Hattiesburg, William Sturkey
Hattiesburg, William Sturkey
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Hattiesburg
An American City In Black And White

Author: William Sturkey

Narrator: Bill Andrew Quinn

Unabridged: 13 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/25/2019

Synopsis

If you really want to understand Jim Crow—what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it—you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. William Sturkey introduces us to both old-timers and newcomers who arrived in search of economic opportunities promised by the railroads, sawmills, and factories of the New South. He also takes us across town and inside the homes of white Hattiesburgers to show how their lives were shaped by the changing fortunes of the Jim Crow South.

Sturkey reveals the stories behind those who struggled to uphold their southern "way of life" and those who fought to tear it down—from William Faulkner's great-grandfather, a Confederate veteran who was the inspiration for the enigmatic character John Sartoris, to black leader Vernon Dahmer, whose killers were the first white men ever convicted of murdering a civil rights activist in Mississippi. Through it all, Hattiesburg traces the story of the Smith family across multiple generations, from Turner and Mamie Smith, who fled a life of sharecropping to find opportunity in town, to Hammond and Charles Smith, in whose family pharmacy Medgar Evers and his colleagues planned their strategy to give blacks the vote.

About William Sturkey

William Sturkey is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he teaches courses on African American history and the history of the American South. His first book, To Write in the Light of Freedom, coedited with Jon Hale, brought together the newspapers, essays, and poems produced by young black students of the Freedom Schools during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Grace on October 18, 2022

Hattiesburg. I'd never heard of the town before, I had no idea whether it was historically/culturally/religiously important to the US. But the title caught my eye. A side by side of Black and White experience. Interesting. And indeed, it was interesting. Although it moved slowly, it is a detailed hist......more

Goodreads review by Jayne on April 25, 2021

How many bubbles are in a bar of soap? If you were an African American citizen in Forrest County, Mississippi in the 1950’s, this is the literacy test question you would face when you presented yourself to the county registrar in an attempt to register to vote. In 1955, out of 7406 age-eligible black......more

Goodreads review by JoAnn Bishop on January 27, 2021

Starts out slow...boring almost...but picks up further in. I live right outside Hattiesburg so was interested in its history. I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a great town and has come a long way from those previous years that the author writes about, thank goodness. A good read if you’re into history.......more

Goodreads review by Sean on January 31, 2025

I don’t know what I was expecting, but this is essentially a very boring textbook for a class that nobody would sign up for. I’ve read a ton of books about cities in the south, and especially those in my home state of Mississippi. This is by far the most blah I’ve read. True to the city that it is w......more

Goodreads review by Tanya on October 22, 2019

I love bookclub! This book was hard to read, and the authorial tone and stance made me pretty mad, until I had a chance to talk it through with other smart readers. I didn't LOVE this book -- it feels like the content of an undergraduate course -- lots of piling up the evidence and explaining, less re......more

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