The Making of a Southerner

Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin
Foreword by Darlene Clark Hine

Reviews

"Like the autobiographical writings of such other atypical white southern women as Lillian Smith and Virginia Durr, Lumpkin's volume is one of illuminating power. She penetrates the contradictions, myths, and ironies so deeply embedded in southern culture—in its religion, its economy, its race relations, and its gender conventions. Hers is the poignant testimony of a woman steeped in traditions peculiar to her class and region, who through education and will removed the cataracts of racism, curing herself of the blindness that hid pervasive and unrelenting white poverty and the grinding exploitation of agricultural, factory, and mill workers."
—Darlene Clark Hine, from the foreword to The Making of a Southerner

"We need to have this book around again to remind us what it took to be what Katharine Lumpkin was in her time. Her book is no longer fond prophecy and faint hope; it is a record of the route we had to travel."
—Louis D. Rubin Jr.


Description

Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin was born into a prominent Georgia family and raised in a southern society intent on preserving the economic and racial status quo. But as a young woman working with the poor in the sand hills of South Carolina, she began to question what she had been taught. In The Making of a Southerner, Lumpkin re-creates the South of her childhood and records the journey she took from her early instruction as a daughter of the “Lost Cause” to the liberal viewpoints she championed as an adult.

Page count: 280 pp.
Trim size: 5.5 x 8.5
  

Paper
List price: $24.95
978-0-8203-1385-6
1992

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Darlene Clark Hine is John A. Hannah Professor of History at Michigan State University.