Compare And Contrast Wilkie And Ralph Eubanks

Ralph Eubanks’ memoir, Ever is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past, is a personal history of an African American family’s experience in Mississippi. Eubanks revisits a small Southern town divided by racism and violence in the midst of the Civil Rights era. Eubanks recounts burning churches, forcibly integrated schools, and the murders of numerous African Americans. Curtis Wilkie’s historical autobiography, Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Historic Events That Shaped the Modern South, is a political and social history of the South told through the perspective of a white man. Wilkie offers a personal look on significant landmark events of American history in the South. From James Meredith’s enrollment in the University of Mississippi to the Freedom Summer of 1964 to the murder

In their memoirs, Eubanks and Wilkie discuss their upbringings in Mississippi with an emphasis on the issue of race during larger historical events. Eubanks and Wilkie’s historical autobiographies both portray a man coming to terms with his southern legacy and its redemption. Throughout both authors’ memoirs, the comparison of their lives are portrayed through their upbringings and outlooks on historical events in Mississippi. “Like most of Mississippi,” Eubanks and his family lived on a farm “which was made up of eighty acres of rolling green pastures and dark rich fields planted in vegetables and fruit trees – all common in our part of Mississippi, except that we were black” (Eubanks 24). Eubanks was the child of educated professionals and claimed that some might say that he “belonged to a privileged class of people, blacks with a sense of noblesse