Hattiesburg
An American City in Black and White
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize
Benjamin L. Hooks Award Finalist
“An insightful, powerful, and moving book.”
—Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice
“Sturkey’s clear-eyed and meticulous book pulls off a delicate balancing act. While depicting the terrors of Jim Crow, he also shows how Hattiesburg’s black residents, forced to forge their own communal institutions, laid the organizational groundwork for the civil rights movement.”
—New York Times
If you really want to understand Jim Crow—what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it—you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. There you can still see remnants of the shops and churches where, amid the violence and humiliation of segregation, men and women gathered to build a remarkable community. Hattiesburg takes us into the heart of this divided town and deep into the lives of families on both sides of the racial divide to show how the fabric of their existence was shaped by the changing fortunes of the Jim Crow South.
“Sturkey’s magnificent portrait reminds us that Mississippi is no anachronism. It is the dark heart of American modernity.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk
“When they are at their best, historians craft powerful, compelling, often genre-changing pieces of history…William Sturkey is one of those historians…A brilliant, poignant work.”
—Charles W. McKinney, Jr., Journal of African American History
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Civil rights historian Sturkey (To Write in the Light of Freedom) turns his eye to the Jim Crow era South to tell the maddening racial history of Hattiesburg, Miss. Sturkey chooses Hattiesburg because of its role as the quintessential city of the post-Reconstruction New South and its eventual importance to the civil rights movement. The book ranges from the city's founding in 1882 to the beginning of the Freedom Summer of 1964 and alternates between the perspectives and experiences of black and white Hattiesburgers. This narrative structure makes clear the stark contrast between the parallel but unequal experiences of black residents and white ones under Jim Crow. He lays bare the perpetual fear of unsanctioned violence faced by African-Americans, from casual verbal and physical abuse to lynchings, and discrimination, as in a garment factory that arrived in the city in the late 1930s that hired only whites. Sturkey writes using such scholarly conventions as endnotes, but the complex portrait of the city that emerges is an accessible one. Hattiesburg is not connected in the popular mind with civil rights history in the way of Selma and Montgomery, but Sturkey's vibrant history makes a strong case that, to understand how the civil rights movement emerged, it's essential to spend time there.
