Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Rituals of Initiation and Rebellion: Adolescent Responses to Segregation in Southern Autobiography

Rituals of Initiation and Rebellion: Adolescent Responses to Segregation in Southern Autobiography ESSAY by Melton McLaurin ? Lillian Smith's Our Faces, Our Words, a young northern-born and -educated African American come south to join the civil rights movement reflects upon his experiences in the field with southern youths, black and white. Young southerners of both races, he realizes, have so much in common that at times he feels segregated from them. The foundation for this relationship between young southerners of both races, he concludes, is their shared memories. "These south- erners are tied and tangled in a web of common memories they can't escape and don't want to escape," he writes. They are bound by memories of common foods, hot southern summers, and shared activities. A more insightful observation follows this eloquently expressed, if not original, concept: The South's residents, the young man notes, are also bound by "common hurts; each [race] hurt in a different way by that old barbed wire of segregation but both hurt. And they know it."1 The virtual wellspring of southern autobiography published since the outbreak of the Second World War strikingly supports the validity of this young northern black's observation. Practically all these autobiographies explore to some extent the seemingly intractable problem of race, http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Southern Cultures University of North Carolina Press

Rituals of Initiation and Rebellion: Adolescent Responses to Segregation in Southern Autobiography

McLaurin, Melton Alonza.
Southern Cultures , Volume 3 (2) – Jan 4, 1997
Download PDF
20 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-north-carolina-press/rituals-of-initiation-and-rebellion-adolescent-responses-to-dLTjA8Tgl0

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of the American South.
ISSN
1534-1488
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

ESSAY by Melton McLaurin ? Lillian Smith's Our Faces, Our Words, a young northern-born and -educated African American come south to join the civil rights movement reflects upon his experiences in the field with southern youths, black and white. Young southerners of both races, he realizes, have so much in common that at times he feels segregated from them. The foundation for this relationship between young southerners of both races, he concludes, is their shared memories. "These south- erners are tied and tangled in a web of common memories they can't escape and don't want to escape," he writes. They are bound by memories of common foods, hot southern summers, and shared activities. A more insightful observation follows this eloquently expressed, if not original, concept: The South's residents, the young man notes, are also bound by "common hurts; each [race] hurt in a different way by that old barbed wire of segregation but both hurt. And they know it."1 The virtual wellspring of southern autobiography published since the outbreak of the Second World War strikingly supports the validity of this young northern black's observation. Practically all these autobiographies explore to some extent the seemingly intractable problem of race,

Journal

Southern Cultures – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Jan 4, 1997

There are no references for this article.