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This chapter examines the ways in which the rural South works as a stimulant for the postmodern African–American literary imagination and the kinds of resolutions it yields to problems of urban literary representation. It focuses on Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, because these two novels admit, often self-reflexively but sometimes inadvertently, the difficulties plaguing their own use of the rural South as a device of literary resolution to postmodern urban problems. These difficulties become manifest in Morrison's and Naylor's contradictory treatments of two interconnected systems of cultural value—magic and oral tradition—that are embedded in the rural South and presented as the distinguishing marks of an integral black community.

This book investigates the behaviors, motivations, and lifestyles of African American adolescents in rural communities across the country. More specifically, it examines what it is like for black youth to grow up in the twenty-first-century rural South. With Hamilton, Alabama, and the neighboring town of Carlyle as the backdrop, this book is an ethnography of young African Americans and what defines the rural South in the twenty-first-century. It challenges the stereotypes that define how society has come to view African Americans, including teens, not only by focusing on the rural South, but also by also allowing the youth Down Yonder to speak for themselves. In addition to shedding light on the meaningful aspects of black teens’ everyday lives—some of which relate to race, class, and gender oppression—the book considers the intersections of local and translocal cultural elements in Hamilton and in the lives of young people who live there. Moreover, it explores the dialectical relationship among structure, culture, and behavior in Hamilton.

Using the 1937 Appalachian marriage of nine-year-old Eunice Winstead and twenty-two-year-old Charlie Johns, and the subsequent international attention it received as a prism, this chapter focuses on the persistence of very youthful marriage in the rural southern United States. During the Great Depression, when rates of marriage were down and the age of first marriage increased, minors continued to marry at very high numbers in rural southern states. This chapter argues that isolation, poverty, child labor, poor schooling, and the lack of age consciouness that was its consequence, account for this trend. In communities where calendar age had far less meaning than it did among the middle class and urban residents, white, black and Latino Americans in rural America continued to countenance child marriage in part because they did not see it as noteworthy. Urbanites voiced their horror for the practice in newspapers, magazines, and in film using a language of civilization to condemn those they perceived as backwards barbarians.

Chapter Two shows that from the 1910s through the 1930s, tens of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who initially lived in Texas moved on to the rural black-white South. Of these, the largest group picked the cotton in the Mississippi Delta. From the start, Mexicanos in Mississippi tasted the brutality and exclusion that the region’s white planters had long used to segregate, terrorize, and control African Americans. Mexicanos responded by fighting back in their daily lives, fleeing to new places, and pursuing a political strategy that engaged the cross-border and cross-class nationalism of the Mexican government and its consulate in New Orleans rather than the institutions, lawyers, and liberal discourses of U.S. citizenship. They battled most intensely from 1925 through 1930, the period when many envisioned a future in the Delta. And though most left the area during the Depression, those who remained at long last reaped the fruits of these labors: they forced local officials to admit them to the privileges of whiteness, decisively separating their futures from those of the region’s African Americans and paving the way for their families’ advancement into the white middle class.

This chapter details the respective backgrounds of the two preachers under discussion, highlighting the similarities in their life stories—particularly their shared frustrations growing up as ambitious, talented young men in the rural South. Their youths were defined by the tensions between family survival and an individual sense of calling, between agricultural labor and adventure, and between physical hunger and the thirst for deeper meaning in life. Moreover, the laws and culture of the Jim Crow South also held sway over both their lives, and made Claude Williams's youth at once very similar to, yet completely separate from, Owen Whitfield's experience. Both men would, however, come to the same religious calling as they came of age.

This chapter looks at the types of employment former slaves occupied. With few economic resources available to them, the majority of former slaves in the rural South could only really gain an income working on a plantation or farm. They did, however, enjoy the right to be choosey about which employer to work for. Freedpeople seeking to enlarge their freedom confronted former slaveholders bent on constraining it as narrowly as possible. Employers sought to squeeze all they could from the former slaves they employed.

This chapter describes the impact of free market economic policies on rural development in the 1980s and 1990s. Seeking to end excessive government interference in the economy, President Ronald Reagan cut taxes, weakened civil rights enforcement, and reduced funding for social programs that served low-income Americans. Reagan believed that private enterprise and market forces were the most efficient mechanisms for creating wealth and distributing resources. Such policies failed to address the problems facing unemployed and poor people in the rural South. At the turn of the twentieth century, the region was still plagued by unemployment, poverty, inadequate health care, substandard housing, and out-migration.

This chapter briefly outlines the history of racial discrimination in the rural South and the ways social justice activists continued the struggle for equality in the decades following the civil rights movement. Civil rights legislation failed to adequately address the economic legacies of past discrimintation, which were compounded by the mass displacement of agricultural workers from the land in the mid-twentieth century. Activists’ calls for government intervention to provide employment, income, education, housing, and health care for displaced workers generated strong resistance from regional elites whose preferred solution to the crisis was for displaced workers to leave. The ideological and political struggles that ensued had consequences for all Americans, not just African Americans, and helped shape national responses to labor displacement during the transition from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism in the late twentieth century.

The book’s third chapter examines the politics of marriage for formerly enslaved African Americans following the Civil War, in which they gained legal recognition for their domestic relationships. In reviewing the testimonies of formerly enslaved people, one finds a stark divide between those who claimed the custom was as authentic as any other ceremony, against those who, for reasons of self-protection, downplayed the significance or denied the existence of broomstick weddings on their own plantation. Consequently, jumping the broom largely faded from popularity in the postbellum era, but the chapter shows how its memory survived among certain sections of the descendant community. Under unique circumstances, some African Americans continued to practice it throughout the rural South, and other sources reveal that many formerly enslaved people refused to marry using legally-recognized protocols, as they considered the broomstick wedding as legitimate. In certain cases, this caused some couples to reject governmental requirements to remarry. But even for those who rejected it, the colloquial expression “jump the broom” remained in the parlance of Black southerners into the twentieth century. The colloquial expression was important for retaining memories of the ancestral past, and it would help spur its revival during the late-twentieth century.

This chapter brings the story of Liberia into the present. Drawing on memories of current residents, the chapter describes efforts to preserve and present the community’s history to visitors. For example, the original community cemetery is re-discovered, cleared, protected, and interpreted. Newer homes provide refuge for returning relatives or aging kin. Some racist sentiments remain, but overwhelmingly Liberia’s remaining residents fit comfortably into a rural Upstate South Carolina landscape.

James Still was born July 16, 1906, in Chambers County, Alabama. This chapter provides background on his parents, J. Alex Still and Lonie Lindsey, and a brief discussion of the family genealogy. His early childhood was typical of large farming families at the beginning of the twentieth century in the rural South. The family moved from place to place within the county. While working with his sisters in the field, the boy learned the value of storytelling..

Amanda Bryant-Friedrich (Fig. 4.1) is Dean of the College of Graduate Studies at the University of Toledo (Toledo). Amanda was born in Enfield, NC, a small town about fifteen miles from the North Carolina-Virginia border. Her father was a farmer and her mother was a housewife. Her father only had a sixth-grade education and did not read or write much. Her mother graduated from high school in Enfield. Her maternal grandfather was a child of a slave and her mother was one of twenty-two children from two wives. They lived on a farm owned by a man named Whitaker. As her mother’s family had been enslaved by the family that owned the farm, her last name was Whitaker. Amanda’s paternal grandfather was a businessman who owned his own farm, on the other side of town. He was also involved in the illegal production of moonshine. Amanda went to Unburden Elementary School in Enfield. Her first experience with school was dramatic, because she lived at the end of a dirt road and was really isolated from other families. The first day she went to kindergarten she saw all those little kids, and she was afraid because there were too many people there. But the daughter of her mother’s best friend was there and invited her to come in to the classroom. Her first science class was in general science in fourth or fifth grade. She was so fascinated, she changed her mind about her future career of secretary or teacher and decided on science. Amanda went to Enfield Middle school in Halifax County, then the second poorest county in the state. The school had only basic infrastructure for science classes. She remembers her middle school chemistry teacher, Ms. Crowley, who told the students to put a mercury thermometer in a cork and Amanda accidently stuck it in her hand. They did not have much in the school, but her teacher taught her what she could.

The Introduction provides a brief summary of the life of Julius Chambers. Born in rural North Carolina in the middle of the Great Depression, Chambers would overcome numerous obstacles to become the nation's foremost civil rights litigator in the generation after Thurgood Marshall. Chambers built the nation's first enduring racially integrated law firm in Charlotte, North Carolina, and, working closely with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, he and his partners brought landmark civil rights suits that pushed federal civil rights law to its high-water mark by the early to mid-1970s.

This chapter reviews the evolution of Italy’s social order and institutions between the end of Fascism, in 1943, and the early 1950s. The peninsula was a battlefield for two years, during 1943–5. War and resistance shook Italy’s social order, and the post-war years saw the emergence of a democratic republic based on a progressive constitution. Reconstruction was rapid, and laid the basis for the country’s full industrialization. The ideological cleavage traced by Marxism, however, which split the anti-fascist coalition, and the political repercussions of the Cold War eased the efforts of the pre-war elites to constrain the opening up of the social order and undermine the newly adopted political institutions. An episode of collective action in the rural South nonetheless showed the potential of well-designed reforms sustained by effective organizations. The chapter concludes that during the 1950s electoral democracy consolidated, but Italy remained distant from the liberal democracy paradigm.