Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Star Creek Papers
ISBN: 9780820340234
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of Georgia Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Lynching; African American farmers; Rural schools; African Americans; African Americans;

In 1934, Horace Mann Bond was not yet a renowned educator and author of Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel. While studying the operation of the local black schools in a small farming community in southeastern Louisiana, he and his wife, Julia, lived in a cabin without electricity or running water‘conditions that were no different from those of most people living in the rural South in the 1930s. The couple made friends with their neighbors, and Horace recorded their observations and experiences in the diary that is the basis for this collection of short writings. Bond's interest in black family history, and his curiosity about why so many local black farmers owned their own land, led him to construct a "Portrait of Washington Parrish" through the complex, interconnected genealogies of black and white families. In "The Lynching" and "Forty Acres and a Mule," Horace Bond focused on the family of John Wilson, whose son had been hastily convicted of murder in a bizarre shooting incident by a jury of white men. The young man was subsequently dragged from the jail and beaten to death. Although Horace Bond intended to write a history of the Wilson family from their slave origins to the lynching of Jerome Wilson, he never completed his book. If this collection is fragmentary, it once again proves Horace Bond, who died in 1972, was a shrewd observer of race relations and black family life. Photos not seen by PW. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved