Publications to Note

Louisiana State University Press published Court Carney’s Reckoning with the Devil: Nathan Bedford Forrest in Myth and Memory wrestles with the multifaceted legacy of slave trader, Confederate general and prominent Klansman Nathan Bedford Forrest. More than a hundred years after his 1877 death, the Confederate general’s persona continues to resound with selected groups and exhibit wide-ranging interpretations that reflect the complex interaction of history, memory, and a challenged past. Carney, a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, explores how historical lacunae and erasures continually reshape perceptions of Forrest as well as the Civil War. The author encompasses well-defined periods of Forrest’s commemorations, from the unveiling of statues in Memphis in 1905 to his representation in literature and media and the controversies surrounding his monuments in the 2010s, which culminated with the 2017 removal of the Memphis statue, reflecting the evolving societal perspectives on symbols tied to intolerance. Forrest’s significance lies in his capacity to encompass conflicting narratives ― hero and villain, rebel, and patriot. Professor Carney contends that understanding Forrest’s legacy is essential for comprehending the intricacies of the southern past and its enduring impact on American society. By exploring the fluidity of Forrest’s image, Carney’s work illuminates the nuanced interplay of history, memory, and the ongoing struggle to reckon with a tumultuous past. Carney has penned a critical and captivating volume that tracks the lifespan and legacy of Nathan Bedford Forrest across more than two hundred years. Considering the reality, sentiment, and evaluation, Dr. Carney draws out one of the South’s ― and nation’s ― most infamous characters and demonstrates how he continues to remain within present-day politics and culture. Reckoning with the Devil examines Forrest's role in different periods, including the present and the past. Hardcover $45.00

The University of North Carolina Press published Crystal R. Sanders’ A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs. This works conveys the little-known history of "segregation scholarships" awarded by Southern states to African American post-baccalaureate students wanting to pursue graduate education prior to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Under the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, southern states, if they so desired, could provide African American students graduate possibilities by creating separate but equal graduate programs at tax-supported African American educational institutions of higher learning or by admitting African American students to historically white institutions. Many of those institutions of higher learning opted out of such options. Instead, they paid to send African American students out of state for graduate education. Tennessee was no exception, as exhibited by William Redmond, Jr., a graduate of Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State College (now Tennessee State University), who applied to and denied entrance to the University of Tennessee’s Pharmacy School in 1935. The author of A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle, Dr. Sanders explores African American graduate students who moved to the North, Midwest, and West to further their educational pursuits with segregation scholarships, revealing the many challenges they faced along the way. After Supreme Court’s 1954 unanimious decision in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, segregation scholarships began to decline, however, the desegregation of graduate programs at southern public universities was dilatorious. In illuminating this narrative, Dr. Sanders elucidates how efforts to preserve segregation led to the underfunding of public African American colleges and universities, furthering racial disparity in America’s institutions of higher education. Paperback, $27.95.

Vanderbilt University Press has republished Nashville Metro: The Politics of City-County Consolidation by Brett W. Hawkins with the Foreword by David Briley. Originally published in 1966, four years after the consolidation of Nashville and Davidson County in 1962, Hawkins, who passed in 2022, sought to answer a series of questions. This work provided a comprehensive record of what Nashville understood itself to be at the time. How did it happen? When fewer thoroughgoing reforms had failed elsewhere, how could Nashville accomplish a complete city‑county consolidation? Why in Nashville did the voters outside the central city support consolidation, when in area after area it is typically these voters who defeat reform proposals? First attempted in the late 1950s, why did the consolidation fail in 1958 and succeed in 1962? Hawkins wrote Nashville Metro to answer such questions. One benefit of the author’s approach is how he conveys the conventional wisdom at the time and what the local papers reported and assesses it against what participants told him directly. On June 28, 1962, the charter passed in both the city and the county, despite fifty-five percent of African American voters rejecting the consolidation. Sworn in as the first mayor of Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County on April 1, 1963, Beverly Briley was joined by African Americans Mansfield Douglas, John Driver, and Harold Love, Sr., who joined Looby and Lillard among the forty members of the first Metropolitan Council. The new foreword by Judge David Briley — former Nashville mayor (Seventh Mayor of Nashville and Davidson County) and grandson of the first metro Nashville mayor, Beverly Briley — offers a firsthand account of the realities of metropolitan government sixty years plus years later. On Vanderbilt University Presses Vintage Series, this tome is worth reading, especially for native Nashvillians and those who now call Nashville home to understand what the capital of Tennessee’s metropolitan form of government is and why its citizens chose to reorganize and consolidate the city and county this way in 1963. Paperback, $24.95.

W.W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. published Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality by Deborah N. Archer. This work is an account of how transportation infrastructure ― from highways and roads to sidewalks and buses ― became a means of protecting segregation and inequality after the fall of Jim Crow. The placement of roads, highways, and bridges has often been used as an instrument to disrupt African American communities, like I-40 and other highway projects dislocated African American communities in Chattanooga, Knoxville, Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee. Twentieth-century transportations decisions maltreated those communities, shattered African American wealth, and destroyed cohesive African American neighborhoods across America.

Archer, an eminent legal scholar, president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), tenured professor, and associate dean at New York University School of Law, makes evident that the success of the Civil Rights Movement and the fall of Jim and Jane Crow in the 1960s did not connote the termination of racial segregation. The dismantling of the status quo would not be easily disassembled. With the separation of the races no longer legal, bureaucrats across the United States ― not just in the South ― turned to the transportation infrastructure to keep Americans divided. Prosperous white communities could no longer be "protected" by racial covenants and segregated shops, but a multilane road, with no pedestrian crossings, could be constructed along its border to make it challenging for people from a lower-income community to visit. Highways could not be routed through Black neighborhoods (as implemented between the late 1950s and the early 1970s,) based on the race of their residents, but those neighborhoods’ lower property values ― a legacy of racial exclusion ― could justify their destruction. A new suburb could not be for "whites only," but planners could refuse to extend sidewalks from African American communities into white ones. Drawing on numerous sources, including interviews with those who now live in the shadow of highways and other major infrastructure projects, Archer presents a sweeping, national account. She assesses the confines of current Civil Rights decrees that can be employed against explicitly discriminatory officials but are less efficacious in addressing deeper, more lasting, fundamental challenges. This volume fills the need in addressing transportation policy that has long been ignored in the decision-making and how the infrastructure ― roads, bridges, and sidewalks impact those who reside therein those communities. Like Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, Dividing Lines is the narration needed to restructure disintegrating concrete, tar, and steel that girds the infrastructure; and refresh a vision of the American future. Hardcover $29.99