Research Paper on:
Katherine Lumpkin's The Making of a Southerner

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
chronicles her life growing up in the South. Her commentary on what it means to be Southern also serves to dispel the often accepted stereotypes about Southern culture. One of  the first myths that she explodes is that of the romantic South as immortalized by the Gone with the Wind novels and movies. She exposes the reader to the South  which she saw; the one which included black Southerners, the highly political Southerners, and those who were determined to hold on to a way of life which was long since  past. From this, then, one can see that Lumpkin believes that there are many faces to the personality of the South and each person living there chooses which of those  faces most closely represents their values. Lumpkins story is particularly compelling when she mentions that her own father fought for the confederacy and was so disillusioned by the outcome of  the war that he later joined the Ku Klux Klan. She speaks about her fathers view of the South. His way was the only way that any white person should  view the South and if one didnt adhere to that, then one wasnt Southern anymore. This would cause great strife between her and her father since as a young college  student in the 1920s she became a civil rights activist on the University of Georgias campus. Lumpkin shows in her book that prejudice and racial bigotry are  not endemic simply to the South, but that it was rampant everywhere in the United States. She especially shows how these prejudices are passed on to the next generation, both  consciously and sub-consciously, and how powerful these myths were to the extent that they shaped policies and societal structures for decades. Her time spent among the black workers