New Releases by Julie Buckner

" ''As Birmingham goes, so goes the nation,'' Fred Shuttlesworth observed when he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to the city for the transformative protests of 1963. From the height of the civil rights movement through its long aftermath, the images of police dogs and fire hoses turned against protestors, and the four girls murdered when Ku Klux Klan members bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, made the city an uncomfortable racial mirror for the nation. But like many white people who came of age in the civil rights movement''s wake, Julie Buckner Armstrong knew little about her hometown''s history growing up with her single, working class mother in 1960s and 70s. It was only after moving away and discovering writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker that she began to realize that her hometown and her family were part of a larger story of racial injustice and struggle. In recent years, however, Birmingham has rebranded itself as a vibrant, diverse destination for civil rights heritage tourism. Former sites of violence have been transformed into a large moving National Park Service memorial complex that includes a museum, public art, churches, and multiple walking tours. But beyond the tourist map, one can see in Birmingham--just like Anytown, USA--a new Jim Crow reemerging in the place where the old one supposedly died. Returning home decades later to care for her aging mother, Shuttlesworth''s admonition rang in her mind. By then an accomplished scholar and civil rights educator, Armstrong found herself pondering the lessons Birmingham has for America in the twenty-first century, where a 2014 Teaching Tolerance report characterized a common understanding of the civil rights movement in "two names and four words: Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, and ''I have a dream.''" Seeking to better understand her hometown''s complicated history, its connection to other stories of oppression and resistance, and her own place in relation to it, Armstrong embarked on a journey to unravel the standard Birmingham narrative to see what she would find instead. Beginning at the center, with her family''s arrival in 1947 in a neighborhood near the color line, within earshot of what would become known as Dynamite Hill, Armstrong works her way out in time and across the map. Pulling at strings and weaving in the personal stories of her white working-class family, classmates, and other local characters not traditionally associated with Birmingham''s civil rights history, she expands the cast and forges connections between the stories that have been told about Birmingham as well as those that haven''t. From a "funny" cousin whose closeted community was also targeted by Bull Conner''s police force to an aunt who served on the jury that finally convicted Robert Chambliss of murdering Denise McNair, Armstrong combines intimate personal stories, archival research, and cultural geography to reframe the lessons of Birmingham through the intersections of race, class, gender, faith, education, culture, place, and mobility. The result is more than a pageant of Birmingham and its people; it''s also a portrait of Birmingham rendered on the ground over time--as seen in old plantations, in segregated neighborhoods, across contested boundary lines, over mountains, along increasingly polluted waterways, under the gaze of Vulcan, beneath airport runways, on the highways cutting through and running out of town. In her search for truth and beauty in the veins of Birmingham, Armstrong draws on the powers of place and storytelling to dig into the cracks, complicating the easy narrative of Black triumph and overcoming. Among other discoveries found in the mirror, Armstrong finds a white America that, for too long, has failed to recognize itself in the horrific stories and symbols from Birmingham''s past or accept the continuing inequalities from which it unfairly benefits. A literary scholar, Armstrong observes that "many of the best writings on civil rights and race relations describe racism as a wound, a poison, or a sickness--without offering easy prescriptions." Citing James Baldwin, Armstrong knows stories have the power to touch the human heart but warns that resistance to injustice only begins there. Once engaged, it is up to each of us to look again and consider what our stories really reveal about the world and ourselves. In "Learning From Birmingham," Armstrong reminds us that the stories of civil rights, structural oppression, privilege (whether intentional or unconscious), abuse, and inequity are difficult and complicated, but that their telling, especially from multiple stakeholder perspectives, is absolutely necessary"--

Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching traces the reaction of activists, artists, writers, and local residents to the brutal lynching of a pregnant woman near Valdosta, Georgia. In 1918, the murder of a white farmer led to a week of mob violence that claimed the lives of at least eleven African Americans, including Hayes Turner. When his wife Mary vowed to press charges against the killers, she too fell victim to the mob. Mary''s lynching was particularly brutal and involved the grisly death of her eight-month-old fetus. It led to both an entrenched local silence and a widespread national response in newspaper and magazine accounts, visual art, film, literature, and public memorials. Turner''s story became a centerpiece of the Anti-Lynching Crusaders campaign for the 1922 Dyer Bill, which sought to make lynching a federal crime. Julie Buckner Armstrong explores the complex and contradictory ways this horrific event was remembered in works such as Walter White''s report in the NAACP''s newspaper the Crisis, the “Kabnis” section of Jean Toomer''s Cane, Angelina Weld Grimké''s short story “Goldie,” and Meta Fuller''s sculpture Mary Turner: A Silent Protest against Mob Violence. Like those of Emmett Till and Leo Frank, Turner''s story continues to resonate on multiple levels. Armstrong''s work provides insight into the different roles black women played in the history of lynching: as victims, as loved ones left behind, and as those who fought back. The crime continues to defy conventional forms of representation, illustrating what can, and cannot, be said about lynching and revealing the difficulty and necessity of confronting this nation''s legacy of racial violence.

This anthology of drama, essays, fiction, and poetry presents a thoughtful, classroom-tested selection of the best literature for learning about the long civil rights movement. Unique in its focus on creative writing, the volume also ranges beyond a familiar 1954-68 chronology to include works from the 1890s to the present. The civil rights movement was a complex, ongoing process of defining national values such as freedom, justice, and equality. In ways that historical documents cannot, these collected writings show how Americans negotiated this process--politically, philosophically, emotionally, spiritually, and creatively. Gathered here are works by some of the most influential writers to engage issues of race and social justice in America, including James Baldwin, Flannery O''Connor, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni. The volume begins with works from the post-Reconstruction period when racial segregation became legally sanctioned and institutionalized. This section, titled "The Rise of Jim Crow," spans the period from Frances E. W. Harper''s Iola Leroy to Ralph Ellison''s Invisible Man. In the second section, "The Fall of Jim Crow," Martin Luther King Jr.''s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and a chapter from The Autobiography of Malcolm X appear alongside poems by Robert Hayden, June Jordan, and others who responded to these key figures and to the events of the time. "Reflections and Continuing Struggles," the last section, includes works by such current authors as Rita Dove, Anthony Grooms, and Patricia J. Williams. These diverse perspectives on the struggle for civil rights can promote the kinds of conversations that we, as a nation, still need to initiate.