Contents -- Foreword / James C. Cobb -- Introduction / Randy Finley and Thomas A. DeBlack -- Publications by Willard B. Gatewood Jr. -- In the Shadow of the Revolution: Savannah's First Generation of Free African American Elite in the New Republic, 1790-1830 / Whittington B. Johnson -- "A Model Man of Chicot County": Lycurgus Johnson and Social Change / Thomas A. DeBlack -- "I Go To Set the Captives Free": The Activism of Richard Harvey Cain, Nationalist Churchman and Reconstruction-Era Leader / Bernard E. Powers Jr. -- "This Dreadful Whirlpool" of Civil War: Edward W. Gantt and the Quest for Distinction / Randy Finley -- James Carroll Napier (1845-1940): From Plantation to the City / Bobby L. Lovett -- Robert E. Lee Wilson and the Making of a Post-Civil War Plantation / Jeannie M. Whayne -- Reward for Party Service: Emily Newell Blair and Political Patronage in the New Deal / Virginia Laas -- "A Generous and Exemplary Womanhood": Hattie Rutherford Watson and NYA Camp Bethune in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, 1937 / Fon Gordon -- Tufted Titans: Dalton, Georgia's Carpet Elite / Thomas Deaton -- Sara Alderman Murphy and the Little Rock Panel of American Women: A Prescription to Heal the Wounds of the Little Rock School Crisis / Paula C. Barnes -- Notes -- List of Contributors

Elites have shaped southern life and communities, argues the distinguished historian Willard Gatewood. These essays—written by Gatewood's colleagues and former students in his honor—explore the influence of particular elites in the South from the American Revolution to the Little Rock integration crisis. They discuss not only the power of elites to shape the experiences of the ordinary people, but the tensions and negotiations between elites in a particular locale, whether those elites were white or black, urban or rural, or male or female. Subjects include the particular kinds of power available to black elites in Savannah, Georgia, during the American Revolution; the transformation of a southern secessionist into an anti-slavery activist during the Civil War; a Tenessee "aristocrat of color" active in politics from Reconstruction to World War II; middle-class Southern women, both black and white, in the New Deal and the Little Rock integration crisis; and the different brands of paternalism in Arkansas plantations during the Jacksonian and Jim Crow eras and in the postwar Georgia carpet industry.

“You must be from the North,” was a common, derogatory reaction to the activities of white women throughout the South, well-meaning wives and mothers who joined together to improve schools or local sanitation but found their efforts decried as more troublesome civil rights agitation. You Must Be from the North: Southern White Women in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement focuses on a generation of white women in Memphis, Tennessee, born between the two World Wars and typically omitted from the history of the civil rights movement. The women for the most part did not jeopardize their lives by participating alongside black activists in sit-ins and freedom rides. Instead, they began their journey into civil rights activism as a result of their commitment to traditional female roles through such organizations as the Junior League. What originated as a way to do charitable work, however, evolved into more substantive political action. While involvement with groups devoted to feeding school-children and expanding Bible study sessions seemed benign, these white women's growing awareness of racial disparities in Memphis and elsewhere caused them to question the South's hierarchies in ways many of their peers did not. Ultimately, they found themselves challenging segregation more directly, found themselves ostracized as a result, and discovered they were often distrusted by a justifiably suspicious black community. Their newly discovered commitment to civil rights contributed to the success of the city's sanitation workers' strike of 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death during the strike resonated so deeply that for many of these women it became a defining moment. In the long term, these women proved to be a persistent and progressive influence upon the attitudes of the white population of Memphis, and particularly on the city's elite.

Robert Patrick Bender is a history instructor at Eastern New Mexico University-Roswell. He is the author of Like Grass Before the Scythe: The Life and Death of Sgt. William Remmel, 121st New York Infantry.

The Dalton-Whit?eld County area of Georgia has one of the highest concentrations of Latino residents in the southeastern United States. In 2006, a Washington Post article referred to the carpet-manufacturing city of Dalton as a "U.S. border town," even though the community lies more than twelve hundred miles from Mexico. Voices from the Nueva Frontera explores this phenomenon, providing an in-depth picture of Latino immigration and dispersal in rural America along with a framework for understanding the economic integration of the South with Latin America. Voices fr ...

When Edgar A. Love, Oscar J. Cooper, Frank Coleman, and Ernest Everett Just founded the historically Black fraternity Omega Psi Phi on November 17, 1911, at Howard University, they could not have known how great of an impact their organization would have on American life. Over the 110 years that followed, its members led colleges and universities; served in prominent military roles; made innumerable contributions to education, civic society, science, and medicine; and at least one campaigned for the US presidency. This book offers a comprehensive, authoritative history of the fraternity, emphasizing its vital role through multiple eras of the Black freedom struggle. The authors address both the individual work of its membership, which has included such figures as Carter G. Woodson, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, James L. Farmer Jr., Benjamin Elijah Mays, James Clyburn, Jesse Jackson, and Benjamin Crump, and the collective efforts of the fraternity's leadership to encourage its general membership to contribute to the struggle in concrete ways over the years. The result is a book that uniquely connects the 1910s with the present, showing the ongoing power of a Black fraternal organization to channel its members toward social reform.

Current Geographical Publications (CGP) is a non-profit service to the scholarly community initiated in 1938 by the American Geographical Society of New York. Beginning in 2006, the format changed to include the tables of contents of current geographical journals. The journal titles listed link to web pages or PDF scans of the current issue's contents.

Article abstracts and citations of reviews and dissertations covering the United States and Canada.

Every American city had a small, self-aware, and active black elite, who felt it was their duty to set the standard for the less fortunate members of their race and to lead their communities by example. Professor Gatewood's study examines this class of African Americans by looking at the genealogies and occupations of specific families and individuals throughout the United States and their roles in their various communities. --from publisher description.