How to Litigate a Case Against a White Southerner

Chapter 2 traces the legal journey of African Americans who succeeded in litigating cases against white southerners in the 35 years after the Civil War. In many cases, they litigated suits against the very whites who had enslaved them. The chapter discusses why black southerners turned to the courts and the obstacles they met in attempting to litigate suits against whites. It follows black southerners as they hired lawyers, testified before crowded courtrooms, and appealed their suits to their state’s highest courts. It discusses as well why white lawyers represented black litigants, the motivations of white and black witnesses in such suits, and the considerations of juries and judges deciding civil cases between black and white southerners.

African American Poetic Responses to Faulkner

This chapbook brings together five young writers, Chiyuma Elliott, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Derrick Harriell, Randall Horton, and Jamaal May, in a chapbook of poems that employs an invigorating range of tonalities and moods to engage directly with Faulkner’s writings, characters, and verbal art, as well as with his historical example as a race-haunted white southerner who struggled, often unsuccessfully, with the changing racial landscape of twentieth-century America. A brief preface by Elliott and Harriell situates the group’s efforts in relation to those of precursors like Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), who called on black writers to come to a fuller, firmer reckoning with Faulkner in their work. In the nineteen poems gathered here, Elliott, Griffiths, Harriell, Horton, and May take their place alongside the Komunyakaa of “Tobe’s Blues,” the Lucille Clifton of “My Friend Mary Stone from Oxford Mississippi,” and other black poets who have risen to Madhubuti’s challenge.

Elevated above the Real: The Poor White Southerner in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels

This chapter discusses the work of Cormac McCarthy, whose early novels depicted the poor white southerner. In The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Robert Benson praises McCarthy for his vivid and honest portrayal of east Tennessee and its people—the lower classes in particular. Benson accurately characterizes McCarthy's work as a critical shift in the representation of lower-class characters in southern literature. McCarthy's focus on exploring and illuminating the lives of those often called “white trash” suggests a direct and important link between his work of the 1960s and early 1970s and the work of later southern writers invested in recovering the poor white southerner from the margins of literary representation. And yet, for several reasons, McCarthy's connection to later Rough South writers is decidedly complex. Furthermore, not all critics have been as quick as Benson to praise McCarthy's portrayal of southern poor whites. This chapter examines McCarthy's first three novels: The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark (1968), and Child of God (1973).

Can patriotism justify killing in defense of one’s country?

Cosmopolitan liberals would be ready to fight - and to kill and be killed for the sake of restoring international justice or for the abolition of profoundly unjust political institutions. Patriots are ready to do the same for their own country. Sometimes the cosmopolitan liberals and patriots would fight on the same side and sometimes on the opposite sides of the conflict. Thus the former would join the latter in the defense of Serbia against Austria-Hungary (in 1914) but would oppose the white Southerner patriots in the American Civil War (in 1861). In this paper I argue that fighting and killing for one?s country is, in both of those cases, different from the defense of one?s own life and the lives of those who cannot defend themselves. Killing for one?s country is killing in order to fulfill a particular political preference. The same is the case with fighting for the abolition of a profoundly unjust political institution. It is not amoral or immoral to refuse to kill for any one of these two political preferences because there is no reason to believe that either political preference trumps our moral constraints against killing.