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When first published in 1962, Sarah Patton Boyle's narrative of personal growth and change was highly praised and quickly sold more than sixty thousand copies, though few of them in the South. In it we witness Boyle's journey from sedate Virginia housewife to civil rights activist via an often naive, but ultimately courageous path. Catalyst for Boyle's conversion was African American attorney Gregory Swanson's successful suit for admission to the University of Virginia Law School in 1950. Boyle wrote Swanson a friendly note of welcome—and prided herself on addressing him as "Mr." Her awkward efforts to help led her to T. J. Sellers, editor of Charlottesville's black newspaper, The Tribune, and to what they came to call "The T. J. Sellers Course for Backward Southern Whites." It was the beginning of a remarkable friendship which is traced in their correspondence, selections from which are published here for the firt time. Although she could not have imagined it when she wrote that note to Gregory Swanson, by 1962 Sarah Patton Boyle had become the most outspoken white integrationist in Virginia. In addition to writing, speaking, and organizing for the NAACP and other groups, she gained national attention when an article she had originally titled "We're Readier Than We Think" appeared in the Saturday Evening Post under the inflammatory title "Southerners Will Like Integration." A wave of hostile reactions from across the country included crosses burned on her lawn. This reprinting of The Desegregated Heart, long out of print, adds significantly to the new work that attempts to unravel massive resistance. For all who seek to understand the civil rights movement in this country, it recaptures the contribution of not one but two people who proved themselves part of the very backbone of a new racially progressive South that is still in the making.
Sarah Patton Boyle’s personal crusade for civil rights began in the fall of 1950, when the University of Virginia refused to admit Gregory Swanson, the Negro student who challenged its policy of segregation. Confident that this wrong could be righted quickly, Mrs. Boyle, the wife of a professor at the University, went forth to do her share—to meet not only with the burning crosses of white hatred but with decided wariness on the part of Negroes. Here is the story of Mrs. Boyle’s lonely struggle—the more courageous for her aristocratic Virginia background and traditional Southern upbringing. It is also the story of her painful re-education—of a Southerner’s discovery of “the real Negro, the real white man, and herself.” A fascinating, reaffirming read. “It should be read by everyone with the brotherhood of man.”—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “A most interesting and revealing book, honest, compassionate. The South needs it; Negroes need it; northerners need it. It is beautiful in its candor and deeply moving....”—Lillian Smith
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In the segregated South of the early twentieth century, unwritten rules guided every aspect of individual behavior, from how blacks and whites stood, sat, ate, drank, walked, and talked to whether they made eye contact with one another. Jennifer Ritterhouse asks how children learned this racial "etiquette," which was sustained by coercion and the threat of violence. More broadly, she asks how individuals developed racial self-consciousness. Parental instruction was an important factor--both white parents' reinforcement of a white supremacist worldview and black parents' oppositional lessons in respectability and race pride. Children also learned much from their interactions across race lines. The fact that black youths were often eager to stand up for themselves, despite the risks, suggests that the emotional underpinnings of the civil rights movement were in place long before the historical moment when change became possible. Meanwhile, a younger generation of whites continued to enforce traditional patterns of domination and deference in private, while also creating an increasingly elaborate system of segregation in public settings. Exploring relationships between public and private and between segregation, racial etiquette, and racial violence, Growing Up Jim Crow sheds new light on tradition and change in the South and the meanings of segregation within southern culture.
Freedom Libraries: The Untold Story of Libraries for African-Americans in the South. As the Civil Rights Movement exploded across the United States, the media of the time was able to show the rest of the world images of horrific racial violence. And while some of the bravest people of the 20th century risked their lives for the right to simply order a cheeseburger, ride a bus, or use a clean water fountain, there was another virtually unheard of struggle—this one for the right to read. Although illegal, racial segregation was strictly enforced in a number of American states, and public libraries were not immune. Numerous libraries were desegregated on paper only: there would be no cards given to African-Americans, no books for them read, and no furniture for them to use. It was these exact conditions that helped create Freedom Libraries. Over eighty of these parallel libraries appeared in the Deep South, staffed by civil rights voter registration workers. While the grassroots nature of the libraries meant they varied in size and quality, all of them created the first encounter many African-Americans had with a library. Terror, bombings, and eventually murder would be visited on the Freedom Libraries—with people giving up their lives so others could read a library book. This book delves into how these libraries were the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, and the remarkable courage of the people who used them. They would forever change libraries and librarianship, even as they helped the greater movement change the society these libraries belonged to. Photographs of the libraries bring this little-known part of American history to life.
"An eye-opening account of southern white women who worked to challenge racial segregation. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice "Brings to life a small but important group of women who worked hard to change the South. . . . It will help to more fully explicate the motivation and experiences of women willing to challenge expected behavior in order to bring racial justice to the region and the nation."--American Historical Review "Stefani does a stellar job of chronicling southern white women?s confrontation with segregation and white supremacy. . . . A welcome contribution to the growing historiography of little-known civil rights heroines."--North Carolina Historical Review "An intriguing narrative of women whose lives were dramatically shaped by their work in such actions as the Little Rock Central High School desegregation campaign in 1957, the Albany movement in 1961, and Freedom Summer in 1964."--Journal of American History "Extensively researched. . . . A valuable resource for anyone studying white southern women, women?s civil rights activism, and women?s activism across race, religion, and time."--Journal of Southern History "Stefani redefines the proverbial 'southern lady' with a close look at over fifty white, anti-racist women. Concentrating on traits that linked these women across two generations, Unlikely Dissenters provides the first comprehensive study of how these southern women both employed and destroyed a stereotype."--Gail S. Murray, editor of Throwing Off the Cloak of Privilege "Presents a sophisticated and well-supported argument that women such as Lillian Smith, Virginia Durr, and Anne Braden challenged white supremacy at its core while knowing that they would be regarded as traitors to their race, region, and gender in doing so."--Peter B. Levy, author of Civil War on Race Street Between 1920 and 1970, a small but significant number of white women confronted the segregationist system in the American South, ultimately contributing to its demise. For many of these reformers, the struggle for African American civil rights was akin to their own complex process of personal emancipation from gender norms. As part of the white community, they wrestled with guilt as members of the "oppressor" group. Yet as women in a patriarchal society, they were also "victims." This paradoxical double identity enabled them to develop a special brand of activism that combatted white supremacy while emancipating them from white patriarchy. Using the 1954 Brown decision as a pivot, Anne Stefani examines and compares two generations of white women who spoke out against Jim Crow while remaining deeply attached to their native South. She demonstrates how their unique grassroots community-oriented activism functioned within--and even used to its advantage--southern standards of respectability.
Unmasking the Klansman may read like a work of fiction but is actually a biography of Asa Carter, one of the South's most notorious white supremacists (and secret Klansman). During the 1950s, the North Alabama political firebrand became known across the region for his right-wing radio broadcasts and leadership in the white Citizens’ Council movement. Combining racism and thinly-concealed anti-Semitism, he created a secret Klan strike force that engaged in a series of brutal assaults, including an attack on jazz singer Nat King Cole as well as militant civil rights activists. Exploring his life during these years offers new insights into the legal maneuvers as well as the violence used by white Southern segregationists to derail the civil rights movement in the region. In the early 1960s Carter became a secret adviser to George Wallace and wrote the Alabama governor’s infamous 1963 inauguration speech vowing "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." When Carter disappeared from Alabama in 1972, few knew that he had assumed a new identity in Abilene, Texas, masquerading as a Cherokee American novelist. Using the name “Forrest” Carter, he published three successful Western novels, including The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, which Clint Eastwood made into a widely acclaimed 1976 movie. His last book, The Education of Little Tree (a fake biography of his supposed Indian childhood) posthumously became a number one best-seller in 1991. Author Dan T. Carter uncovered “Forrest” Carter’s true identity while researching his biography of Georgia Wallace and in a New York Times’ op-ed he exposed Carter’s deception. Although the difficulties of uncovering the full story of the secretive Carter initially led him to abandon the project, in 2018 he gained access to more than two hundred interviews by the late Anniston newsman, Fred Burger. These recordings and his two decades of exhaustive research finally brought Asa Carter’s story into focus. Unmasking the Klansman is the result.