Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America

Born into a former slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin were raised in a culture of white supremacy. While Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her sisters reinvented themselves as radical thinkers, organizing for racial justice, women’s liberation, and labor rights. National Humanities Award?winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall traces the sisters from their childhood in the Deep South to the progressive zeal of the early twentieth century and toward our contemporary moment.

By threading these women’s stories through a century of history, social movements, and intellectual debates, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall makes visible forgotten sites of experimentation and creative thinking on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. She demonstrates how the fraught ties of sisterhood were tested and frayed as each sister struggled, albeit in radically different ways, to reinvent herself as a modern woman, grapple with a legacy of racism, and remake the South as a place to call home.