Music

Mrs. Mary D. Williams, one of the best gospel singer-scholars in the country, is a key part of the teaching staff.  Every week we will open our time together with music.  Mrs. Williams will perform songs and also teach us songs.  By running this music through our bodies, we immerse ourselves in Southern culture, much the same as we do by reading fiction or history.  Please focus when the music begins and participate appropriately.  Anyone who disrespects Mrs. Williams while she is singing will be asked to leave.  These songs are a central text for the course.

Content Overview

This course focuses on the history and culture of the American South, a region of the heart, the mind, and the United States where democracy has been envisioned and embattled with global consequences.  The reverberations of these struggles have been as contradictory, volatile and visionary as the South's own politics; from a region almost synonymous with oppression, the liberating voice of the black South still resonates around the world, wherever people resist what Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. called the "thingification" of human beings.  But Southern culture, black and white, has furnished an irresistible, if sometimes ironic and always polyrhythmic, drumbeat of freedom across the twentieth century.  

Outnumbered and outgunned, black Southerners fought white domination, sometimes openly defiant, more often masked by "myriad subtleties," in Paul Laurence Dunbar's phrase. It is more than coincidence that black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow created the blues, gospel, jazz, and a literary renaissance that was hardly confined to Harlem.  Culture, of course, will not stay in a color-coded box.  Despite the color line-in some ways, perhaps, because of the color line-- the South's painful humanity, black and white, produced the most compelling expressive culture in the history of the world.  

The call and response between black and white cultures in the South has been as compelling as the chasm between them.  This course will survey Southern history and culture in black and white, in print and music, in film and oratory, in religion and politics, seeking both to place the black freedom struggle in a broader context and to explore the range and complexity of Southern life in this tumultuous century. This course argues, as W.E.B. Du Bois did more than a hundred years ago, that to trace the conversation along and beyond the color line in the South is to understand the history of the twentieth century. 

Course Format

"The South in Black and White" is a lecture and discussion course open to students at Duke, UNC, and North Carolina Central University, and also to the larger community; this is intended to be public education in the largest sense, education about public and civic life conducted as an expression of public and civic life.  This course will constitute a kind of front porch on Southern history, where we will join those whom Zora Neale Hurston called "the big picture talkers" and hear their stories.  We meet Tuesday evenings for two and a half hours in the historic Hayti Heritage Center at St. Joseph's Church on Fayetteville Street in Durham.  Each week there will be music, poetry, film clips, and opportunities for discussion.  Activists, scholars, and musicians, among others, will make oral history presentations, musical and dramatic performances, and guest lectures.  There will be music, poetry, documents and stories every day.  We will explore a history as rich and complicated, painful and delightful as the South itself.

Course Reading Materials

The unusual breadth of the course makes a "quilt" model-something useful and beautiful, patched together from many types of material by a community of people-the most appealing and practical approach to readings.  

Tyson, Radio Free Dixie
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Greene, Our Separate Ways
Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name
Carla Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters
Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography
Neil McMillen, Remaking Dixie
John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
Chafe, et. al., Remembering Jim Crow
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow
 Ida B. Wells, A Red Record
Tera Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War
Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry
 Gene Cheek, The Color of Love
Leon Prather, We Have Taken a City
Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1901
William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights
 John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom
Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home
Glenn Eskew, But for Birmingham
Andrew Manis, A Fire They Can't Put Out: the Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth
David Garrow, Bearing the Cross
Danielle McGuire, "'It Was Like We Had All Been Raped,'" Journal of American History, 91, No. 3, (December 2004): 906-931
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters
William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights
John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom
Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home
Glenn Eskew, But for Birmingham
Andrew Manis, A Fire They Can't Put Out: the Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth 
David Garrow, Bearing the Cross