P&gt;Birmingham's history of racial violence and bigotry is the centerpiece of this intense and affecting memoir about family, society, and politics in a city still haunted by its notorious past. 
In 1963, Birmingham was the scene of some of the worst racial violence of the civil rights era. Police commissioner "Bull" Connor loosed dogs and turned fire hoses on black demonstrators; four young girls at Sunday school were killed when a bomb exploded in a black church; and Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his famous letter from the Birmingham jail, defending his activism to fellow ministers.
Birmingham native Paul Hemphill, disillusioned with his hometown, had left home to pursue a journalistic career, so he witnessed these historic events with the rest of the world through newspaper and television reports. "That grim old steel town," he writes, "was the most blatantly segregated city of its size in the United States of America, and most of us regarded it with the same morbid fascination that causes us to slow down and gawk at a bloody wreck on the highway."
Thirty years later, Hemphill returned to Birmingham to explore the depths of change that had taken place in the decades since the violence. In this powerful memoir, he interweaves his own autobiography with the history of the city and the stories of two very different Birmingham residents: a wealthy white matron and the pastor of the city's largest black church. As he struggles to come to terms with his own conflicting feelings toward his father's attitudes, Hemphill finds ironic justice in the integration of his childhood neighborhood and a visit with the black family who moved into his family's former home.

Leaving Birmingham: Notes of a Native Son (Deep South Books)

Biographies & Memoirs

Hemphill, Mr. Paul

Community & Culture

University Alabama Press

A veteran journalist's exploration of a church-burning in south Alabama becomes a richly rewarding evocation of the Deep South--its land, its people, and its sweat--popping summers.
More than an anatomy of a church arson, The Ballad of Little River is a poignant but hard-hitting biography of one of the poorest areas in the United States--where deer outnumber people. A cauldron of unresolved racial and familial conflict, of heat, boredom, gossip, and grudges, Little River, Alabama, gained notoriety in 1997 as the site of the U.S. government's first conviction under a new hate-crimes law intended to stop a rash of fires set at black churches around the country.
When journalist Paul Hemphill, son of an Alabama truck driver and veteran writer on the blue-collar South, moved into the area, he discovered a world that time had virtually forgotten--an obscure, isolated community in the swampy woodlands far from the mainstream of American life, a forlorn cluster of poverty and ignorance and dead-end jobs. He met a stew of heroes and villains right out of fiction--"Peanut" Ferguson, "Doll" Boone, "Hoss" Mack, Joe Dees, Murray January, a Klansman named "Brother Phil," and his stripper wife known as "Wild Child"--all swirling in a maelstrom of history and heat. 
Originally published in cloth by Free Press, The Ballad of Little River is Hemphill's gripping look at the southern backwoods, a chilling cautionary tale filled with both kindness and cruelty, told in the steady voice of a master storyteller and one who knows the human heart.

Ballad of Little River: A Tale of Race and Unrest in the Rural South

History

Americas

In this lively and fascinating book, noted writer and Auburn alum Paul Hemphill tells the story of the progress of Auburn from that first game coached by Auburn legend George Petrie through the team’s growth and development into the national force it is today. Hemphill records the many highs and occasional lows, and the heartbreak and jubilation each caused, noting the standouts great and small on the way. 
A Tiger Walk through History contains 172 photographs, many of them rare and surprising. The text and photos capture the many great players and coaches in the Auburn football experience: Auburn’s first bowl appearance in 1936; coaching eras of innovative football genius John Heisman, after whom the Heisman trophy is named; “Iron Mike” Donahue; Ralph “Shug” Jordan, who brought Auburn its first national championship in 1957; Pat Dye, Terry Bowden, and present coach Tommy Tuberville; Auburn’s two Heisman trophy winners Pat Sullivan and Bo Jackson; and victories over rivals Alabama and Georgia. The 2007-2008 season is highlighted, including the sixth straight win over Alabama and a bowl victory over Clemson. As the game has grown, Auburn and its team have grown with it, and Auburn now ranks as a perennial power both in its conference and in the nation.
Vince Dooley states in his foreword that “beyond the famous coaches and players and their heroics on behalf of the Orange and Blue, A Tiger Walk through History is also about time-honored traditions—rallying cries like ‘Sullivan-to-Beasley’ and ‘Punt Bama Punt’ and ‘Rolling Toomer’s Corner’—that echo in resounding fashion from the pages of Paul Hemphill’s remarkable book.”
No fan, whether casual or devoted, can afford to miss this riveting account of the Plainsmen’s journey from the very beginning to today, which is the record of a great university as well as the story of the development of a great football team.

A Tiger Walk through History: The Complete Story of Auburn Football from 1892 to the Tuberville Era

Pebble Hill Books

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