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Since the knowledge contained in DIXIE BE DAMNED is too fiery for the universities to fund, we had to relocate this talk to LAVA space, which has adequate heating and seating capacity. Learn from two southerners about the untold stories of revolt and insurrection in the south, prison riots and slave uprisings, worker sabotage and other hidden narratives of resistance below the Mason-Dixon, and get a chance to reconsider or recalibrate your conception of the yankee/southerner dichotomy.
[October 25 at 3pm at LAVA 4134 Lancaster Ave]
About the book (From AK PRESS):
In 1891, when coal companies in eastern Tennessee brought in cheap convict labor to take over their jobs, workers responded by storming the stockades, freeing the prisoners, and loading them onto freight trains. Over the next year, tactics escalated to include burning company property and looting company stores. This was one of the largest insurrections in US working-class history. It happened at the same time as the widely publicized northern labor war in Homestead, Pennsylvania. And it was largely ignored, then and now.
Dixie Be Damned engages seven similarly “hidden” insurrectionary episodes in Southern history to demonstrate the region’s long arc of revolt. Countering images of the South as pacified and conservative, this adventurous retelling presents history in the rough. Not the image of the South many expect, this is the South of maroon rebellion, wildcat strikes, and Robert F. Williams’s book Negroes with Guns, a South where the dispossessed refuse to quietly suffer their fate. This is people’s history at its best: slave revolts, multiracial banditry, labor battles, prison uprisings, urban riots, and more.
About the Authors:
NEAL SHIRLEY grew up in Winston-Salem, NC, and now lives in Durham, NC, where he runs a publishing project called the North Carolina Piece Corps.
SARALEE STAFFORD was born in the Piedmont of North Carolina. She teaches gender-related health in Durham, NC.
