As I was sitting at my desk last December taking a little break from putting what I hope are the final edits into University, Court, and Slave I saw that Dee Dee Bonner (@deedeebonner) tweeted a photograph of students from the August Evans School in Mobile carolling at the Mobile Airport.
Now that's cool -- for so many reasons. I didn't even know there was a school named after Augusta Jane Evans. But I can see why people in Mobile would remember her -- she spent much of her life in the city and wrote her most famous work there. Augusta Evans published just before the Civil War a novel, Beulah, whose title character delivers a graduation address so fabulous that she's offered a job teaching school. (Wrote a little bit about this when I was writing about graduation addresses at UNC before the Civil War.) Evans and her book wander across my manscript in a couple of places -- I'm particularly interested in Beulah as an example of the southern critique of Transcendentalism. But that's really a story for another time. Finally, it looks from the picture that there's a large African American student population at the school -- which is yet another example of the extraordinary changes since Evans' era. (Because Evans was a zealous representative of the proslavery south, particularly during the Civil War.)
With that I will say happy Martin Luther King Day. I hope you celebrate it in part by thinking about how far our country has traveled towards the dream of racial justice.
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