The Exodus Down South

With essays by Blyden Jackson, Dernoral Davis, Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, Carole Marks, James R. Grossman, and William Cohen and Neil R. McMillen What were the causes that motivated legions of black southerners to immigrate to the North? What was the impact upon the land they left and upon the communities they chose for their new homes? Perhaps no pattern of migration has changed America's socioeconomic structure more than this mass exodus of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. Because of this exodus, the South lost not only a huge percentage of its inhabitants to northern cities like Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia but also its supply of cheap labor. Fleeing from racial injustice and poverty, southern blacks took their culture north with them and transformed northern urban centers with their churches, social institutions, and ways of life. In Black Exodus eight noted scholars consider the causes that stimulated the migration and examine the far-reaching results.

The Exodus: A Collection of Poetry is a unique and special look into the soul of author Leonard J. Warrick. His poems were written in the winter of 2004-2005, when the author was 38 years old, and encompass the social, economical and spiritual epitaphs of that time. It takes place in wake of the presidential election in November 2004, when there was a strong mood of pessimism overriding the spirit of Black America. His poems "A Forgotten People" and "An Election Day Aftermath" reveal hidden truths the media never reported. The transcending quality in the evolution of American history and culture has brought an awakening to the author about his true identity. The political, personal and historical persons that contributed in influencing the author as well as American society are included. Leonard J. Warrick was shaped by his legal guardian's mother, who was the descendant of an Indian chief father and a freed slave mother. Others who impacted his life were his first grade teacher, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., President Bill Clinton, Malcolm X, singer Billie Holiday and Professor W.E.B DuBois. The Exodus is a creative effort aimed at instilling a concept of self-love, respect and forgiveness within American Black people - who are by the deliberate account of lost history - the true Jews!

Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935

From the seventeenth century Cavaliers and Uncle Tom's Cabin to Civil Rights museums and today's conflicts over the Confederate flag, here is a brilliant portrait of southern identity, served in an engaging blend of history, literature, and popular culture. In this insightful book, written with dry wit and sharp insight, James C. Cobb explains how the South first came to be seen--and then came to see itself--as a region apart from the rest of America. As Cobb demonstrates, the legend of the aristocratic Cavalier origins of southern planter society was nurtured by both northern and southern writers, only to be challenged by abolitionist critics, black and white. After the Civil War, defeated and embittered southern whites incorporated the Cavalier myth into the cult of the "Lost Cause," which supplied the emotional energy for their determined crusade to rejoin the Union on their own terms. After World War I, white writers like Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner and other key figures of "Southern Renaissance" as well as their African American counterparts in the "Harlem Renaissance"--Cobb is the first to show the strong links between the two movements--challenged the New South creed by asking how the grandiose vision of the South's past could be reconciled with the dismal reality of its present. The Southern self-image underwent another sea change in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, when the end of white supremacy shook the old definition of the "Southern way of life"--but at the same time, African Americans began to examine their southern roots more openly and embrace their regional, as well as racial, identity. As the millennium turned, the South confronted a new identity crisis brought on by global homogenization: if Southern culture is everywhere, has the New South become the No South? Here then is a major work by one of America's finest Southern historians, a magisterial synthesis that combines rich scholarship with provocative new insights into what the South means to southerners and to America as well.

Exodus in the Jewish Experience: Echoes and Reverberations investigates how the Exodus has been, and continues to be, a crucial source of identity for both Jews and Judaism. It explores how the Exodus has functioned as the primary model from which Jews have created theological meaning and historical self-understanding. It probes how and why the Exodus has continued to be vital to Jews throughout the unfolding of the Jewish experience. As an interdisciplinary work, it incorporates contributions from a range of Jewish Studies scholars in order to explore the Exodus from a variety of vantage points. It addresses such topics as: the Jewish reception of the biblical text of Exodus; the progressive unfolding of the Exodus in the Jewish interpretive tradition; the religious expression of the Exodus as ritual in Judaism; and the Exodus as an ongoing lens of self-understanding for both the State of Israel and contemporary Judaism. The essays are guided by a common goal: to render comprehensible how the re-envisioning of Exodus throughout the unfolding of the Jewish experience has enabled it to function for thousands of years as the central motif for the Jewish people.

“In this book the author has endeavored to reach historical results through external evidence, particularly of an archaeological nature, combined with a critical view of the Old Testament records. It is well known that archaeology and Old Testament history cannot be separated without injury to the latter. This is specially true where the latter concerns such a subject as the Exodus and its various historical problems. Only by the application of trustworthy external evidence can these be properly understood and interpreted. It is the author’s conviction that the more such evidence is available, the greater will be the gain to Biblical history and to the cause of true religion.” —From the Preface