Published in July 2012, Rebels and Runaways analyzes the various degrees of slave resistance—from the perspectives of both slave and master—and how they differed in various regions of antebellum Florida. In particular, the book demonstrates how the Atlantic world view of some enslaved blacks successfully aided their escape to freedom, a path that did not always lead North but sometimes farther South to the Bahama Islands and Caribbean.

A banquet was held for all Florida Book Awards winners on March 19^th at the Mission San Luis in Tallahassee, FL.

Congratulations Dr. Rivers!

Using a variety of sources such as slaveholders’ wills and probate records, ledgers, account books, court records, oral histories, and numerous newspaper accounts, Dr. Rivers illuminates the historical significance of Florida as a runaway slave haven dating back to the seventeenth century and explains Florida’s unique history of slave resistance and protest.

The award will be presented at the annual FHS Meeting and Symposium, May 23-26.

Congratulations, Dr. Rivers!

“Musician and folklorist Stephen Wade dissects and celebrates the vast diversity
of American culture in The Beautiful Music All Around Us, his book drawn from
the Library of Congress’ vast holdings of field recordings made from 1934 to 1942. . . .
These stories and the recordings — capturing the voices of everyday people, not
pop stars — simply crackle.”

In addition to being a top seller for the University of Illinois Press since its original publication in 2010, Hands on the Freedom Plow has earned numerous plaudits:

-Winner of the Letitia Woods Brown Book Award, sponsored by the Association of Black Women Historians, 2011

-Winner of the 2010 Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change’s National Book Award, 2011

-Received a nomination for the 42nd NAACP Image Awards in the category of Outstanding Literary Work, Nonfiction, 2011

“The stories of the ‘beloved community’ of unknown women in Hands on the Freedom Plow convey a transcendent message of how history can be changed by committed individuals who stand up to what is wrong and live by that old freedom song ‘Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me roun.’”–Essence, Charlayne Hunter-Gault 

“Page after page reveals remarkable stories of courage and defiance. . . . The book opens a window onto the organizing tradition of the Southern civil rights movement.”–The Root 

“Completely upend[s] both traditional and radical histories of the modern civil rights movement by placing women at the center of their narrative and interpretive process.  This is a breathtaking achievement. . . . Because of the power of the storytelling, as a reader I felt as though I were living through events as they were unfolding.  I felt the terror of the violence and the euphoria of triumph.”–Women’s Review of Books

“Powerful, inspiring, and tremendously moving, the oral histories collected here highlight the essential role women played as organizers and activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the South of the early 1960s. . . . Essential reading for anyone interested in the Civil Rights Movement.”–Library Journal

Though the official publication date is still a few weeks away, Hands of the Freedom Plow has started appearing in bookstores and is shipping from our website and major online retailers.

Q:  Who is the “Ghost” in the book’s title?

Blevins:  The “Ghost of the Ozarks” was one of several nicknames the press gave to the man, Connie Franklin, who testified as the trial for his own murder and who may or may not have been an imposter.

Q:  How and when did the murder victim, the “Ghost” of the Ozarks, appear to testify?

Blevins:  A traveling phonograph salesman discovered the “Ghost” working on a farm in the Arkansas Delta about ten days before the trial was to commence and convinced him to turn himself in to authorities more than 100 miles away in the Ozarks.

Q:  How was his testimony perceived?

Blevins:  It depended on who was doing the perceiving. Relatives and friends of the five men accused of the murder of Connie Franklin were, not surprisingly, excited to see him and eagerly proclaimed him the “real” Connie Franklin, while relatives and friends of the accuser (teenaged girl Tiller Ruminer) dismissed the “Ghost” as an imposter and considered his testimony useless at best and part of an elaborate conspiracy at worst.

Q:  Did this event garner much national media attention?

Blevins:  The story of the murder of Connie Franklin and the hobo who claimed to be the murdered man dominated state and regional news for the better part of a month between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 1929, regularly appearing on front pages and in pictorial spreads in daily papers in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Memphis. It also received significant media attention around the nation, with the more sensational wire stories making front-page headlines in daily papers large and small from coast to coast. Two different issues of TIME carried brief articles on the murder story. As a matter of fact, I first came across the story while looking through an old copy of TIME.

Q:  What about this rural region attributed to how this story was perceived nationwide?

Blevins:  Stereotypes of the rural Ozarks and of people in the highland South in general were well established by 1929. Most of the characteristics attributed to these “hillbillies” are familiar to readers today: illiteracy, slovenliness, moonshining, inbreeding, violence, backwardness, etc.  Reporters, especially urban newsmen from places like Kansas City and Memphis, often crafted their stories with these stereotypes in mind, making the regional landscape one of the key characters in the saga.

Q:  What kind of divisions did these murders create in the community?

Blevins:  The chief division was between those who believed the “Ghost” to be the “real” Connie Franklin and those who believed him to be an imposter. These divisions within the community tended to break down along family lines, as people sided with relatives who were involved in the case on one side or the other. The possibility of imposture also caused
other Ozarkers and the reading public to come down on one side or the other. An informal survey conducted by one reporter showed that opinions were evenly split among those with no personal stake in the story.

Q:  Do people in the region still talk about the murder to this day?

Blevins:  It depends on where in the region and who’s doing the talking. For the most part the families of the accused and the accusers exercised an informal gag order that stifled discussion of the case in the years after 1929, so much so that direct descendants of some of the story’s central characters learned about the murder mystery only as young adults and through incidental brushes with the story. Two different descendants told me
that they first heard of the story when they happened across a version of it in a “true crime” serial or magazine years later. And it has been rare for these descendants to discuss the event with anyone not in the family or not from the immediate community. Outside of the immediate community and the families most initimately involved, the story survived in myriad versions among people who grew up in the White River valley. I suppose my family lived too far from the river, for I never heard the folklore of Connie Franklin.

Q:  What’s the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the book?

Blevins:  Just how relevant and emotional a story could remain after more than eighty years. As someone who had primarily written social history before this book, I was excited to write narrative history about a specific event but unprepared for the strong emotions stirred up by my poking into a story that many descendants and community residents felt was better left alone. Several people refused to discuss the event with me, but I was also fortunate to meet a number of interesting, helpful Ozarkers during my years of research. I felt a special obligation to them to recreate the events of 1929 as accurately as possible and to be fair to all the characters involved in a most remarkable story.

*****

Brooks Blevins author photo by Tim Ellis-Darkroom Studio.

Stephen Wade’s forthcoming book The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience will be published in September 2012. Visit Stephen’s information page for details on his new CD and upcoming concert dates.

“For this installment, KSMU’s Emma Wilson interviews the author of a new book that tells the story of a crime so rife with scandal it shocked the nation at the time, and had lasting repercussions for this region and its image.  We’d like to advise you in advance that this report contains a mention of a brutal crime.”

In Spirit of Rebellion, Jarod Roll documents an alternative tradition of American protest by linking working-class political movements to grassroots religious revivals. He reveals how Missouri farmers used their shared traditions and faith to defend their agrarian livelihoods amid the political and economic upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century.

On the frontier of the New Cotton South in Missouri’s Bootheel, the relationships between black and white farmers were complicated by racial tensions and bitter competition. Despite these divisions, workers found common ground as dissidents fighting for economic security, decent housing, and basic health, ultimately drawing on the democratic potential of evangelical religion to wage grassroots revolts against big agribusiness. Roll shows how the moral clarity and spiritual vigor these working people found in Pentecostal revivals gave them the courage to develop an expansive agenda of workers’ rights by tapping into existing organizations such as the Socialist Party, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the NAACP, and the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union.

The Missouri History Book Award is decided by a panel of judges selected by the executive director of the State Historical Society of Missouri. This is the third award that Roll was won for Spirit of Rebellion. He is also the author, with Erik S. Gellman, of The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America, which was published this year by the University of Illinois Press.

A Reading from Spirits of Just Men by Charles Thompson from Charles D. Thompson on Vimeo.

 
See how you can help fund, via a Kickstarter campaign, the documentary film project for Spirits of Just Men: Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen in the Moonshine Capital of the World.

“[Thompson's] book is a fabulous and thorough collection of stories, facts, drama, character portraits, and court proceedings, including a chronicle of the Great Moonshine Conspiracy Trial of 1935. But here’s the good news: It reads smoothly and cleanly, like a tightly woven novel. And it’s about far more than bootlegging, as Moby-Dick is about far more than whaling.”