Making of a Southerner

KATHARINE DU PRE LUMPKIN (1897–1988) was a sociologist and activist who studied, taught, and did research at a number of schools, including Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Mills College, and Wells College. Although she is best known for The Making of a Southerner, Lumpkin published a number of other books: The Family: A Study of Member Roles; Shutdowns in the Connecticut Valley: A Study of Worker Displacement in the Small Industrial Community; Child Workers in America (with Dorothy W. Douglas); The South in Progress; and The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke. She is an inductee to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

Like the autobiographical writings of such other atypical white southern women as Lillian Smith and Virginia Durr, Lumpkin's volume is one of illuminating power. She penetrates the contradictions, myths, and ironies so deeply embedded in southern culture—in its religion, its economy, its race relations, and its gender conventions. Hers is the poignant testimony of a woman steeped in traditions peculiar to her class and region, who through education and will removed the cataracts of racism, curing herself of the blindness that hid pervasive and unrelenting white poverty and the grinding exploitation of agricultural, factory, and mill workers.