Author Archives: Doug Cumming

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About Doug Cumming

Doug Cumming is an associate professor emeritus of journalism at Washington & Lee University with 26 years experience at metro newspapers and magazines. After getting a Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill in mass communications, he taught multimedia reporting and feature writing at Loyola University-New Orleans and at W&L in Virginia. Earlier, he worked at the newspapers in Raleigh, Providence and Atlanta; was editor of the Sunday Magazine in Providence; and helped launch Southpoint monthly magazine in Atlanta. He won a George Polk Award and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

Five Lessons & Carols for Southern Liberals

Posted on February 15, 2020 by Doug Cumming

(This essay first ran in the website “Like the Dew: A Progressive Journal of Southern Culture & Politics,” Dec. 8, 2019) The word has gone forth. Our historic Episcopal church has done what many thought was impossible – we got … Continue reading →

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Down to the entryway of higher education

Posted on February 4, 2020 by Doug Cumming

For millions of Americans, community college is the gateway to higher education, job skills and a better life. Last fall, for me, community college was a gateway in the other direction. It led me, temporarily, out of the bubble of … Continue reading →

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Michael Cohen’s Lesson

Posted on November 20, 2019 by Doug Cumming

They’re cheering Trump in Atlanta, cheering him in Monroe, La. This is the world of TV that Neil Postman warned about in Amusing Ourselves to Death, now taken over the whole American brain and nervous system, our national politics. The … Continue reading →

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Review of ‘Deep South Dispatches’

Posted on October 9, 2019 by Doug Cumming

Herbers, John N., with Anne Farris Rosen. Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist.Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018. 260 pp. $28. Look up John N. Herbers’s byline in the New York Times Historical database and you find … Continue reading →

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Glimpses of Buckhead, 1930-40

Posted on October 2, 2019 by Doug Cumming

Something I learned about the cultural and economic life in parts of north Atlanta in the 1930s and ‘40s, from online U.S. Census data. I looked up a 1930 page that includes my uncle John Kiser, when he was 2 … Continue reading →

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The Mist of History

Posted on September 14, 2019 by Doug Cumming

Living in Rockbridge County, I’ve learned to accept the idea that there are three distinct kinds of “history.” First, there’s the history of historians, the gentle “arguments” of history professors in the three colleges rooted hereabouts and in the lectures … Continue reading →

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Shade for sale?

Posted on September 5, 2019 by Doug Cumming

We worked in the lower pasture getting fence posts and yellow jacket stings (two, that is, for me), then met William in Dobson at the Mexican restaurant called Tlaquepaque. It’s bleakly set between the highway and that giant chicken processing … Continue reading →

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South Sudanese gathering in Lexington: One step

Posted on September 5, 2019 by Doug Cumming

This past weekend, a different civil war drew nearly 100 mediation experts, Episcopal bishops and war victims from as far away as South Sudan and Omaha to the little city where Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are buried. The … Continue reading →

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Free movie, pointing to local South Sudanese gathering for reconciliation

Posted on August 14, 2019 by Doug Cumming

LEXINGTON, Va. – A one-time screening of the movie “The Good Lie” at Washington and Lee University is open to the public on Friday evening, Aug. 16, to raise awareness of a historic meeting of more than 100 South Sudanese … Continue reading →

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The Wright stuff

Posted on July 31, 2019 by Doug Cumming

The sky over the Wright Brothers National Memorial is a dazzling blue playground dotted with kites. In that blue, a slow cub plane pulls an advertisement that says, “$15 Rides All Day. . .OBXAIRPLANES.COM.” The sun is blinding. It’s hot, … Continue reading →

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