Jacqueline Matte, author of They Say the Wind Is Red: The Alabama Choctaw — Lost in Their Own Land, still remains active with the MOWA Choctaw tribe whose history she documented, including attending the MOWA Choctaw Indians Annual Pow-Wow, held each year in October, “like a homecoming,” Matte says …
Ted Dunagan’s books Secret of the Satilfa and Trouble on the Tombigbee have both been chosen as Accelerated Reader books for students, selected by Renaissance Learning …
The US Postal Service inducted Robert R. Taylor, the United States’ first academically trained African American Architect, into their Black Heritage Stamp series this past week. In a ceremony at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum, Taylor’s great-grandaughter White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett dedicated the stamp with Postmaster General Megan Brennan. As related in historian Ellen Weiss’s book Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee (NewSouth Books), Taylor received an architectural degree at MIT, and was then recruited by Booker T. Washington to teach and and help design the buildings of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (later Tuskegee University). Taylor’s buildings were seen, in defiance of strengthening Jim Crow laws, as a public expression of racial pride and progress. Weiss’s lush hardcover book recounts Taylor’s life and accomplishments alongside over 100 photographs, including a full pictorial catalog of Taylor’s work at Tuskegee University …
One of “Birmingham’s best bars” has a military connection within its long, storied history. A recent AL.com article by Jesse Chambers, Wings of Denial: The Alabama Air National Guard’s Covert Role at the Bay of Pigs, by Warren Trest and Donald Dodd for some of the bar’s history …
The February 2015 edition of the Episcopal Journal offers a full-page feature on Reverend Phil Noble’s book Beyond the Burning Bus: The Civil Rights Revolution in a Southern Town, and the events in Anniston, Alabama, that lead to the city’s formation of the Human Relations Council. With racial tension in the news and resurgent interest in the Civil Rights Movement with the release of the movie Selma, Noble’s first-hand account of the violence and reconciliation in his town remains required reading …
A new review in the Journal of Architectural Education calls Ellen Weiss’s biography of African American architect Robert R. Taylor “a vital addition to architectural history, African American studies, the history of education, history of the South, and that of campus architecture.” Professor Katherine Wheeler writes that Weiss’s book deftly details “the challenges black architects faced in the South after the Civil War, as well as underlining the importance of architecture’s role in promoting racial equality” …
Greenhorn, a new movie based on author Anna Olswanger’s illustrated book of the same name published by NewSouth Books, premiered this past October in special showings at the Museum of Tolerance in Manhattan. Greenhorn tells the story of Daniel, a young Holocaust survivor who arrives to live at a New York yeshiva in 1946. He is befriended by Aaron, who stutters, and the two boys bond in the face of taunting from the other children. The Jewish Standard‘s Abigail Klein Leichman covered the screening and spoke with Olswanger …
In recognition of the new edition of esteemed civil rights lawyer Fred Gray’s memoir, Bus Ride to Justice, Case Western’s Think Magazine‘s Bill Lubinger spoke with Gray about his experiences at the school and about his experiences with Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other civil rights events. They also talked about the new movie Selma, produced by Oprah Winfrey, in which Cuba Gooding Jr. has been cast as Gray …
Voices Beyond Bondage: An Anthology of Verse by African Americans of the 19th Century, which seeks to reveal the largely unknown literary heritage of enslaved and free African Americans of that era, received prominent coverage recently with an Associated Press article and a discussion on the Tavis Smiley radio show …
Writer and historian Frye Gaillard was a long-time friend of country music legend George Hamilton IV, who died Wednesday. Gaillard’s tribute to Hamilton will be read at Hamilton’s memorial service: “… That was George Hamilton IV, a country music star who refused to act like one. If he had — if he had surrounded himself with the pomp and trappings of stardom — I have no doubt that he would already be in the Country Music Hall of Fame, a lapse, I assume, that could still be remedied …”