Publications to Note

Christian Board of Publication, Saint Louis, Missouri published Edward J. Robinson’s To Pave the Way for His People: A Life of Preston Taylor. Robinson, an Associate Professor of History and Religious at Texas College has written several books including Hard-Fighting Soldiers: A History of African American Churches of Christ and Show Us How You Do It: Marshall Keeble and the Rise of the Black Churches of Christ in the United States, 1914-1968, has written the first religious biography of Preston Taylor, an African-American businessman, minister and philanthropist, who is considered one of the most influential leaders of Nashville, Tennessee's African American community. Robinson informs the reader how Preston Taylor emerged as one of the most influential and prevailing African Leaders in Middle Tennessee. According to the April 16, 1931, edition of the Nashville Banner, Taylor was owned by the family of Zed Taylor, a brother of former President Zachariah Taylor. The Banner falsely attributed Taylor’s service in the Civil War as being a drummer boy for the Confederate Army. Actually, he was a drummer boy in the Union Army during the siege of Richmond, Virgina. Taylor’s work covered racial uplift, social reform, civil rights, and organizational leadership for African American Disciples of Christ. He established Greenwood Cemetery, Nashville’s second oldest cemetery for African Americans; Greenwood Recreational Park for African Americans; in 1888, he founded Taylor Funeral Company at 449 North Cherry Street (now Fourth Avenue), among other business ventures including the One Cent (now Citizens Savings Bank and Trust) Savings and Trust Company Bank. Preston Taylor set the stage and standard for church leaders in the African American community. His vision and the narrative of his life story should remind the reader of the interconnectedness of the rich heritage and perseverance necessary among all to succeed. Robinson's biography gives the reader a contextualized and profoundly human Preston Taylor, exposing both his accomplishments and dilemmas. Paperback $25.00.

Deathcat Media, LLC, Nashville, Tennessee published Scott Faragher’s Glenn Ferguson: A Life of Public Service. Faragher, the author of such books as The Peabody Hotel; The Pigeon Drop, a work of science fiction; and The Arlington Resort Hotel and Spa. Faragher book discusses Glen Ferguson, who rose to heights in Nashville government. In 1959, when Nashville and Davidson County operated under separate governments, Glen Ferguson entered the political arena, when he challenged Frank Melfi, and incumbent. The race between Melfi and Ferguson was one of the most hotly contested and hard-fought elections. Ferguson ultimately won the councilmanic race and became entrenched if Nashville’s political scene. During his tenure as a council person and subsequently as Metropolitan Trustee, Ferguson was one of the main proponents behind the Country Music Hall of Fame and a strong advocate for the formation of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson. Faragher knew Glenn Ferguson well through their mutual association with country singer Johnny Paycheck and watched his rise from obscurity to power in both pre-Metro and afterwards. This work gives the reader an insight into Glenn Ferguson and his rise from obscurity to one of the main actors in Metro Government. Paper $21.95.

Oxford University Press, United Kingdom brought forth John Cullen Gruesser’s Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs: The Man on the Firing Line. The son of American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College), Dr. Allen R. Griggs, was one of the seminary’s founders. Later, his son, Sutton E. Griggs served as the institution’s first president. The first biography of Sutton E. Griggs draws on wide-ranging research in primary materials and late 20^th century periodicals, local and national African American and white sources. Among the most productive African American writers at the turn of the 20^th century, the younger Griggs, in contrast to his northern contemporaries, as Dr. W. E. B. DuBois noted, “spoke primarily to the Negro race,” and used his own Nashville-based Orion Publishing Company to produce four of his novels including Imperium in Imperio (1899): Overshadowed (1901), Unfettered (1902); and The Hindered Hand; or, the Reign of the Repressionist (1905), written in response to Thomas Dixon’s first published novel of his Reconstruction trilogies, The Leopard’s Spots. A Romance of the White Man's Burden—1865–1900, followed by The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), and The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907). Alongside Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Griggs was a key political and literary voice for African American education and political rights and against Jim Crow. The Orin Publishing Company like the R. H. Boyd Publishing Company (formerly known as the National Baptist Publishing Board) the National Baptist Sunday School Publishing Board, U. S. A., Incorporated provided printed materials to African Americans in Nashville and across the country. Gruesser’s work on Sutton E. Griggs defies present-day notions about the distribution of materials to those civically engaged with African American fiction and changes the perception about African American literature and print culture of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries print culture of the period.  Hardback, $84.00

Alice Randall’s My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future was published in early April by Atria/Black Privilege Publishing, a division of Simon and Schuster, New York, New York. Alice Randall’s My Black Country is a celebration of one of the most American music genres and at the same time, the deep-seated pride and joyfulness in realizing the power of the African American impact on American culture. Her book’s publication coming out approximately two weeks after Beyonce Knowles-Carter’s Cowboy Carter illustrates the impact of African Americans on Country Music. Randall’s book is a starting point for honest and plain-spoken conversations that those in the genre’s mainstream must encounter. The first the first African American woman to cowrite a number one country hit, Trisha Yearwood’s “XXX’s and OOO’s,” harkens back to African Americans who made earlier forays into country music. Individuals like DeFord Bailey, Lil Hardin, Ray Charles, and Charley Pride among others, who comprised a community of African American country musicians and artists. My Black Country interweaves Randall’s memoir with the genre’s historical narrative and the influence of African American artists in the genre. Alice Randall is an award-winning songwriter and professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University. A New York Times bestselling novelist, she is widely recognized as one of the most significant voices in modern African American fiction. Hardback, $28.99.

University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA published Grave History: Death, Race, and Gender in Southern Cemeteries edited by Kami Fletcher and Ashley Towle. This work is the first volume to use southern cemeteries to investigate and probe southern society and the structure of racial and gendered hierarchies prior to the American Civil War through the dismantling of the Jim Crow era. Grave History draws upon an interdisciplinary assemblage of eleven scholars that includes historians (including Tennessee’s State Historian Dr. C. V. West), archaeologists, and social-justice activists to examine the chronicle of racial segregation or exclusion in southern cemeteries and what it can tell the reader how ideas, class, and gender informed and were reinforced in cemeteries. Editors Kami Fletcher is an associate professor of history at Albright College in Redding, Pennsylvania, and Ashley Towle is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern Maine, with campuses in Portland, Gorham and Lewiston, Maine. Grave History illustrates the importance of using cemeteries as analytical tools for examining power relations, community formation, and historical memory. This tome is a must read for anyone interested in the wealth of information that can be ascertain from the era in which cemeteries were created. Paper. $32.95

A finalist in for the 2024 Book Award given by the Tennessee Historical Commission and the Tennessee Historical Society, Mark R. Cheathem’s Who Is James K. Polk: The Presidential Election of 1844 was published by the University Press of Kansas. Just as presidential elections matter today, they also mattered in 1844, when a relatively unknown Tennessean ran for the nation’s highest political office. The question Americans asked that year was, “Who the hell is James K. Polk?” He, of course, was not unknown, but was considered an unlikely candidate given the others who also ran during the 1844 election. Cheatham, a professor of history and project director of the Papers of Martin Van Buren at Cumberland University, gives the reader insight into Polk, how he won the nation’s highest office, and why it matters today. William K. Bolt, a professor of history at Francis Marion University and former assistant editor of the James K. Polk Papers Project, notes that Cheathem give the readers a behind-the-scenes look at the inner works of all the 1844 campaigns. Polk’s elevation to the nation’s highest office and his policies aided in putting the country on the glide path to its internal or sectional strife over the issue of chattel enslavement, ultimately leading to the American Civil War. Who Is James K. Polk helps today’s electorate fully comprehend that “Elections matter.” Historiographically speaking, this is a must have book for historians and lay historians interested in presidential elections and their impact on public policy. Hardcover, $44.95.

Vanderbilt University Press, Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, Tennessee, published Jerome Moore’s Deep Dish Conversations: Voices of Social Change in Nashville. A native Nashvillian, Jerome Moore served as a United States Peace Corp volunteer in Paraguay, now is a community organizer and creator of “Deep Dish Conversations”, which he produces and serves as host at Nashville Public Television. Through this work composed of thirteen conversations, the author provides the reader with an understanding as to what inspires individuals to become community organizers. This 135-page tome began as a series of interviews that the author conducted with Nashville leaders and a diverse group community members and activists about what it means to live in Tennessee’s capital city. These conversations produced an honest dialogue about racism, lack of affordable housing, policing, and the fate of the city’s low-wage or poverty-stricken population. This work should be of interest to anyone wanting to make “the Athens of the South” a better and more openhearted metropolis for all who visit or call the city home. One should not only read Moore’s Deep Dish Conversations, he or she should let it ruminate and commit to being an agent of change so that the city will be a better and more welcoming place for all, residents and visitors alike. Paper, $24.95.

Vanderbilt University Press also published From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle edited by Francoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney, Jr. This work is the compilation of eight collaborative authors that engage the dynamic relationship between two liberatory possibilities on the African American Freedom Struggle timeline that goes from the Civil Rights/Black Power moment and the #BlackLivesMatter era. This updated exploration of the movement for civil rights is a much need work that illustrate the connective tissue between the antecedent Modern Civil Rights/Black Power Movements and Black Lives Matter. The editors framed this work around several questions including what can be learned when moments of struggle are placed in dialogue with each other? How should one’s understanding of the mass movements after the Second World War shape an analysis of #BLM? What are the continuities or discontinuities should scholars keep in mind? Additionally, how can one’s understanding of #BLM shape/reshape one’s understanding of the larger Black Freedom Struggle. Both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grass-roots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissension—core aspects of movement work—mark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multi-level responses to these assertions of African American humanity. Editor Francoise N. Hamlin is the Royce Family Associate Professor of Teaching Excellence in Africana Studies and History at Brown University and Editor Charles W. McKinney, Jr. is chair of Africana Studies and associate professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. From Rights to Lives and its contributing scholars have put the Modern Civil Rights Movement and the #BlackLivesMatter movement in dialogue with each other to bring about the subtle and inconspicuous characteristics of both movements. Paper $34.95.

Another publication brought forth by Vanderbilt University Press is the tenth-anniversary edition of Andrew Maraniss’ Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South with a foreword by Derrick E. White and Louis Moore. Their foreword places the story in the context of the study of sports and society, while the author, Andrew Maraniss adds a concluding chapter updating readers on how events unfolded between Strong Inside’s 2014 publication and Perry Wallace’s death in 2017 and explores Wallace’s continuing legacy. The biography of Wallace, the first African American basketball player in the Southeastern Conference—became a catalyst for the reconciliation between Wallace and the city in which he was born rejected him, despite his contribution to place that considered itself the “Athens of the South.” In September of 2023, the Nashville Children’s Theatre presented Strong Inside, as an adapted play of the same title. Maraniss is a New York Times–bestselling author of sports nonfiction for adults, teens, and children. In addition to Strong Inside, his work includes Games of Deception: The True Story of the First US Olympic Basketball Team at the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany; Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke; Inaugural Ballers: The True Story of the First US Women’s Olympic Basketball Team; and the Young Readers adaptation of Strong Inside. Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South is a must read for those interested in the intersection of race, the Southeastern Conference, and sports in American history. Paper, $24.95