Creating Community

Cover

Download PDF (56.5 KB)
 

Title Page, Copyright

Download PDF (33.3 KB)
 

Contents

Download PDF (29.0 KB)
pp. v-vi

Preface

Download PDF (55.1 KB)
pp. vii-

The essays in this volume were generated by a suggestion that we, the editors, made to our colleagues in the Department of Humanities at Alabama State University: to write personal essays on their experiences at ASU that, when taken together, might illuminate some of the institution’s hidden assets. The various faculty who responded interpreted the charge on their own...

Introduction

Download PDF (87.1 KB)
pp. 1-16

The community described in this volume is a diverse one that includes blacks and whites, women and men, the native-born and immigrants from around the world. It is representative of American society and a product of the American dream. That dream has always promised freedom and opportunity...

PART ONE Alabama Black-White Mix

Download PDF (26.5 KB)
pp. 17-

1 / You Can Go Home Again

Download PDF (86.6 KB)
pp. 19-34

During the 1940s and ’50s, Montgomery, Alabama, prided itself on its conservative nature and the fact that it was the so-called Cradle of the Confederacy. Like many southern cities, Montgomery was racially segregated. There were white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods, white schools...

2 / E Pluribus UnumDiscovering Multiculturalism

Download PDF (59.8 KB)
pp. 35-42

I was raised in the South, but I did not know the South. I lived most of my childhood and adolescence in Birmingham, but one day in 1963 I discovered that I did not know Birmingham. My family and I were watching the evening news when the television screen was filled with pictures of boys and...

3 / Genesis of the National Center forthe Study of Civil Rightsand African-American Culture

Download PDF (67.1 KB)
pp. 43-52

Martin L. King Jr., in his Address to the First Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) Mass Meeting, delivered at Montgomery’s Holt Street Baptist Church on December 5, 1955, following the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks, said, “Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the...

PART TWO Region-Wide

Download PDF (26.5 KB)
pp. 53-

4 / I Go to College

Download PDF (86.8 KB)
pp. 55-69

I �nished R. B. Hudson High School May 24, 1957, in Selma, Alabama. There were a hundred and thirty of us in the class of 1957. The occasion was on Friday night at seven in the school auditorium. It was a time of great anticipation for all of us. I had waited a long time for this moment, for I...

5 / Living a Womanist Legacy

Download PDF (69.5 KB)
pp. 70-80

“When Martin Luther King started the Montgomery Bus Boycott—” “What?” I interrupted, as if to stop a crime. “King didn’t start the boycott,” I explained. “The Women’s Political Council did!” The student in my Alabama State University World History class nodded acquiescence as he...

6 / I Pledge Allegiance toMy “Black-Eyed Susan” University [Contains Image Plates]

Download PDF (153.1 KB)
pp. 81-92

In the fall of 1987, my husband and I moved with our children to Montgomery, Alabama, to work at Alabama State University. In moving from Jackson, Mississippi, I left behind what I had considered a utopia: we were surrounded by family and friends, had a good working environment, and...

PART THREE Non-SouthernWhat Difference?

Download PDF (26.6 KB)
pp. 93-

7 / Portrait of the Artist as a Young White Man

Download PDF (54.2 KB)
pp. 95-100

To the best of my knowledge, there were no African Americans living in DeKalb County, Indiana, when I was a boy growing up on the farm in the 1950s and ’60s. We lived about a mile from a small town of perhaps a thousand citizens. There were a few streets of dilapidated shacks, owned or rented...

8 / City on a Hill

Download PDF (64.2 KB)
pp. 101-109

Historians try to be objective. That means that when I tell a story I’m supposed to shine a light on the facts while doing my best to hide out in the shadows, as if the story were telling itself without me. But I found a light already shining when I got here, and it’s been changing the way I see things....

9 / Called Home

Download PDF (104.5 KB)
pp. 110-130

In the basement recreation hall of the church of my childhood hung a painting of Jesus with all of the children of the world gathered around him, a huge crowd of girls and boys in costumes from many lands. As a child, I grew up gazing at that painting and affirming its message: God is love, and..

PART FOUR International All Welcome

Download PDF (26.5 KB)
pp. 131-

10 / “You’re Not White, You’re Canadian”Where I Belong

Download PDF (58.2 KB)
pp. 133-139

I am a white Canadian heathen who �nds herself a tenured associate professor of English at a historically black university in the heart of the Bible Belt. I am often asked how I got here, and although I have both a long and short answer, in the end it seems I have ended up exactly where I belong....

11 / The Color BrownAn Asian’s Perspective

Download PDF (69.5 KB)
pp. 140-150

Recently, on a long flight, flipping listlessly through the pages of an in-flight magazine, I came upon an advertisement for a poster on diversity.Beneath a picture of people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds wasan inscription that read, “Great achievements are not born from a singlevision, but from the combination of many distinctive viewpoints.” Diversity...

Afterword

Download PDF (52.4 KB)
pp. 151-156

This volume presents a collection of personal essays in which the writers as faculty members at Alabama State University describe their experiences in the academic community of an HBCU. Each essay provides an expression of what we can learn from each other in an academic setting that accepts..

Appendix: America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Download PDF (31.2 KB)
pp. 157-160

Bibliography

Download PDF (53.8 KB)
pp. 161-166

Contributors

Download PDF (109.8 KB)
pp. 167-170

Index

Download PDF (65.4 KB)
pp. 171-180