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One Woman's View of the South
story by Mary Dalrymple
How do women speak about the South? Jacquelyn Hall, professor of history and director of the Southern Oral History Project, has found one answer in the life and writings of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin.
As a Southern autobiographer, sociologist, and historian, Lumpkin explored both the personal and scholarly meanings of Southern heritage. In her 1947 autobiography,
The Making of a Southerner, she used what she called the "plain
facts" of her life to challenge contemporary notions about the Southern past.
Hall first met Lumpkin in the 1970s, when she interviewed her for Carolina's Southern Oral History Project.
Those interviews and Lumpkin's autobiography were the basis for a series of lectures Hall delivered at Louisiana State
University Press in the spring of 1994. Hall is now turning those lectures into a book, uncovering Lumpkin's interpretation of Southern history.
"The Making of a Southerner was part of a whole spate of white Southern autobiographies that came out after
World War II," Hall says. "In most of these works, white Southerners were looking back nostalgically at a past that
they felt was lost."
Lumpkin challenged the romanticization of the South's past in her life and in her writing. "She tried to say there is
another South, there is another Southern history," Hall says.
"That is the South of black Southerners, the South of the
populists, the South of the liberals who had tried to oppose racial segregation and slavery.
"Out of her experience and her studies she came to believe that there were many Souths and that a Southerner could
choose to identify with a progressive South."
Lumpkin's story began in Georgia, where she was born the youngest of seven children in 1897. Her father fought
with the Confederacy and later rode with the Ku Klux Klan. Hall says, "He expected to inherit a plantation and to be
a slave-owner, and he never got over being deprived of that."
Lumpkin's father indoctrinated his children with his version of Southern history. "She was raised to believe that
there was only one way of being a Southerner," Hall says, "and that if you dissented from the beliefs of the white South
you were no longer a Southerner."
As a college student in Georgia during the early 1920s, Lumpkin found that economic and social realities challenged her father's version of Southern history. Moved by racial and economic injustice, Lumpkin began an activist
career that confronted segregation and poverty.
Lumpkin headed the students' division of the
YWCA in the South and tried to create an interracial student
movement. Traveling through the Jim Crow South with her black co-workers, she witnessed the indignities of
segregation first-hand. Lumpkin also worked in a factory in the
YWCA's industrial division, where she tried to help
working women join the labor movement.
As the Depression deepened in the 1930s, she continued to work on economic solutions to the South's problems. Unable to secure a teaching position in the male-dominated discipline of sociology, Lumpkin helped found a
Council of Industrial Studies at Smith College. She came
to believe that interracial labor unions could relieve the
economic oppression of poor blacks and whites.
Later, she helped found an independent Institute of Labor Studies that tracked World War II developments in
labor relations. Hall says, "Her focus on women, family, and community foreshadowed the new labor history that
would emerge in the 1970s."
The power of Lumpkin's story, Hall says, lies in the similarity of her life with the experience of other Southerners.
"The purpose of writing this autobiography," Hall explains, "was to demonstrate to white
Southerners, but also to Northerners and readers in general, how racial attitudes and class prejudices were inculcated in children, how powerful
those mores were, and how inevitable it was that good people would have believed in them."
In her autobiography, Lumpkin used Southern history and her own life experience to point out that racial and
class conflict are not confined to the South, nor are they indelible facts of Southern life, Hall says. "She wanted to
inspire other people to think that if she - raised as she was in the shadow of slavery - could change, so could they."
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