Books by William Sturkey
Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White
Winner of the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize
Benjamin L. Hooks Award Finalist
“An insightful, powerful, and moving book.”
―Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice
“Sturkey’s clear-eyed and meticulous book pulls off a delicate balancing act. While depicting the terrors of Jim Crow, he also shows how Hattiesburg’s black residents, forced to forge their own communal institutions, laid the organizational groundwork for the civil rights movement.”
―New York Times
If you really want to understand Jim Crow―what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it―you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. There you can still see remnants of the shops and churches where, amid the violence and humiliation of segregation, men and women gathered to build a remarkable community. Hattiesburg takes us into the heart of this divided town and deep into the lives of families on both sides of the racial divide to show how the fabric of their existence was shaped by the changing fortunes of the Jim Crow South.
“Sturkey’s magnificent portrait reminds us that Mississippi is no anachronism. It is the dark heart of American modernity.”
―Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk
“When they are at their best, historians craft powerful, compelling, often genre-changing pieces of history…William Sturkey is one of those historians…A brilliant, poignant work.”
―Charles W. McKinney, Jr., Journal of African American History
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Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White
Winner of the 2020 Zócalo Public Square Book Prize
A rich, multigenerational saga of race and family in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, that tells the story of how Jim Crow was built, how it changed, and how the most powerful social movement in American history came together to tear it down.
If you really want to understand Jim Crow―what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it―you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. There you can see remnants of the shops and churches where, amid the violence and humiliation of segregation, men and women gathered to build a remarkable community. William Sturkey introduces us to both old-timers and newcomers who arrived in search of economic opportunities promised by the railroads, sawmills, and factories of the New South. He also takes us across town and inside the homes of white Hattiesburgers to show how their lives were shaped by the changing fortunes of the Jim Crow South.
Sturkey reveals the stories behind those who struggled to uphold their southern “way of life” and those who fought to tear it down―from William Faulkner’s great-grandfather, a Confederate veteran who was the inspiration for the enigmatic character John Sartoris, to black leader Vernon Dahmer, whose killers were the first white men ever convicted of murdering a civil rights activist in Mississippi. Through it all, Hattiesburg traces the story of the Smith family across multiple generations, from Turner and Mamie Smith, who fled a life of sharecropping to find opportunity in town, to Hammond and Charles Smith, in whose family pharmacy Medgar Evers and his colleagues planned their strategy to give blacks the vote.
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January 6 and the Politics of History (History in the Headlines Ser.)
by William Sturkey, Jill Lepore, Joanne B. Freeman, Julian E. Zelizer, Jim Downs, Stephanie McCurry, Elizabeth Hinton
On January 6, 2021, more than two thousand rioters stormed the doors of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., hoping to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power from former president Donald Trump to his successor, Joseph Biden. The deaths, property damage, and vicious rampage that ensued were witnessed on live television as an unprecedented attack on the democratic process and those who strive to protect it.
As an installment of UGA Press’s History in the Headlines series, this book offers a rich discussion between highly respected scholars on the historical backdrop and context for contemporary issues from the headlines. In addition to the historical context, this conversation demonstrates how historians speak to one another about contentious topics and how they contribute in meaningful ways to the public’s understanding of momentous events. This volume focuses on the historical context of the January 6 attack and employs a free-flowing conversation style that allows the historians a more unconventional format. The participants discuss if―and if so, how―historians should engage in public debates and what that engagement means to their roles as academic authorities in the public.
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$22.95
To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies)
by William Sturkey, Jon N. Hale
Fifty years after Freedom Summer, To Write in the Light of Freedom offers a glimpse into the hearts of the African American youths who attended the Mississippi Freedom Schools in 1964. One of the most successful initiatives of Freedom Summer, more than forty Freedom Schools opened doors to thousands of young African American students. Here they learned civics, politics, and history, curriculum that helped them instead of the degrading lessons supporting segregation and Jim Crow and sanctioned by White Citizen's Councils. Young people enhanced their self-esteem and gained a new outlook on the future. And at more than a dozen of these schools, students wrote, edited, printed and published their own newspapers. For more than five decades, the Mississippi Freedom Schools have served as powerful models of educational activism. Yet, little has been published that documents black Mississippi youths' responses to this profound experience.
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U. S. History at The 250th - From the Revolution to the History Wars
by William Sturkey, Annette Gordon-Reed, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Erika Lee, Marc Stein, Sandra Enríquez, Sandy Grande, Robert Parkinson
The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But does the nation begin in 1776, or do we trace its origins to some point earlier-for example, the arrival of the first enslaved people in 1619 or the initial settlement of Indigenous people? What's at stake with establishing a date that marks the nation's origins? Where does the history of the nation begin? In colonial New England, the Chesapeake, or in the Southwest?
In this unprecedented volume, leading thinkers come together to debate these-and many other-issues. Their conversation shows that U.S history is not just about what happened but who gets to tell the story and the political implications of the narratives we tell. The participants include two Pulitzer Prize winners: Nikole Hannah-Jones, who created the 1619 Project and ignited a national conversation about slavery and the nation's founding; and Annette Gordon-Reed, who documented Thomas Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemmings. The other specialists include experts in Asian American, civil rights, Native American, Latino, LGBT, and early American history.
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