An intriguing blend of biography, oral history, sociology, and politics that stretches the boundaries of each category to examine one particular story of the South during the Civil Rights era.

What does it mean to tell a life story? Can it truly be done? Is there a single version of -truth- to be told about a person's life?

In this complex and fascinating book, Dorothy Danner of Mobile, Alabama, emerges as an intriguing example of Sartre's -universal singular.- Born into a wealthy and well-established Southern family, she bears and reflects many of the marks of her gender, social place,...

Arguing that politics is essentially a contest for meaning and that telling a story is an elemental political act, Richard A. Pride lays bare the history of school desegregation in Mobile, Alabama, to demonstrate the power of narrative in cultural and political change. This book describes the public, personal, and meta-narratives of racial inequality that have competed for dominance in Mobile. Pride begins with a white liberal's quest to desegregate the city's public schools in 1955 and traces which narratives--those of biological inferiority, white oppression, the behavior and values of...