Ellen Weiss discusses legacy of Robert R. Taylor with US Postal Service
Dr. Ellen Weiss, author of Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee: An African American Architect Designs for Booker T. Washington (NewSouth Books, 2011), recently spoke with the US Postal Service in an interview about Robert R. Taylor. Taylor, the first academically trained African American architect in the United States, designed buildings for Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University). On February 12, the US Postal Service inducted Taylor into their Black Heritage stamp series …
Vince Matthews event, CD release with Frye Gaillard at Country Music Hall of Fame
On Saturday, June 6, 2015, Frye Gaillard will read from his book, Watermelon Wine: Remembering the Golden Years of Country Music, at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. Gaillard will be part of a celebration of the life and legacy of the late Vince Matthews, a songwriter whose songs were recorded by Johnny Cash, Gordon Lightfoot, Crystal Gayle, Gene Watson, Charlie Pride, Waylon Jennings and others …
Remembering Guy Carawan, civil rights activist and folk singer
Civil rights activist and folk singer Guy Carawan died on May 3 after a long illness. Guy and his wife Candie co-authored Sing For Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs, published by NewSouth Books in 2007. Carawan was perhaps best known for introducing the song “We Shall Overcome” to the civil rights movement. In a tribute to the musician, National Public Radio featured excerpts from an archived story on the song …
Journey to the Wilderness by Frye Gaillard a beautiful “meditation” on how Civil War is remembered
Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family’s Civil War Letters, by award-winning author Frye Gaillard and newly published by NewSouth Books, has garnered strong early reviews. Readers praise the elegance of Gaillard’s prose and the insight of his commentary on a very personal topic: his ancestors’ Civil War experiences and his own changing view of the war from his typical Southern upbringing through his adult reflections on its effects and meaning …
The Week on Bob Zellner’s walk to protest demise of rural American healthcare
The USA edition of the British paper The Week featured Bob Zellner (pictured fourth from left), author of The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, published by NewSouth Books, in a article on the partnership between a conservative and a progressive activist advocating on behalf of rural healthcare, an endangered species …
Guy and Candie Carawan honored for lifetime of social justice cultural education
Guy and Candie Carwan, authors of Sing For Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs, published by NewSouth Books, were honored recently by the East Tennessee Historical Society, the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, McClung Historical Collection, and the Knox County Public Library with a celebration of their work for social justice. The program included a photography exhibit, showing of rare video footage from the civil rights era, and a musical performance …
Jacqueline Matte participates in MOWA Choctaw Indians Annual Pow-Wow
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 …
Dunagan’s Secret of the Satilfa, Trouble on the Tombigbee named Accelerated Reader titles
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 …
US Postal Service dedicates Robert R. Taylor Black Heritage stamp
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 …
Birmingham’s Airport Inn bar has Alabama National Guard connection
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 …