Sisters and Rebels

March 15, 2019
A history of 20th-century sisters who bore witness to Southern culture, politics, and values.In 1973, Hall (Revolt Against Chivalry, 1993, etc.), director of the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina, interviewed two sisters, "improbable voices from the deepest South," who each had grappled with her heritage and was shaped by a "maelstrom of historical events and processes." Grace Lumpkin (1891-1980) and her younger sister, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin (1897-1988), are the central characters in a sweeping, richly detailed intellectual and political history of America from the 1920s to the 1980s, an absorbing narrative based on impressive scholarship: the women's published and private writings; their racist father's "bitter, murderous memoir," in which he discloses participating in the Ku Klux Klan; and abundant archival sources and oral history interviews. William Lumpkin boasted that he taught his children "to love the Lost Cause"--i.e., the South's past glory and the Confederacy's "brilliant and heroic" fight. The Lumpkin sisters, however, came to see their Southern past "as both a burden and an opportunity" as they sought to create "new patterns in the tangled threads of memory and history." Both sisters observed racial violence and "grinding class inequity" that led them to redefine the meaning of whiteness and their complicity in America's social structure. Both were educated at Brenau, a women's college that drew its white students from relatively wealthy families. Grace took a degree in domestic science; Katharine became a student leader and, after graduating, worked as a traveling secretary of the YWCA, whose mission was to save souls and nurture "independent womanhood." As Grace gravitated to fiction writing, Katharine continued her education in sociology and politics, where ideas from Darwin to John Dewey shook her preconceptions. Hall traces the sisters' professional careers, their campaigns against the oppression of blacks and women, their love affairs (Katharine lived with a woman for more than three decades) and involvement in communism, and, eventually, the divergent paths that resulted in their becoming "the most intimate of strangers."Sharply etched biographical portraits focus a compelling history.

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Starred review from March 25, 2019
In this excellent triple biography, Hall (Like a Family) follows Elizabeth, Grace, and Katherine Lumpkin, whose lives and work touched many elements of 20th-century social history. They were born in late-19th-century Georgia, daughters of a Klansman who raised them to be persuasive orators at Confederate veterans’ reunions. Elizabeth (1888–1963) stayed true to the Lost Cause, even having a Confederate-themed wedding. Her progressive younger sisters, however, rebelled. Grace (1891–1980) and Katharine (1897–1988), influenced by liberal Christian denominations and women’s colleges, moved north and wrote in favor of equality for women and black people. Katharine earned a PhD in social work; in middle age, she wrote a landmark autobiography, The Making of a Southerner, and worked as a teacher and a journalist, often under FBI surveillance for her leftist leanings. Grace was a labor journalist and wrote fiction, but after her proletarian novel, To Make My Bread, was published in 1932, she slipped into poverty, ending up conservative, bitter, and begging back in the South. Hall alternates among the sisters’ stories, concentrating on Katharine and Grace and connecting them to broader elements of 20th-century America (including the Scottsboro Boys, mill strikes, Communism, world wars, Brown v. Board of Education, the FBI, the YWCA, and the ACLU). These admirably crafted biographies of the Lumpkins, their cohorts, and their causes opens a fascinating window on America’s social and intellectual history. Photos.

May 1, 2019
Hall, founding director of the University of North Carolina's Southern Oral History Program, presents an intelligent, scholarly assessment of three sisters?Elizabeth, Grace, and Katherine Lumpkin?born into a life of white privilege in late-nineteenth-century Georgia. As children of the Reconstruction-era South, all three initially absorbed and modeled the racist attitudes of their father, a Ku Klux Klan standard bearer and propagandist for the glories of the Lost Cause. As they matured, however, they took divergent paths. After attending college and being influenced by more liberal Christian philosophies, Grace and Katherine moved north, adopting more bohemian, inclusive lifestyles and advocating for and writing about a rich tapestry of liberal causes, including racial equality, feminism, and the labor movement. Meanwhile, Elizabeth not only remained in the South but also clung to the bigoted values ingrained in her by her father. Hall's biographical chronicle will appeal and be of value to readers interested in the Reconstruction, women's history, and individuals involved in the evolution of twentieth-century social and cultural change movements.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

May 1, 2019

The National Humanities Medalwinning director of the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Hall tells the intriguing story of three sisters born in late 19th-century Georgia. Though raised in a culture of white supremacy by a KKK father, Grace and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin eventually left the South and sister Elizabeth behind and, inspired by liberal Christianity and the YWCA, became social justice activists and progressive writers in bohemian Greenwich Village and Northampton, MA.

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May 1, 2019

Hall (history emerita, dir., Southern oral history, Univ. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Revolt Against Chivalry) plumbs the story of the Lumpkin sisters of Georgia, who were born in the 19th century into a culture steeped in white supremacy, and whose father was a prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan. Katharine, the youngest, was influenced by both liberal Christianity and exposure to black activists through the YWCA. She underwent a shifting of consciousness, which would inspire her to a life of advocacy. Grace Lumpkin was similarly drawn to progressivism and believed capitalism gave rise to oppression and division, particularly in the South, where racial fears were stoked to further political ends. Hall devotes considerably less ink to eldest sister Elizabeth, who was a standard bearer and orator for the mythology of the Old South and the Lost Cause. It is primarily through the lens of Katharine that the author traces the journey of a Southerner to remake and improve the region she calls home. Hall's perceptive and elegant writing and her extensive, decades-long research into the sisters' lives provides rich context for the creation of Southern reformers as a political force. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers interested in women's history and American intellectual history.--Barrie Olmstead, Lewiston P.L., ID

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.