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Seeking refuge in marriage to George Hyde‐Lees posed a potentially lethal threat to Yeats's poetic enterprise. Because the essence of the courtly love poem was its praise of an unattainable woman, marriage and sexual satisfaction threatened to cut off the source of inspiration. Yeats found his way out of the inspirational impasse, but this time it took what he described as ‘something very like a miraculous intervention.’ To relieve her husband's post‐marriage gloom, George feigned automatic writing, but then, she maintained, a superior force took over. The fascinated Yeats pressed her into five years of intensive communication with the unknown spirits. George's Pythia‐like exchanges with the spirits answered the question whether sexual success would still the voice of the Muse. Au contraire, they said, ‘What is important is that the desire of the medium and her desire for your desire be satisfied’ because ‘there cannot be intellectual desire…without sexual & emotional satisfaction’ and ‘without intellectual desire there is no force — or truth especially truth because truth is intensity.’ In other words, whereas sexual fulfillment was inconsistent with the courtly lover's access to inspiration, it was the sine qua non of revelation from George's instructors. Chapter 5 situates the automatic writing and its product, the extraordinary philosophical, historical and aesthetic essay, A Vision, in the context of Yeats's pursuit of the Muse, and examines the way in which the great poems of his maturity reflect the influence of George Yeats as oracle and Muse.

Black Memphians pressed for economic opportunities, civil rights, improved public services, political influence, and an end to lynching from 1917 to 1927. They expanded their activism into new avenues such as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Commission on Interracial Cooperation chapters. Along with Edward H. Crump, they helped defeat a Ku Klux Klan slate of office seekers in 1923. Robert R. Church, Jr., became increasingly involved on the national political scene and emerged as the most prominent African American in the Republican Party. He transformed the local Lincoln League into the Lincoln League of America, an influential black political organization during the World War I era. The political efforts of black Memphians culminated in 1927 when they, including Church's protégé George W. Lee, mobilized to vote the incumbent mayor out of office and elect a candidate who incorporated their demands into his platform.

This chapter describes the public execution of seven men hanged for property offenses. It notes that these men were Lyon Abrahams and Saunders Alexander, convicted of burglary, George Lee, a handsome eighteen year old condemned for highway robbery, two coiners, Richard Baker and John Radcliffe, the twin brothers, Daniel and Robert Perreau, convicted of forgery. It further notes that although the brothers had been convicted of forgery, they continued to protest that they were the victims of a beautiful, intelligent, and dangerous courtesan, Mrs. Margaret Caroline Rudd. It relates that when the crime was first detected in March, the brothers insisted on their innocence and alleged that Mrs.Rudd, Daniel's mistress, had entrapped them.

This chapter discusses the murder of the Reverend George Washington Lee, a prominent civil rights leader from Belzoni, Mississippi. Lee was one of the speakers at the voting rights rally that took place in the Mississippi Delta town of Mound Bayou in April 1955. He was shot on May 8, 1955, probably by racists who were outraged over his speech in Mound Bayou. Even while the Federal Bureau of Investigation was probing Lee’s murder, seven other Mississippi Negro leaders reportedly had been marked for death by white supremacists: Dr. T. R. M. Howard, state NAACP president Dr. A. H. McCoy, NAACP state secretary Medgar Evers, former NAACP state president Dr. James Stringer, civil rights activist Dr. Clinton Battle, undertaker T. V. Johnson, and grocer Gus Courts. All of these men had been vocal about their support for immediate integration of public schools and had been involved in voter registration drives.

Just as white Christians develop silent agreements among themselves to define morality in individual terms that take no responsibility for systematic anti-Black racism, white Christian churches develop means for managing and disciplining adherents who do take on anti-Black racism in a serious and discomfiting way. This chapter reconstructs a lost archive of dissent by LDS Church members against white supremacy in Mormonism, including public criticisms by national figures like Stewart Udall. It analyzes the calculus of identity, race, class, gender, belief, belonging, and social and political capital that condition dissent in religious communities, observing that white privilege and status in predominantly white Christian churches allow some to dissent more publicly and with lesser costs than others.