Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Jim Crow
An honest telling of history, including deeply disturbing events such as the murder of Emmett Till, allows us to look at our past in a richer and more meaningful way.
Editor’s Note: Dr. Lonnie G. Bunch, III is the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Dubbed the “AAA guide for black people,” the underground travel manual encapsulated how automobile travel expanded — and limited — African American lives under Jim Crow.
Editor's Note: Candacy Taylor is an award-winning author, photographer, and cultural documentarian.
He was a lieutenant in the Army of the United States: he saw no reason to sit in the back of the bus
ON JULY 6, 1944, Jackie Robinson, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant, boarded an Army bus at Fort Hood, Texas.
Although marred by the grisly murders of three young activists, the Freedom Summer of 1964 brought revolutionary changes to Mississippi and the nation.
Separate and Unequal and Unconstitutional
…And the real secret in Strom Thurmond’s past
Is it a symbol of a brave past or a banner of treason? And is there perhaps another Southern standard to be raised?
“My ancestors fought for the question of who was supreme, the federal or the state government. They felt that South Carolina freely went into the Union and had the right to opt out, like an independent country.”
In William Faulkner’s greatest work, a bitter epic of violence and despair resolves itself on a note of love and longing.
William Faulkner, the troubled alcoholic son of the poorest state in the Union, a Mississippi so obsessed by race that it refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, is the greatest American novelist of the 20th century.
He was to turn a segregated little army within an army into the world’s first black pursuit squadron
The young woman was niece to a Texas governor, with money and social entrée most appealing to Noel F. Parrish, the son of a clergyman whose ministries had been mainly in some medium-size towns of Kentucky, Georgia, and Alabama. But Noel didn’t like his girlfriend’s hands.
Before there was William Faulkner, there was the small Southern universe of Oxford, Mississippi.
The trouble with coming to Mississippi in winter is that, throughout his writing, William Faulkner has rarely pictured it that way for you. He almost always has that heavy summer air over everything, and you would not imagine these crisp brown January lawns.
BORN IN SLAVERY AND RAISED IN ITS PAINFUL AFTERMATH TO BECOME ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL AMERICAN ICONS, SHE HAS BEEN MADE TO ENCOMPASS LOVE AND GUILT AND RIDICULE AND WORSHIP, AND STILL SHE LIVES ON.
On Highway 61, just outside of Natchez, Mississippi, stands Mammy’s Cupboard, a 34-high concrete figure of a black woman.
In the 19th Century, white performers invented the minstrel show, the first uniquely American entertainment form
NOTE: this article has been updated and reissued in the Winter 2019 issue. Click for the new version.
When one weary woman refused to be harassed out of her seat in the bus, the whole shaky edifice of Jim Crow began to totter
In 1955,
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