Search results for ""Author W. Ralph Eubanks""

In June of 1957, Governor James Coleman stepped before the cameras of "Meet the Press" and was asked whether the public schools would ever be integrated. "Well, ever is a long time," he replied, "[but] I would say that a baby born in Mississippi today will never live long enough to see an integrated school." In this extraordinary pilgrimage, Library of Congress Publishing Director W. Ralph Eubanks recaptures the feel of growing up during this tumultuous era, deep in rural Mississippi. Vividly re-creating a time and place where even small steps across the Jim Crow line became a matter of life and death, he offers eloquent testimony to a family's grace against all odds. Inspired by the 1998 declassification of files kept by the State Sovereignty Commission-an agency specifically created to maintain white supremacy-the result is a journey of discovery that leads Eubanks not only to surprising conclusions about his own family, but also to harrowing encounters with those involved in some of the era's darkest activities.

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“This is the book all of us Mississippi writers, dead and alive, need to read. It is indeed a strange but glorious sensation to see your literary and geographic lineage so beautifully and rigorously explored and valued as it's still being created.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir The South has produced some of America’s most celebrated authors, and no state more so than Mississippi. Names as diverse as Faulkner, Welty, and Ward have created a literary legacy spanning decades and stretching across lines of class, gender, and race. One thing binds together these wide- ranging perspectives—the land itself. In A Place Like Mississippi, W. Ralph Eubanks explores those ties and the ways in which the Magnolia State has fostered such a bounty of expression. The stories haven’t always been easy to tell; even beautiful landscapes can’t obscure a complicated history. The state’s African American writers have long recounted the fight for equality, forming a lineage of powerful Black voices that continue to speak with urgency in our tumultuous times. Yet underlying those truths is also a deep affection for Mississippi’s places. With the love of a native son, Eubanks pays tribute to the inspiration that can come from the lay of the land, proving that a journey through one state’s literary terrain can help us better understand America as a whole

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