The Making of a Southerner

by Katherine DuPre Lumpkin, Darlene Clark Hine (Foreword)

Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin was born into a prominent Georgia family and raised in a southern society intent on preserving the economic and racial status quo. But as a young woman working with the poor in the sand hills of South Carolina, she began to question what she had been taught. In The Making of a Southerner , Lumpkin re-creates the South of her childhood and records the journey she took from her early instruction as a daughter of the "Lost Cause" to the liberal viewpoints she championed as an adult.

Genres: History, Memoir

280 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 1992

Reviews

[Alma · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing journey of a young white woman in the American South. Lumpkin tells the readers what it takes to create prejudice in young people like herself, and the enlightening journey she traveled to change her ways of thinking.

[Grace Tenkay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and heartfelt. If you are interested in southern culture, would recommend this highly.

[Amy Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feels like she tried to make an honest "account" as Edward Ball uses the term, for her pesonal history as it reflects Southern history.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written and intensely self-aware, it provides an immensely engaging window into her time, place, and culture.

[Sami · Rating 5 out of 5]

a memoir of her life post-civil war childhood. Very interesting.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

A heartfelt story of a woman raised in the South and her developing a sense of place, history and self-awareness. Wonderful book.

[Karen]

This was a fascinating book! Most of it was post Civil War memories of the daughter of a Southerner who was a teenager during the war. She chronicles the reconstruction period, the emergence of the KKK, the support of the "Lost Cause", and Jim Crow. She moves in her attitudes from acceptance of all things Southern to realization that attitudes toward African Americans by white Southerners are totally wrong. The book was completed in the 1940's. She adds a very valuable "afterward" in 1980 after the rejection of segregation by the courts and the move toward integration.