My journey through the culture of the Lost Cause and what had been (still is?) the cult of Jefferson Davis came full circle years after my initial visit to Beauvoir upon learning about the creation of the Jefferson Davis Presidential Library. This project was initiated by the Mississippi Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), which owns and operates the site, and through its lobbying efforts became a financial beneficiary of the State of Mississippi. On their own, the Sons were not successful in their efforts to raise money for the library. In fact, the money they raised was not enough to renovate the house, much less build a presidential library.

The original opened in 1998.

So the Sons lobbied state officials, especially then Governor Kirk Fordice, who confirmed his support for Confederate history during each year of his two terms in office by officially declaring April as Confederate Heritage Month…

From the editor Regina N. Bradley:

Black Camera invites submissions for a Close-Up focusing on hip-hop cinema. Cinema is an underutilized medium for critically engaging how hip-hop sonically and visually experiments with memory, music, and identity to articulate a post–civil rights Black experience. Where earlier representations of hip-hop cinema (such as the Breaking films and Wildstyle) focused on documenting its elemental aesthetics or conceptualizing contemporary black agency and protest (such as the “hood” film era of the early and mid-1990s), there is still room to consider how hip-hop cinema stands as a curator of race, identity, and performance in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This call for submissions looks to break new ground in identifying how film helps visualize and navigate hip-hop’s increasingly ambiguous intersections of race, identity, and commercial appeal. In other words, how does hip-hop cinema redress and/or link critical depictions of Blackness in the…