Every time I drive down highway 365 towards Atlanta, right before I hit Jaemor Farms and the Schoolbus Graveyard, I see a sign on the side of the road that reads “Lee Arrendale State Prison” with an arrow pointing down another asphalt laden road. Whenever I pass that sign, I think about the women incarcerated at the facility and the individuals incarcerated at facilities … Read More Open Letter on Conditions at Lee Arrendale State Prison
+ "our state flag", "zen and the art of xenophobia", christianity, five iron frenzy, georgia, music, squad five-o
Over the past few months, I’ve been noticing a trend in a lot of the older bands and songs that I really cut my teeth on during college during the late 1990s and early 2000s. During that period, I was really into the “Christian” punk, ska, hardcore music scene that initially revolved around Tooth and Nail. I purposefully put “Christian” in quotation marks because … Read More Politics in “Christian” Songs
+ 13th, Ava DuVernay, caste, clayton, georgia, georgia, georgia literature, isabel wilkerson, lillian e smith, michelle alexander, new jim crow
Last year, I posted about my first Lillian E. Smith Studies course which I taught in spring 2020. Today, I want to share the syllabus I constructed for the spring 2021 semester. The focus, still, is on Smith and her work, but I am also incorporating Michelle Alexander’s work on mass incarnation, using NPR’s Louder than and Riot podcast and Ava DuVernay’s 13th. Along … Read More Spring 2021 LES Studies Course
+ #runwithmaud, ahmaud arbery, EJI legacy museum, equal justice initiative, georgia, ida b wells, lillian e smith, national memorial for peace and justice
A couple of years ago, I took students to the EJI Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. When we first entered the museum, a student saw the flag that hung from the headquarters of the NAACP in New York throughout the 1920s and the 1930s. The flag, which flew outside the headquarters, drew attention to racial violence … Read More We Must Stop the Roots from Ever Appearing
+ clayton, georgia, georgia, killers of the dream, laurel falls camp, lillian e smith, lillian smith: breaking the silence, rabun county, strange fruit, Uncategorized
Note: This article originally appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of “A View from the Mountain,” the Lillian E. Smith Center’s newsletter. This year marks the 100th anniversary of Laurel Falls Camp. Lillian Smith’s father, Calvin, opened the camp in 1920, and it was the first private camp for girls in the state of Georgia. “Miss Lil,” as the campers called her, took over … Read More Laurel Falls Camp at 100
