Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White

by William Sturkey

Overview

Winner of the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize
Benjamin L. Hooks Award Finalist

“An insightful, powerful, and moving book.”
—Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice

“Sturkey’s clear-eyed and meticulous book pulls off a delicate balancing act. While depicting the terrors of Jim Crow, he also shows how Hattiesburg’s black residents, forced to forge their own communal institutions, laid the organizational groundwork for the civil rights movement.”
—New York Times

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. There you can still see remnants of the shops and churches where, amid the violence and humiliation of segregation, men and women gathered to build a remarkable community. Hattiesburg takes us into the heart of this divided town and deep into the lives of families on both sides of the racial divide to show how the fabric of their existence was shaped by the changing fortunes of the Jim Crow South.

“Sturkey’s magnificent portrait reminds us that Mississippi is no anachronism. It is the dark heart of American modernity.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk

“When they are at their best, historians craft powerful, compelling, often genre-changing pieces of history…William Sturkey is one of those historians…A brilliant, poignant work.”
—Charles W. McKinney, Jr., Journal of African American History

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674248274
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Pages:	456
Sales rank:	440,181
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.25(d)

About the Author

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 previous book was To Write in the Light of Freedom, coedited with Jon Hale. Hattiesburg won the 2020 Zócalo Book Prize.

Table of Contents

Introduction: People of Spirit 1

1 Visionaries 10

2 The Bottom Rail 37

3 The Noble Spirit 57

4 A Little Colony of Mississippians 79

5 Broken Promises 102

6 Those Who Stayed 125

7 Reliance 146

8 Community Children 167

9 Salvation 190

10 A Rising 211

11 Crying in the Wilderness 234

12 When the Movement Came 264

Conclusion: Changes 295

Archival Abbreviations 311

Notes 313

Acknowledgments 425

Index 429

Editorial Reviews

In this masterful biography of an American place, Sturkey compels us to look anew at the world made by white supremacy and remade by the black freedom struggle. Hattiesburg is a timely reminder of how much remains to be said about our shared, segregated past, and few have said more in a single book than this author. This bold, imaginative book is essential reading for anyone seeking to fathom Jim Crow’s rise, fall, and resilience—in Mississippi and well beyond.

Jason Morgan Ward

Illuminating… Sturkey’s clear-eyed and meticulous book pulls off a delicate balancing act. While depicting the terrors of Jim Crow, he also shows how Hattiesburg’s black residents, forced to forge their own communal institutions, laid the organizational groundwork for the civil rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s.

New York Times

Sturkey provides a moving account of the evil of white supremacy.

Choice

When they are at their best, historians craft powerful, compelling, often genre-changing pieces of history…William Sturkey is one of those historians…A brilliant, poignant work of history…Shows us—in a powerful way—the utility of taking a longer, more systematic view of the Jim Crow period.

Journal of African American History

Hattiesburg is where racial democracy meets white supremacy, where technology meets nature, where old slavery money meets the indebted sharecropper, where imagination meets the unimaginable, where the ballot meets the bullet. Sturkey’s magnificent portrait reminds us that Mississippi is no anachronism. It is the dark heart of American modernity.

Robin D. G. Kelley

Hattiesburg, Mississippi, was the quintessential New South city, built on the promise of quick cash and persistent oppression. In this brilliantly braided history, William Sturkey shows how African Americans made it into a place of opportunity, community, resilience, and rebellion. Hattiesburg is an insightful, powerful, and moving book.

Kevin Boyle

Sturkey’s beautifully written portrait of Hattiesburg, Mississippi—from its founding after the Civil War through the emergence of the modern civil rights movement—offers a fresh history of Jim Crow’s development and decline, unlike any other I have read. Sturkey features people with agency, acting to shape their lives and improve their community, while showing how these individuals were acting within the context of broad economic trends related to war, depression, migration, and more. A wonderfully compelling book.

Emilye Crosby

Sturkey's book is a study in unintended consequences—a portrait of a Mississippi town from its founding in 1882 through the depredations of racial apartheid, ending with a brief coda on the civil rights movement. The close-up view affords us the chance to learn how segregation operated on the most intimate level, in the everyday experiences of Hattiesburg's residents. The personal histories of black and white townspeople are recounted in alternating chapters, showing the unexpected points at which they diverge and intersect—all the better to understand what the historian C. Vann Woodward called "the strange career of Jim Crow"…Sturkey's cleareyed and meticulous book pulls off a delicate balancing act. While depicting the terrors of Jim Crow, he also shows how Hattiesburg's black residents, forced to forge their own communal institutions, laid the organizational groundwork for the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s.

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

01/14/2019

Civil rights historian Sturkey (To Write in the Light of Freedom) turns his eye to the Jim Crow–era South to tell the maddening racial history of Hattiesburg, Miss. Sturkey chooses Hattiesburg because of its role as the quintessential city of the post-Reconstruction New South and its eventual importance to the civil rights movement. The book ranges from the city’s founding in 1882 to the beginning of the Freedom Summer of 1964 and alternates between the perspectives and experiences of black and white Hattiesburgers. This narrative structure makes clear the stark contrast between the parallel but unequal experiences of black residents and white ones under Jim Crow. He lays bare the perpetual fear of unsanctioned violence faced by African-Americans, from casual verbal and physical abuse to lynchings, and discrimination, as in a garment factory that arrived in the city in the late 1930s that hired only whites. Sturkey writes using such scholarly conventions as endnotes, but the complex portrait of the city that emerges is an accessible one. Hattiesburg is not connected in the popular mind with civil rights history in the way of Selma and Montgomery, but Sturkey’s vibrant history makes a strong case that, to understand how the civil rights movement emerged, it’s essential to spend time there. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

When they are at their best, historians craft powerful, compelling, often genre-changing pieces of history…William Sturkey is one of those historians…A brilliant, poignant work of history…Shows us—in a powerful way—the utility of taking a longer, more systematic view of the Jim Crow period.

Journal of African American History - Charles W. McKinney Jr.