As you’re doing your Christmas shopping, you’ve got good options for the reader on your list!

Closed Ranks:
The Whitehurst Case in Post Civil-Rights Montgomery

Published in 2018 by NewSouth Books, Closed Ranks tells the latter-day story of the Whitehurst Case, a police shooting controversy in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1970s. In this previously untold Black Lives Matter story, a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man, whose family is still seeking justice. The Alabama Writers Forum’s review of the book stated, “Closed Ranks is a powerful and methodical memoir that captures a wrongful historical account of the untold murder of Bernard Whitehurst Jr., an African-American man who was senselessly killed on December 2, 1975 by a white officer on the Montgomery police force.”

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Children of the Changing South:
Accounts of Growing up During and After Integration

Published in 2011 by McFarland & Co., the edited collection Children of the Changing South contains memoirs by eighteen writers and historians who spent their formative years in the South from the 1950s through the 1990s. The book opens with Foster’s introduction, which provides an academic argument for the importance of studying this subject. Notable contributors include Jim Grimsley, Stephanie Powell Watts, Ravi Howard, and Kathleen Rooney.

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I Just Make People Up:
Ramblings with Clark Walker

Published in 2009 by NewSouth Books, I Just Make People Up offers a biography and full-color retrospective of Clark Walker, an artist whose career in Montgomery, Alabama spanned more than five decades from the 1950s through the 2010s. The book was based on conversations between the writer and the artist in 2004, when they were neighbors. In her review of I Just Make People Up, the late Julia Oliver called it “a gorgeous coffee table book” and “a triumph of the as-told-to style of writing.”

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