Hunter Library is pleased to announce the reissue of Just Over the Hill: Black Appalachians in Jackson County, Western North Carolina by Victoria A. Casey McDonald. The book, originally published by Catch the Spirit of Appalachia in 2012, presents a collection of narratives of African Americans in the region. The biographies and histories feature educators, soldiers, factory workers, ministers, athletes, and other community members.
A Western Carolina University alumna (BSE,1973; MAE, 1978), Victoria A. Casey McDonald was a teacher, preacher, artist, storyteller, and local historian. She was the author of three other books, African Americans of Jackson County: From Slavery to Integration, A Pictorial History, and the novels Living in the Shadow of Slavery and Under the Light of Darkness: Love and Marriage in the Antebellum South for Slaves.
McDonald passed away in 2014. This reissue is a collaboration with her daughter, Faustine (Tina) McDonald. The new edition includes a foreword by Marie T. Cochran, the founding curator of the Affralachian Artist Project and the 2020-2022 Lehman Brady Visiting Professorship, at Duke University, Center for Documentary Studies and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of American Studies. The project was funded by a Thomas W. Ross Fund publishing grant from The University of North Carolina Press, which helps “establish sustainable publishing initiatives” including reissues of out-of-print works.
This is the third in Hunter Library’s series of regionally focused reprints–all funded by Thomas W. Ross publishing grants and distributed by UNC Press: Twenty Years Hunting and Fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains by Samuel J. Hunnicutt and Mountain Days: A Journal of Camping Experiences in the Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, 1914-1938 by Paul M. Fink.
Just Over the Hill is available for checkout at Hunter Library and wherever books are sold, including the UNC-Press Website and City Lights Bookstore, Sylva.
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