by C. D. Wright
Kennedy, Randall. Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. Pantheon Books, 2002. [With a nod in the title to C. Vann Woodward, this book unearths the whole sordid history of the N-word.]
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom. Harper and Row, 1958.
____. Why We Can’t Wait. Signet Classic, 2000.
____. I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World. Edited by James M. Washington. Harper San Francisco, 1992.
____. A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard. Warner Books, 2001.
[When people say so-and-so is a poet when so-and-so is actually a lyricist or a fashion designer or a dog whisperer or a preacher, it sets my tail on fire, but the Reverend, by any lights, was a poet.]
Lancaster, Bob. The Jungles of Arkansas: A Personal History of the Wonder State. University of Arkansas Press, 1989. [I am very attached to this smart-mouthed journalist’s tucked-up chronicle of the state.]
Rodgers, Clyde Allen. Lives of Quiet Desperation. PublishAmerica, 2004. [Novel by a white sharecropper’s son whose fictitious Uncle Sal said flatly of his native Arkansas Delta, “It is an ugly country, and it gives me a headache... the mosquitoes are bloodthirsty and bold. I am too old to contend, even with a bug.”]
Roy, Beth. Bitters in the Honey: Tales of Hope and Disappointment across Divides of Race and Time. University of Arkansas, 1999. [An independent scholar’s crucial, absorbing account of Little Rock’s infamous year.]
Stockley, Grif. Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919. University of Arkansas Press, 2001. [Not enough has been writ- ten about this unforgivable bloodletting. Stockley’s book begins the exhumation.]
Woodruff, Nan Elizabeth. American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta. Harvard University Press, 2003. [Hallelujah. She nailed it.]
Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Reprint of third revised edition, Oxford University Press, 2002. [Sometimes re- ferred to as the Dean of Southern History. Fluid/ solid from his earliest writings. Pounds.]
The Memphis Commercial Appeal, the Arkansas Gazette, and the Daily Times-Herald were copiously consulted.
Copyright 2010 by C.D. Wright
All rights reserved
Cover art: Deborah Luster, “Pump House, Forrest
City, Arkansas,” 2006.
ISBN: 978-1-55659-388-8
eISBN: 978-1-61932-016-1
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