew McNeill Canady

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2016-11-25

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0813168163

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At the turn of the twentieth century, few white, southern leaders would speak out in favor of racial equality for fear of being dismissed as too progressive. Willis Duke Weatherford (1875–1970), however, defied convention as one of the first prominent white southern liberals to dedicate his life to reforming the South's social system, eliminating violence and injustice through education, and opening a dialogue among the affected groups. His energetic efforts led to a rise in progressive action in the region, though at times his own beliefs prevented him from advocating for absolute racial equality. As a result, historians debate Weatherford's legacy: Was he a forward-thinking supporter of human rights or merely a moderate paternalist? In this comprehensive biography, Andrew McNeill Canady offers a reassessment of the influential educator's life and work. Canady surveys Weatherford's work with institutions such as the YMCA, Berea College, and Fisk University and illuminates his many efforts to foster dialogue among southerners of all races about religion, race relations, and Appalachia. He also examines Weatherford's reluctance to challenge Jim Crow laws and the capitalist economy that contributed to the poverty of African Americans and the people of Appalachia, revealing the limitations that southern reformers faced and the often-difficult compromises they were forced to make. During a career that spanned from the Progressive Era to the civil rights movement, Weatherford was involved in virtually every significant southern liberal effort of his time. Past research has focused primarily on Weatherford's early work, but Canady's study is the first to investigate the full trajectory of his life and career. This overdue biography makes a significant contribution to literature on the long civil rights movement and the development of southern liberalism.

The Problem South
The Problem South

Author: Natalie J. Ring

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0820329037

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For most historians, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the hostilities of the Civil War and the dashed hopes of Reconstruction give way to the nationalizing forces of cultural reunion, a process that is said to have downplayed sectional grievances and celebrated racial and industrial harmony. In truth, says Natalie J. Ring, this buoyant mythology competed with an equally powerful and far-reaching set of representations of the backward Problem South—one that shaped and reflected attempts by northern philanthropists, southern liberals, and federal experts to rehabilitate and reform the country's benighted region. Ring rewrites the history of sectional reconciliation and demonstrates how this group used the persuasive language of social science and regionalism to reconcile the paradox of poverty and progress by suggesting that the region was moving through an evolutionary period of “readjustment” toward a more perfect state of civilization. In addition, The Problem South contends that the transformation of the region into a mission field and laboratory for social change took place in a transnational moment of reform. Ambitious efforts to improve the economic welfare of the southern farmer, eradicate such diseases as malaria and hookworm, educate the southern populace, “uplift” poor whites, and solve the brewing “race problem” mirrored the colonial problems vexing the architects of empire around the globe. It was no coincidence, Ring argues, that the regulatory state's efforts to solve the “southern problem” and reformers' increasing reliance on social scientific methodology occurred during the height of U.S. imperial expansion.

In Black and White
In Black and White

Author: Lily Hardy Hammond

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2010-02-25

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0820337005

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“Our problem is not racial, but human and economic. . . . We hold the Negro racially responsible for conditions common to all races on his economic plane.” The writings of reformer Lily Hardy Hammond (1859-1925) are filled with such forthright criticisms of southern white attitudes toward African Americans--enough so that her stature as a southern progressive thinker would seem assured. Yet Hammond, who once stood at the intellectual center of the southern women’s social gospel movement and was in her time the South’s most prolific female writer on the “race question,” has been marginalized. This volume reprintsIn Black and White, the most important of Hammond’s ten books, along with a sampling of the dozens of articles she published. Elna C. Green’s biographical introduction tells of Hammond’s marriage to a prominent Methodist minister and educator. It also traces Hammond’s career within the context of prevailing gender and racial attitudes in the Jim Crow South. Hammond, who had roots in Methodist home mission work, was also active in such secular and ecumenical organizations as the Southern Sociological Congress, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Hammond worked alongside blacks to promote education, improve living conditions, and stop lynching. As a suffragist and temperance advocate, she urged the leaders of those largely white women’s movements to partner with African Americans. Historians of religion, social science, and race relations will welcome the reintroduction of this remarkable but virtually forgotten figure.

To ’Joy My Freedom
To ’Joy My Freedom

Author: Tera W. Hunter

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1998-09-15

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0674264630

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As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta—the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south—in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers’ domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post–Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception—and at the heart—of the new south.

One Woman's Political Journey
One Woman's Political Journey

Author: Lynn Musslewhite

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780806135632

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Born in Nebraska in 1875, Kate Barnard spent most of her childhood in Kansas, where family dislocation and financial failure darkened her early life. After Barnard and her father moved to Oklahoma Territory in the 1890s, Kate had unsatisfying stints as a schoolteacher and a stenographer before she discovered her life work in politics and social reform. One Woman’s Political Journey: Kate Barnard and Social Reform, 1875—1930 details the life’s work—including the political successes and failures—of a complex and courageous woman who appreciated that she was on the cutting edge of new and novel opportunities for women. Crusading for the disadvantaged, Barnard became a spokeswoman for child labor laws, a compulsory school attendance law, a juvenile justice system, and a modern penal structure. In 1907, at age thirty-two, she became the first woman in the nation elected to a state post—Commissioner of Charities and Corrections, a post created specifically for her by Oklahoma’s constitutional convention. Her dramatic rhetoric and favorable publicity attracted national attention and the admiration of Oklahomans. Convinced that women could effect positive change, she encouraged them to move into the public arena and embrace social justice reform. She also formed a coalition of farmers and laborers that led to the creation of Oklahoma’s Democratic Party. In her first term, Barnard persuaded Oklahoma’s all-male legislature to pass reforms announcing state responsibility for the welfare of children and forced changes in the state’s humanitarian institutions. In her second term, she sought protection for property rights of American Indian children. But Barnard’s career was not without obstacles. Her lack of control over budgets and personnel, along with her frequent clashing with male politicians limited her effectiveness and fueled her growing discouragement with politics. Named by Oklahoma Today as one of the fifty most influential Oklahomans in the past one hundred years, Kate Barnard is finally the deserved focus of a full-length scholarly biography.

The Camp Fire Girls
The Camp Fire Girls

Author: Jennifer Helgren

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2022-12

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 0803286864

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Through the lens of America’s first and most popular girls’ organization, Jennifer Helgren traces the role and changing meaning of American girls’ citizenship across critical intersections of gender, race, class, and disability in the twentieth-century United States.