Foster Dickson's Blog, page 56

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Things.”

I’m in my office, scanning a three-rack stack of old cassette tapes. As my finger runs down the middle column of the lower rack, there are Keith Richard’s Main Offender, T. Rex’s Electric Warrior, The Best of the Band . . . Like everything in those racks, each tape has its own story. I can remember liking “Wicked As It Seems” after I saw the video on MTV, a black-and-white montage that featured a near-elderly Keith Richards emerging from the darkness to mumble his lyrics. I can remember discovering T. Rex after seeing that iconic image of Marc Bolan, face covered and top hat on, the look that Slash was copying. I can remember buying The Band’s album as a primer to that group I’d heard about, the one that backed up Bob Dylan in the ’60s.

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Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “The Spirit of Booker T.”

With current scuffles over who gets to be in charge next, writing about Newt Gingrich’s second-place finishes in two Republican primaries in Alabama and Mississippi after he won the primaries in South Carolina and Georgia would be kind of pointless— Santorum prayed louder so he won, and the news media moved right along to some place else. Roy Moore, the “Ten Commandments Judge,” might have made a somewhat compelling subject since he won Alabama’s recent Republican primary for state Supreme Court Chief Justice and now moves one step closer to getting back the job that a federal judge took away from him for refusing to move his intrepidly placed monument back in 2003. But that’s like shooting fish in a barrel, too. The South’s “one-party system,” as V.O. Key, Jr. called it in his 1949 book Southern Politics: In State and Nation, has done little more than shift in recent decades from a Democratic “Solid South” to a Republican same-darn-thing.  Boring. There’s almost nothing more boring than conservative political domination— I guess, unless you’re one of the conservative people doing the dominating. Beyond that, neither Newt nor “Sanctorum” will be the GOP’s national nominee, and Roy Moore’s brand of in-your-face Southern evangelism has been overly documented in infinitesimal sources ranging from texts of hell-fire-and-brimstone sermons to John Kennedy Toole’s The Neon Bible— now, that zealotry just wanders around in the cultural limbo between stereotype and punchline. So let’s talk about something else instead . . .

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Lake Martin Sunsets: A Greatest Hits Collection, 2013 – 2017

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May 24, 2013

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July 20, 2013

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June 5, 2014

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June 19, 2015

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July 6, 2015

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June 3, 2016

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June 25, 2016

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June 3, 2017

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June 15, 2017

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June 30, 2017

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July 1, 2017

#TBT: The Strand Bookstore, 2003

This picture was taken during my first trip to New York City in early 2003. Here, then-NewSouth Books editor Ben Beard and I were standing outside the famed Strand Bookstore, where we went downstairs to see if any of the advance reading copies of our books had been sold.

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Alabamiana: Thomas Reed vs. the Confederate Flag, 1988

In February 1988, when a black Alabama state representative named Thomas Reed was arrested for trying to climb a fence around the state capitol and remove the Confederate flag that was flying on top, the Civil Rights movement had supposedly been over for twenty years. Though marking the end of the Confederacy, whose battle flag was at issue, is fairly easy – with the surrender at Appomattox – marking the end of the Civil Rights movement is not. Had Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death in 1968 truly closed out the movement, perhaps Reed wouldn’t have been at odds with Gov. Guy Hunt over the white segregationist symbolism that remained where state leaders had defiantly placed it in 1961.

Removing Confederate battle flags from public spaces was a divisive issue in the late 1980s and early 1990s Deep South. Even the milk-toast alt-rock band Hootie & the Blowfish sang about this issue in their song, “Drowning.” So, this attempt at removal in Alabama was momentous enough to illicit coverage from The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. The LA Times included reporting about how the issues extended beyond Alabama:

The NAACP is also campaigning to bring down a Confederate flag over the South Carolina Statehouse, as well as to remove rebel flags from the designs of the Georgia and Mississippi state flags.

By the late 1980s, the Civil War had been over for more than 125 years, but that had not stopped the Confederate battle flag’s proponents, whose mantra was “heritage, not hate.” The rhetoric used by supporters of the flag’s continued display proclaimed that its removal was an attempt to censor history, to pretend that the Confederacy never existed, or to allow political correctness to devalue the valiant states-rights stance taken by the fighting men of the South. However, their opponents in this cultural tug-of-war saw it very differently: the flag was, for them, a symbol of a violent and hate-filled tradition of white supremacy that had enabled a system of bondage, forced labor, rape, and lynching; thus, the continued valuation of that flag portended that those sentiments were still viable.

Rep. Thomas Reed, a Democrat from Tuskegee, was then the president of the Alabama NAACP leading his state’s campaign. Reed had been in the legislature since 1970, when African Americans were elected for the first time since Reconstruction. Eighteen years later, he was a definite and prominent voice in Alabama’s post-Civil Rights black community. According to coverage of his arrest from The New York Times, Reed had “previously tried to negotiate with Governor [Guy] Hunt over the issue,” yet Hunt’s retort was: “the flag is viewed by many as historic and without racial connotation.”

Reed was indeed fighting an uphill battle, trying to remove the Confederate flag from Alabama’s state capitol. The Washington Post‘s coverage featured commentary a man who had driven “100 miles to see Reed’s attempt to remove the flag”:

“I feel strong about it, but it’s not racism,” [ . . . ] He said the Confederate flag over the Capitol is “all that we have left. It’s all been taken away. Next, he [Reed] is going to want the name of the South changed.”

The Chicago Tribune shared another man’s sentiment, one common among white Southerners:

“I’ve got ancestors who died under that flag,” Dempsey said. “I think if the rebel flag comes down, the American flag ought to come down also.”

These Lost Cause ideals, however, neglected to parse out the logic that the Confederate flag truly is a rebel flag, and few, if any nations on Earth celebrate the accomplishments and grandeur of defeated rebellions on their own soil.

Ultimately, Thomas Reed failed to achieve his objective in 1988. He was in his early 60s that year and was pretty easily pulled off the fence by state troopers, who were there to stop him. Yet, this back-and-forth hadn’t started that day, nor would it end that day. Another black state representative named Alvin Holmes, a Democrat from Montgomery, had been poking sticks at this snarling dog for some time. A recent WSFA News story offers a timeline showing that Holmes’  federal lawsuits in 1976 (Holmes v. Wallace) and in 1988 (NAACP v. Hunt) to remove the Confederate flag had also failed. However, there was more to come.

Later that year, in November 1988, Thomas Reed was convicted on bribery charges in a matter unrelated to the Confederate flag and lost his seat in the Alabama legislature. However, Reed saw a link. Associated Press coverage explained:

”Judge, I know I’m not guilty,” he said Friday. Reed, a Tuskegee Democrat, blamed his prosecution on his attempt to have the Confederate flag removed from atop the Capitol.

However, as evidence of Reed’s power and influence, he was re-elected to the Alabama legislature after serving his time in prison.

Ultimately, the Confederate battle flag did come down from Alabama’s state capitol due to an Alvin Holmes lawsuit. On his third try, in 1993, Holmes’ legal challenge of the flag’s placement succeeded. In the judgment for Holmes v. Hunt, we see in that ruling that Alabama law “permits only the state and national flags be hoisted and flown over the Capitol dome.” Furthermore, Gov. Guy Hunt was “permanently enjoined from ordering or allowing” any other flag to fly there again.

Yet, it would be 2015, a century-and-a-half after the surrender at Appomattox, and almost a quarter-century since Holmes v. Hunt, when virtually all Confederate symbolism was removed from the state capitol grounds. It was still a touchy subject then— and in some quarters, it still is now.

Revelations from Reading through the Code of Alabama, 1975, Partially out of Boredom

I have this know-it-all tendency that causes me, usually out of boredom but sometimes out of curiosity, to browse government documents, law books, court decisions, local histories, old newspapers, census data, and other generally obscure texts just to see what’s in them. Sometimes I don’t understand them at all, I usually have to look up a handful of unfamiliar terms, and I almost always marvel at the confusing and cumbersome diction, especially in legal writing.

This time, I was compelled for some unbeknownst reason to start reading the online version of Alabama’s code of law, about which I offer these notes on the revelations found within.

from Title 1: General Provisions

1. In Section 1-1-1, the very first point clarified is this: “(1) PERSON. The word “person” includes a corporation as well as a natural person.” I find it interesting that a status enjoyed by corporations is first thing that gets clarified in Alabama state law.

2. Section 1-1-3 defines what a blind person is, and even goes so far as explaining: “a natural person who has no vision or whose vision with correcting glasses is so defective as to prevent the performance of ordinary activities for which eyesight is essential,” etc, etc. This was the third thing clarified. I wonder if that’s because so many people were saying things like, “Even a blind man could see that this won’t work!”

3. In Section 1-2-8, we find that the tarpon is the official salt-water fish of the state. I’ve never heard of a tarpon.

4. In Section 1-2-19, the pecan is established as a the state nut. I, on the other hand, have differing ideas about the state nut.

5. Likewise, in Section 1-2-35, we see that the blackberry is the state fruit. Again, I have other ideas about the most appropriate use of this distinction of state fruit.

6. Section 1-2A-2 explains that Alabama “did not have a flag from 1819 to January 11, 1861, when a resolution was passed designating a flag designed by a group of Montgomery women as the ‘Republic of Alabama Flag.’ One side of this flag displayed, under an arch bearing the words ‘Independent Now and Forever,’ the Goddess of Liberty holding in her right hand an unsheathed sword and in her left hand a small flag with one star. Displayed on the reverse side of this flag were a large cotton plant in full fruit and flower, a coiled rattlesnake, and the Latin words “Noli Me Tangere” (Touch Me Not) beneath the cotton plant.” From 1865 until 1895, Alabama again had no flag.

7. Section 1-3-4 declares that the state’s fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30. This is very helpful to schools, whose year typically runs from August to May.

8. Section 1-3-8, which lists our state holidays, includes three based on Confederate history (Robert E. Lee’s birthday, Jefferson Davis’ birthday, Confederate Memorial Day) but only one based on Civil Rights history (Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday).

9. The language in some subsections is very confusing. Even a post-modern, post-structuralist, non-binary gender critic might struggle for a minute with this one:

Words used in this Code in the past or present tense include the future, as well as the past and present. Words used in the masculine gender include the feminine and neuter. The singular includes the plural, and the plural the singular. All words giving a joint authority to three or more persons or officers give such authority to a majority of such persons or officers, unless it is otherwise declared.

from Title 2: Agriculture

1. Like in Section 1, Section 2-1-1 has an even broader definition of “person,” which can be “An individual, a partnership, a corporation or two or more individuals having a joint or common interest.” Here’s what I don’t get: how could state law ever have defined marriage as involving one man and one woman when legally a “person” could be “two or more people”? 

2. Section 2-1-7 makes it clear that, if you buy beef with state money, it has to be raised and processed in the US. Yet, that rule does not apply to canned meat. No quarrel is raised over where beef jerky must come from.

3. Section 2-2-90, in Article 5, establishes a Center for Alternative Fuels within the Department of Agriculture & industries that should be for “promoting the development and encouraging the use of alternative fuels as a clean, abundant, reliable, and affordable source of energy.” I had no idea that we have such a thing.

4. Section 2-5-11, which is about Farmer’s Markets, deals with “Ejection of Persons from Markets.” The only information there is a one-liner about a 2013 repeal. Which makes me wonder: what do you have to do to get thrown out of a farmer’s market?

5. Farming has lots of rules— about everything.

6. Section 2-32-1 deals with the promoting the ratite industry. I’d never heard of such, so I looked it up, and a ratite is a flightless bird like an emu or ostrich. Section 2-32-12 says that fees from ratite food will be used for”advertising, education, research, production, and sales of ratites and the consumption and use of ratite products.” So, it’s not like we’re diverting social-studies textbook funds to make TV ads for emu meat.

from Title 3: Animals

1. This was getting tedious, but I decided to go through one more section

2. Unlike Titles 1 and 2, which right off the bat addressed the definition of a “person,” Title 3 has its own unique punchy intro: “No person shall keep any dog which has been known to kill or worry sheep or other stock without being set upon the same.” No mean dogs is rule #1.

3. Just so you know: Section 3-1-15 states that you may not sell, trade for, or even give away baby rabbits, baby chicks, or baby ducklings. Don’t do it.

4. You may also not burn or cauterize the teeth of a horse or mule to make it appear younger. That’s in Section 3-1-26 in case you were considering it and need more details.

5. I learned the legal term estray in Chapter 2 of Title 3. It means stray but adds an ‘e’.

6. There are also lots of rules about where livestock can graze and what will happen to people who let their livestock graze where they shouldn’t.

7. Just read the wording in 3-6-1. It’s incredible. I didn’t even know that “therefrom” was a word. Somehow, the people who wrote this in 1953 used 101 words to say this: if you’re dog bites or hurts someone who you allowed onto your property, you’re liable to pay for the damage. I did it in 20 words. Boom!

Southern Book #8: “Apocalypse South”

[image error]From time to time, I browse Callaloo‘s list of books that need to be reviewed to see if any look interesting, and last fall, I noticed Apocalypse South: Judgment, Cataclysm, and Resistance in the Regional Imaginary by Anthony Dyer Hoefer. Even though the title was imposing, and even though it was published in 2012, I requested it anyway, read it and wrote a review, but wasn’t surprised when the review was declined. It would be a little odd, after all, for a journal like Callaloo to publish a review five years after a book’s release date . . .

In Apocalypse South, Hoefer, who is an Assistant Dean at George Mason, offers a heavily academic tract on the juxtapositions of Southern religious and societal ideals as seen through the lens of four distinctly varied Southern fiction writers: William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Randall Kenan, and Dorothy Allison. Bringing together disparate texts that span the middle and late twentieth century using the intricate concept of the “apocalyptic imaginary,” Hoefer argues that we should see these writers’ narratives as examples that point to and challenge a “bivalent” world view that has and still does dominate Southern life.

Apocalypse South opens its discussion with a side-by-side analysis of the lyrics to the 1936 Carter Family song, “No Depression (In Heaven)” and a selection from a 1963 George Wallace speech that warned against race-mixing. Using these messages, Hoefer introduces the presence of the “southern apocalyptic imaginary,” which “maps the apocalyptic possibilities of cataclysm, judgment, deliverance, and even revolution on the landscape of the region.” In both this world and the next, the lines have been drawn – between good and evil, between white and black, between corrupt and pure, between saved and damned – and they are not to be crossed. And if they are, dire consequences are certain to follow.

Hoefer then begins his main argument by examining these ideas in William Faulkner’s 1932 novel Light in August. The emphasis here is on the characters of Lena Grove and Joe Christmas, both of whom embody a violation of Southern evangelical taboos: premarital sex and race-mixing. Lena Grove is pregnant, unmarried, and walking into Mississippi from Alabama to find the man who impregnated then abandoned her. Yet, more significantly, it is the biracial Joe Christmas whose very existence is a violation of the color line; readers watch him grow from an isolated, abused child into a bitter outsider whose turbulent sexual affair with a white woman, Joanna Burden, creates the conditions for him to be lynched. According to Hoefer, for the mob in Jefferson that lynches Joe Christmas, the “ability to recognize these threats (that is, to identify and name evil) is interpreted as a sign of one’s holiness (that is, his or her exceptional status among the Elect or Chosen).” He also emphasizes the communal need to remove the threat of race-mixing through blood ritual: “Within the logic of segregation, pollution and contamination are not synonymous with blackness, but with ambiguity and miscegenation.” It is not the individual African American per se that these violent Southern evangelical whites fear, but the notion that African-American people might mix with them freely in a way that blurs the lines and disallows a defined either-or. Thus, for the whites, the lynching answers “taboo” with a “sacrifice” to avoid “apocalypse.”

Following that chapter, the argument continues with Richard Wright’s 1938 story collection Uncle Tom’s Children. Beginning this time with the lyrics to Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam,” the critical inquiry contends with themes related to history and time in Wright’s stories, which commingle his Marxist ideals with his Southern evangelical upbringing.  Wright, asserts Hoefer, did not view life in typical terms for an African American in the South. Rather than waiting on “the possibility of a rupture, of a radical break and a totalizing apocalyptic reordering or an oppressive social order,” Richard Wright’s stories show that, for a people whose lives are stagnated outside of time, taking action is a better option than waiting on Judgment Day. Hoefer comments on “the black subject’s alienation from history” and even shares with us that “[m]any Wright scholars have contended that his work fails to recognize the possibilities of black religion.” Thus, the violent episodes in Wright’s fiction are “terrifying experiences that might awaken African Americans to the necessity of active resistance,” and offer “the possibility of ruptures in time and of insights that should provoke action.” Putting Faulkner together with Wright in this first section, Hoefer compares biracial Joe Christmas’ hopeless fate as a lynching victim to Wright’s insistence that action is a viable source of hope in a black struggle against an oppressive “bivalent” social order. And it is “southern apocalyptic imaginary” that creates the conditions for both situations.

Part two of Apocalypse South jumps from the Great Depression to the late twentieth century, first with Randall Kenan then with Dorothy Allison. But before proceeding with these more recent authors, Hoefer offers some lines from the James Weldon Johnson poem “The Judgment Day” then this brief reiteration, which seems meant to keep his reader on track:

Throughout this book, I have argued that expressions of a southern “sense of place,” aiming for something just short of prophesy [sic], are inextricably bound up with the apocalyptic worldview offered by southern religion. [ . . . ] In other words, the South, in its most frequent manifestations, is brought to life out of the fear of its own inevitable disappearance. This brand of Apocalypse promises both the End of Time and the End of this World; as the events of history finally play themselves out, the geographies in which they take place are ultimately used up.

With that, he takes on the difficult themes in Kenan’s 1989 novel A Visitation of Spirits and in his 1992 short story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and Other Stories. Here, Hoefer adds another ingredient – homosexuality – to the already-complex concepts of “collective identity and mutual obligation” (105) into Southern racial and religious conundrums.

In the novel, the predominantly African-American community of Tims Creek, North Carolina deals with the suicide of Horace Cross, a gay sixteen-year-old. Hoefer explains,

Horace’s trials and ultimate death disrupt the romantic, idealizing veil of grief, reveal the original sins that have doomed the community, and expose the horrific consequences that will follow the continuing refusal to tell that history. The southern apocalyptic imaginary provides Kenan with the narrative and discursive space adequate for experiences that disrupt the bivalent, heteronormative ways of speaking that dominate his community.

In this chapter, the recurring themes of “pollution” and “uncleanness” present a quandary different in substance than Joe Christmas’ life as a biracial man in Mississippi. In this story, a rural black community steeped in long-standing traditions, like hog-killing as a rite of passage, must deal with its own decline. Their struggles against white oppression and their subsequent pride in earned self-determination, Hoefer writes, create the circumstances for their own isolation. As a gay black man in this community, there is nowhere for Horace Cross to turn, and “the possibility that Horace might simply leave Tims Creek is never mentioned.” Thus, “Kenan creates a space for meaningful discussion of the possibility of difference within the community,” a kind of tolerance that is not the norm in Southern culture.

Moving on to Dorothy Allison’s novel Bastard Out of Carolina, also from 1992, moves the discussion of difference from a gay black teenager to a “white trash lesbian” (131) who is abused by her stepfather. About these two characters’ predicaments, Hoefer writes that

the southern apocalyptic imaginary has been harnessed to often contradictory ends: just as it is used to regulate moments of undifferentiation and hybridity that contradict the dominant discourses of race and power in southern places and spaces, its historical vision nonetheless offers hope to repressed communities when it is needed. [ . . . ] Apocalypse signals the presence of concealed or displaced meaning [as well as] the presence of a voice that has been silenced or a history that has been expunged, and, thus, a site to be excavated.

In short, Allison’s narrative about a poor, white lesbian who suffers abuse “exposes the oppressive consequences of southern cultural practices.” For example, where black people in Tims Creek lament the decline (and possible loss) of their identity, Bone’s family, the Boatwrights, seem pleased with the burning of the courthouse that contains information about their past, according to Hoefer. Yet, unlike Horace Cross who sees no way out, Bone is “thrilled by the possibility of deliverance and salvation.” Her voice must be heard.

Apocalypse South closes out with a “Redux” that focuses on Hurricane Katrina in 2005, an event that some Southern evangelicals claimed was God’s wrath for rampant sin in the city. Surveying the tragedy through coverage in the Times-Picayune and through John Biguenet’s play Rising Water, Hoefer sees many of the same themes he lists in his subtitle: “Judgment, Cataclysm, and Resistance.” Ending as he began, with song lyrics, the words to “When the Saints Go Marching In” reinforce his point: “Some say this world of trouble. / Is the only one we need, / But I’m waiting for that morning, / when the new world is revealed.” Though the time setting of Faulkner and Wright’s novels – the Great Depression – may be seven decades in the past, we are not necessarily through, in the South, trying to determine where the lines are drawn.

The dilemmas explored in Apocalypse South are not new — interpreting the discord in and oppression within Southern culture caused by irreconcilable views on race, religion, difference, and tolerance — but Anthony Dyer Hoefer still presents compelling ideas to consider. His densely packed assertions weave tightly around each other as they thread through these stories and the history and ideals that underpin them. The main problem is: the book is exceptionally difficult to read. Navigating this work that is chock-full of academic language and the interconnection of complex ideas is certainly possible (with an appropriate level of education), but it is also very time-consuming— sometimes frustratingly so.

Yet, its difficult style aside, Apocalypse South articulates a strong argument for its viewpoint on the inherent difficulties (and hypocrisy) in a multicultural South. There has historically been little tolerance of lives and viewpoints that defy the rigid status quo, and Hoefer offers one possibility for answering the unanswerable question: why did/does it have to be that way? Because of a widespread irrational fear of all hell breaking loose in this world and of God damning sinners in the next. For many Southerners of an conservative ilk, the path is clear when one must choose between being castigated by a politically correct culture or risking eternal damnation by an angry God. The question that arises, which Hoefer also addresses, is: what do you think God’s reaction to violent intolerance will be? America may currently be in a culture war that pits conservative against liberal, but in the South, there is another culture war that is much older: one that pits Old Testament against New Testament, which begs the question: are we to heed the Father’s harsh lesson from Sodom and Gomorrah where sinners were wiped off the Earth, or are we to yield to the words of the Son who admonished us to love each other without judgment?

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Women, Wages, Work, and Wisdom”

Back in April, al.com’s Kelly Poe reported on a story of national interest, as it pertained to our illustrious Heart of Dixie: “Alabama’s pay gap among largest in nation, study finds.” Where, on the national average, women earn 79 cents for every dollar a man earns, in Alabama the female worker is getting just 73 cents. According to the report from the National Partnership for Women & Families, Alabama ranks an unfortunate sixth in the nation in this dubious category, though we don’t have to look far to see the first-place “winner,” our Deep Southern neighbor: Louisiana.

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#TBT: A Poets’ Lunch, April 2003

A little over fifteen years ago, I was working at NewSouth Books and had pushed for the company to do a full-length collection of poems by singer-songwriter-poet Tom House, whose indie literary magazine Raw Bone had been an underground staple in the 1980s. That collection was published in April 2003 as The World According to Whiskey. This picture, taken by NewSouth’s editor-in-chief Randall Williams, shows our in-office lunch on the day of the book release, a day that poet Andrew Glaze was coincidentally stopping by the office to talk about his then-forthcoming collection Remembering Thunder. From left to right: Andrew Glaze, poet David Rigsbee, me, NewSouth’s publisher Suzanne La Rosa, and Tom House

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Disrupters & Interlopers: Golden Frinks

Golden Frinks was a Civil Rights activist, known as “the Great Agitator.” He was born in 1920 in South Carolina, moved to North Carolina as a boy, and served in the Army during World War II. Frinks’ efforts in the Civil Rights movement began in the small town of Edenton, North Carolina in 1956 when he organized a years-long campaign of demonstrations aimed at desegregation. He also worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as a field secretary from 1963 through 1977, then with the NAACP.

Current articles and online entries about Golden Frinks acknowledge openly that he remains among the lesser-known names of the Civil Rights movement. Yet, Frinks contributions were significant and included works on behalf of both African Americans and Native Americans, and his “unique style of activism wore down racist political practices.” A 2016 article about his legacy explains that “he was arrested 89 times for his activities” and that his success had foundations in his unorthodox ways:

He had his little ways. He often dressed in a gold-colored jumpsuit or dashiki with gold chains with a cross. If there was no spirit in the meeting when it was needed, Frinks was not above jumping up on a table and “acting a little crazy.” Once he let loose a coop full of chickens around an Alabama courthouse to delay a hearing. It was a tactic he may have used more than once. A North Carolina State Trooper said he was a master of highway protests.

Golden Frinks’ work for social justice in the South continued throughout his life. Though he is not as well-known today, his name appears in the latter-day Civil Rights stories of Joan Little in the 1970s and of Allen Iverson in the mid-1990s. A 2011 biography, Golden Asro Frinks: Telling the Unsung Song, is also available.

The Disrupters & Interlopers series highlights lesser-known individuals from Southern history whose actions, though unpopular or difficult, contributed to changing the old status quo.