WINNER OF THE ANNE B. AND JAMES B. MCMILLAN PRIZE

A powerful collection of firsthand stories from the Tuskegee Institute High School Class of 1964—students who came of age in the crucible of the Civil Rights Movement. Their stories uncover the bold choices of their ancestors who chose to stay and help shape the South.

Children of the Struggle and the Ancestors Who Stayed, edited by Sonjia Parker Redmond and Beatrice J. Adams, brings together twenty-one deeply personal narratives from members of the Tuskegee Institute High School Class of 1964. These students grew up at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, coming of age during landmark legal battles, community-led voter registration efforts, and the long shadow of Jim Crow.

Graduating in the year of the Civil Rights Act and Freedom Summer, these young people had already helped desegregate Alabama schools. They marched from Selma to Montgomery, mourned the assassination of classmate Sammy Younge Jr., and witnessed firsthand the violent resistance to change that defined the era.

Rather than join the Great Migration northward, many of them followed the lead of their ancestors and chose to stay—becoming educators, organizers, and civic leaders. Their lives reflect a powerful legacy of resistance and renewal, rooted in a deep sense of place and purpose. This collection preserves their voices and honors the generations of Black families who fought for justice not only through protest, but by staying, building, and believing in the promise of the South.

Disregarding for the moment all modern theories of literary property rights and plagiarism, Dr White has gone directly to the writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to find out what they themselves said about imitation. He has combed the entire literature of the period for even the most incidental references to what modern critics call plagiarism. He shows that his authors neither damned imitation because its abuse was evil nor demanded invention because its right use was good. Instead, profiting by each, they triumphantly applied the classical doctrine that originality of real worth is to be achieved only through creative imitation.