This is a story based on true events surrounding the life and times of Elizabeth Jane Jones Davis, known to many as Madea. This story tells of the struggles of the black man living down on the countryside of southern Alabama during the 1950s and 1960s, refusing to depend solely on the privileges allowed by some white landowners. When the black man failed to meet the demands of some white men, the acts of slavery were reignited all over again. This was an act that some white men seemed to remembe
This is the story of how rural Black people struggled against the oppressive sharecropping system of the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta during the first half of the twentieth century. Here, white planters forged a world of terror and poverty for Black workers, one that resembled the horrific deprivations of the African Congo under Belgium’s King Leopold II. Delta planters did not cut off the heads and hands of their African American workers but, aided by local law enforcement, they engaged in peonage, murder, theft, and disfranchisement. As individuals and through collective struggle, in conjunction with national organizations like the NAACP and local groups like the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, Black men and women fought back, demanding a just return for their crops and laying claim to a democratic vision of citizenship. Their efforts were amplified by the two world wars and the depression, which expanded the mobility and economic opportunities of Black people and provoked federal involvement in the region. Nan Woodruff shows how the freedom fighters of the 1960s would draw on this half-century tradition of protest, thus expanding our standard notions of the civil rights movement and illuminating a neglected but significant slice of the American Black experience.
As the nineteenth century ended in Hunt County, Texas, a way of life was dying. The tightly knit, fiercely independent society of the yeomen farmers—”plain folk,” as historians have often dubbed them—was being swallowed up by the rising tide of a rapidly changing, cotton-based economy. A social network based on family, religion, and community was falling prey to crippling debt and resulting loss of land ownership. For many of the rural people of Hunt County and similar places, it seemed like the end of the world. In Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists historian Kyle G. Wilkison analyzes the patterns of plain-folk life and the changes that occurred during the critical four decades spanning the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Political protest evolved in the wake of the devastating losses experienced by the poor rural majority, and Wilkison carefully explores the interplay of religion and politics as Greenbackers, Populists, and Socialists vied for the support of the dispossessed tenant farmers and sharecroppers. With its richly drawn contextualization and analysis of the causes and effects of the epochal shifts in plain-folk society, Kyle G. Wilkison’s Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists will reward students and scholars in economic, regional, and agricultural history.
In this fascinating study of race, politics, and economics in Mississippi, Chris Myers Asch tells the story of two extraordinary personalities--Fannie Lou Hamer and James O. Eastland--who represented deeply opposed sides of the civil rights movement. Both
In the early 1980s, Duccio Balestracci discovered in a Sienese archive two account books kept from 1450 to 1502 by a Tuscan peasant named Benedetto del Massarizia. Benedetto knew how to read but not how to write. Infected by the urban habit of detailed personal record keeping, he asked various of his literate acquaintances to put into writing the details of his daily affairs. The resulting account books offer an unparalleled glimpse into the economic and social world of late medieval peasants. In Renaissance in the Fields, Balestracci uses these account books and a host of supporting archival records to explore the lives of Benedetto and his family over the course of the fifteenth century. In Benedetto we see how country people could organize land and capital and protect themselves, at least a little, from rapacious landlords and urban administrators. By capturing the changing realities of life in the countryside, Renaissance in the Fields offers the best introduction to how the peasant economy really worked, and to how most people actually lived during the Italian Renaissance.
A great deal of controversy has surrounded both the tenure and resignation of former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders. Now, for the first time, Dr. Elders shares both the travails and triumphs of her life in an autobiography which is not only a political memoir chock full of insider information, but also a chronicle of the triumphant rise of a great-granddaughter of slaves and impoverished child of sharecroppers to the highest medical position in the Unites States. of photos.
Ms. Barbara Juliet Adams (a for-hire writer from New York City whod recently broke off a one-sided engagement with a self-centered fool who saw equal rights for women but a detriment to the weaker sex) now ventures her prideful way deep down into a still-bitter South on an elegant riverboat, the Southern Rose, hoping for inspiration for her latest historical account, Again We Are One (the rebuilding of the defeated South), and runs a smitten foul of Mr. Sterling Able, a most dangerous riverboat gambler (veteran of the Southern Stars and Bars), and noted bottom dealer is quite taken too by this brash, quick-talking, high-stepping, beautiful Yank (which fast spreading Southern gossip lends is sure to come to unwise folly) as the courting two near the Magic city, New Orleans, for there are boyhood enemies in steadfast plot of Mr. Sterling Ables Yanks smitten demise. So venture down with Ms. Barbara into the land of cotton for old times there were or are not forgotten, depending how one sees Southern and Northern right from wrong. So yall coming? People are gonna talk sure, but do mind your purse and the voodoo that threatens your soul.
A deadly automobile accident has claimed the life of a young Negro woman in a segregated Louisianan community. Her brother becomes suspicious after hearing rumors that she was kidnapped and her death staged as part of a cover up. When a friend decides to look into it certain people of authority grow apprehensive. Paul Matthews is a typical, happy teenager until he gets involved in a deadly search for clues surrounding Annie Thompsons death. Most people in town are against him, believing things are best left alone, but he and his friends continue to pry. Its a dangerous undertaking. Someone has a lot to lose and will do anything to prevent the truth from coming out, even if he has to kill. In his terrifying odyssey through the bayou Paul interacts with its Cajun inhabitants while navigating through the deadly swamp where gators and snakes abound. He is guided by a mysterious fortuneteller. The voodoo princess knows all. Will she lead him to the truth or down the path of destruction? The serenity of the bayou can bring great joy but beware: monsters lurk within it, and most of them are human.
