Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

Born into a former slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace and Katharine Lumpkin were raised in a culture of white supremacy. While Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her sisters reinvented themselves as radical thinkers, working for racial justice, women’s liberation and labour rights. National Humanities Award-winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall traces the sisters from their childhood in the Deep South to the progressive zeal of the early twentieth century and towards our contemporary moment. By threading these women’s stories through a century of history, social movements and intellectual debates, Hall makes visible forgotten sites of experimentation and creative thinking. She demonstrates how the fraught ties of sisterhood were tested and frayed as each sister struggled, albeit in radically different ways, to reinvent herself as a modern woman, grapple with a legacy of racism and remake the American South as a place to call home.

Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. But while Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sisters chose vastly different lives. Seeking their fortunes in the North, Grace and Katharine reinvented themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works and organizing efforts brought the nation’s attention to issues of region, race, and labor. In Sisters and Rebels, National Humanities Award–winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters, who were “estranged and yet forever entangled” by their mutual obsession with the South. Tracing the wounds and unsung victories of the past through to the contemporary moment, Hall revives a buried tradition of Southern expatriation and progressivism; explores the lost, revolutionary zeal of the early twentieth century; and muses on the fraught ties of sisterhood. Grounded in decades of research, the family’s private papers, and interviews with Katharine and Grace, Sisters and Rebels unfolds an epic narrative of American history through the lives and works of three Southern women.

This newly updated edition connects the past with the present, using the Clarence Thomas hearings -and their characterization by Thomas as a "high-tech lynching"- to examine the links between white supremacy and the sexual abuse of black women, and the difficulty of forging an antiracist movement against sexual violence. Revolt Against Chivalry is the account of how Jesse Daniel Ames and the antilynching campaign she led fused the causes of social feminism and racial justice in the South during the 1920s and 1930s. The book traces Ames's political path from suffragism to militant antiracism and provides a detailed description of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, which served through the 1930s as the chief expression of antilynching sentiment in the white South. Revolt Against Chivalry is also a biography of Ames herself: it shows how Ames connected women's opposition to violence with their search for influence and self-definition, thereby leading a revolt against chivalry which was part of both sexual and racial emancipation.

This newly updated edition connects the past with the present, using the Clarence Thomas hearings -and their characterization by Thomas as a "high-tech lynching"- to examine the links between white supremacy and the sexual abuse of black women, and the difficulty of forging an antiracist movement against sexual violence. Revolt Against Chivalry is the account of how Jesse Daniel Ames and the antilynching campaign she led fused the causes of social feminism and racial justice in the South during the 1920s and 1930s. The book traces Ames's political path from suffragism to militant antiracism and provides a detailed description of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, which served through the 1930s as the chief expression of antilynching sentiment in the white South. Revolt Against Chivalry is also a biography of Ames herself: it shows how Ames connected women's opposition to violence with their search for influence and self-definition, thereby leading a revolt against chivalry which was part of both sexual and racial emancipation.