African-American

June Bug's Grocery and the Cornfield Jook: A South Albany Oral History 

The vibrant South Georgia scene was pure Americana—a picturesque, old-fashioned grocery store next to a thriving jook joint in the heart of a South Albany African-American community. Originally more secluded, this nucleus of the neighborhood became a familiar sight to all Albany residents with the opening in the 1980s of a roadway that passed by the scene and across a new bridge over the nearby Flint River. The waters of the Flint proved to be much too near in 1994, when a catastrophic flood damaged beyond repair the grocery, jook, and hundreds of homes along the river.

Deeply touched by that enormous community loss, Mary Sterner Lawson used her own 1987 photographs to paint a watercolor of the once-flourishing South Albany scene. She never imagined how overwhelming the public response would be when the painting was exhibited in the main lobby of a busy local hospital in 1996. A veritable flood of reminiscences came her way—tales of childhood memories, community gatherings, friendships, brotherhood, families, prostitution, moonshine, and murder. Inspired by the community members who encouraged and aided her efforts, Lawson began recording the rich recollections. June Bug’s Grocery and the Cornfield Jook registers these voices of the community, the voices behind the painting.

Mary Sterner Lawson has taught humanities, literature, and composition at Albany State University since 1973. A natural extension of her longtime involvement with people, art, oral history, and community development, this volume will find a treasured place on Albany bookshelves and will be embraced by young and old, black and white, for generations to come.

A part of the Underground Railroad, read here of enslaved people and their stories of using Virginia's waterways to achieve freedom.

Enslaved Virginians sought freedom from the time they were first brought to the Jamestown colony in 1619. Acts of self-emancipation were aided by Virginia's waterways, which became part of the network of the Underground Railroad in the years before the Civil War. Watermen willing to help escaped slaves made eighteenth-century Norfolk a haven for freedom seekers. Famous nineteenth-century escapees like Shadrack Minkins and Henry Box Brown were aided by the Underground Railroad. Enslaved men like Henry Lewey, known as Bluebeard, aided freedom seekers as conductors, and black and white sympathizers acted as station masters. Historian Cassandra Newby-Alexander narrates the ways that enslaved people used Virginia's waterways to achieve humanity's dream of freedom.

Author and researcher Char McCargo Bah recounts the stories of the men and women buried in Alexandria's freedman's cemetery and the search for their descendants.

At the beginning of the Civil War, Federal troops secured Alexandria as Union territory. Former slaves, called contrabands, poured in to obtain protection from their former masters. Due to overcrowding, mortality rates were high. Authorities seized an undeveloped parcel of land on South Washington Street, and by March 1864, it had been opened as a cemetery for African Americans. Between 1864 and 1868, more than 1,700 contrabands and freedmen were buried there. For nearly eighty years, the cemetery lay undisturbed and was eventually forgotten. Rediscovered in 1996, it has now been preserved as a monument to the courage and sacrifice of those buried within.

Readers interested in the beginnings and development of Mexican and Mexican American culture and education in Texas will delight in this pictorial history. The Blackwell School, established in 1909 in Marfa, Texas, served as a segregated school for Marfa’s Mexican and Mexican American students. Operating until 1965, eleven years after the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, the Blackwell School shaped the lives of its students while reflecting the struggles of Hispanic segregation in the West Texas community. Despite the challenges, the Blackwell School fostered a sense of community through sports, extracurricular activities, and community-oriented pageants. Today, the Blackwell School stands as a national historic site under the management of the National Park Service, reflecting Marfa’s legacy of resilience and commitment to preserving its history.

Cristobal Lopez has a master of arts in history from the University of Texas at San Antonio. As a field representative for the National Parks Conservation Association, he helped establish the Blackwell School as a unit of the National Park Service. Dr. Kirsten Gardner is a Distinguished Teaching Professor in the University of Texas San Antonio Department of History. Dr. Gardner teaches courses on US history, women and gender studies, history of medicine, modern US history, and public history. The images for this book were selected from the Blackwell School Alliance Virtual Museum, Marfa Public Library, the Presidio County Museum, and the Library of Congress.