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Abstract: illustrations by Natalie Nelson“Slavery is everywhere the pet monster of the American people.”“Comfort has come to be its own corruption.”“We should not presume a desire for freedom.”In her 1943 essay for The American Mercury, “The ‘Pet Negro’ System,” writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston transforms the literary genre of the journal article, discomfiting its traditionally genteel form with the exuberant and colorful rhetorical punches of the Black political pulpit. Staging a community callout embedded in southern specificity in a northern publication, Hurston adopts the oratorical approaches that emerge in the early Black churches of the South to address the moral and political problem of comfort, “an ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Houston, texas, was my parents’ first home in the US South.My father was born in the Mexican state of Coahuila, my mother in San Luis Potosí. In the 1980s, each individually made their way to Houston, Texas, where they had family and friends from their respective rural hometowns. A combination of an economic crisis in Mexico with a steady job market in Texas made Houston a popular destination for many migrants in the last decades of the twentieth century. The growing Mexican social and kinship networks established in US cities during the 1980s, particularly following the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, also facilitated higher migration rates of women and young people in this era. My ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The Mississippi Freedom Writers grew out of a trip organized by Professor Pamela Voekel and other Dartmouth College faculty, students, post-docs, and staff to the landmark conference “Making and Unmaking Mass Incarceration” in Oxford, Mississippi, in December of 2019. Members of the group who made the trip then became contributors to the inaugural semester of the abolitionist Study and Struggle project, helping to organize almost one hundred radical study groups within and beyond prisons, select readings, recruit speakers, and translate all materials into Spanish during the summer and fall of 2020. The following year, as some of the original Dartmouth College members graduated and new students joined, the group ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Vidalia mills had only been up and running for about a year when Eric Goldstein went on his quest. As soon as he’d confirmed that the demolition company was in possession of what he was looking for—that the machines hadn’t been destroyed after all—he flew from New York City to Greensboro, North Carolina, that same night in 2019. He met the demo guy at the shuttered factory and asked to see the goods. They were untouched, just as the last workers had left them. “I could not believe what I was looking at,” Goldstein said. They struck a deal on the spot, and within ten days the precious cargo was on its way to Vidalia, Louisiana. White Oak Mill with the lake and mill village houses in the foreground, #1276. All ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Annabelle Pavy, Tanielma Da Costa, and Mekenzie Fanguy learning about Woodland Plantation, where the slave rebellion of 1811 began, in LaPlace, Louisiana. All photographs courtesy of the author, from her film Hollow Tree.“We untangled a lot. We kept asking, ‘What does this mean'’ We asked that over and over.”Annabelle (18), mekenzie (18), and tanielma (17) stand at the edge of Island Road in Terrebonne Parish, the part of Louisiana’s coast that remains barely above the sea, watching as two excavators move dirt to build berms that might protect the land. When a storm blows from the west, or the east, the wind pushes water onto the road, sometimes making it impassable. Mekenzie is from here, “down the bayou,” which ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Lumberton, NC, 2016. Photos courtesy of the author.In october 2016, my wife, Jill McCorkle, and I drove our Tacoma pickup filled with cases of bottled water and other essentials to her hometown of Lumberton, North Carolina. Hurricane Matthew had made landfall at McClellanville, South Carolina, just north of Charleston, and then drifted northeasterly into North Carolina. An eight-mile stretch of I-95 went completely underwater, and by October 10, just two days after the hurricane came ashore in South Carolina, the Lumber River rose to over twenty-two feet in Lumberton. Roads, yards, and first floors of many houses were underwater. As Lumberton resident James Robinson told the Raleigh News and Observer, “All that ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Rows of young cotton around tenant houses in the Mississippi Delta, May 1940. Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.love for the valley arises within us love to possess and thrive in this valleyWILLIAM FAULKNER’S Absalom, Absalom! (1936) tells a history of the Deep South through the lens of an enslaver named Thomas Sutpen. Faulkner’s fictional protagonist grew up in the early 1800s as a dirt-poor white boy in backwoods Appalachia yet aims to obtain status and wealth by becoming a member of the planter elite. He fulfills his “grand design” by embarking on a journey that first takes him to Haiti and then to the fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha with twenty “wild negroes” ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: These quacks [the political economists] would make wreck of the affections, in exchange for incessant production and accumulation . . . It is indeed the moral economy that they always keep out of sight.“AMERICA IS MISSISSIPPI,” Malcolm X asserted in 1964, as he appeared in Harlem alongside Fannie Lou Hamer. “There’s no such thing as the South—it’s America.” Over the summer and fall of 2022, as this issue of Southern Cultures took shape, Mississippi produced an extraordinary archive of moral manifestos that echoed this conflation of the state and the nation. Mississippi’s Congressman Bennie Thompson—who “draws inspiration from the legacies of Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry and Henry Kirksey,” according ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Inventory of water supply. Photo by the author.I HAVE A SCRAP OF PAPER I’ve kept, perhaps perversely, for over a year now. It’s an inventory of all the water I had in my house, where it came from, and whether it was potable. The bathtub was filled with water we could use to flush toilets, and if we got desperate, we could boil it to wash dishes or hands. A neighbor had trudged over to bring us a few plastic camping jugs of boiled drinkable water, but those supplies were dwindling. There was a stock pot of water on the stove, and, for the first time in five days, I could boil it, since the power was back on, and I had managed to relight the pilot light. I was compulsively calculating numbers in my head as I ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Ben Shahn, Break Reaction’s Grip, 1946, offset lithograph. Gift of Leslie, Judy and Gabri Schreyer, and Alice Schreyer Batko, 2000.75.5. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.IN THE UNITED STATES, why is wealth—especially financial wealth—held by white households so disproportionately and, in particular, by the most affluent ones' Racial wealth inequality is no accident of history. Rather, it is the intended result of the southern Democrats in Congress who controlled federal tax policy throughout most of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1930s, champions of white supremacy, such as Senator Pat Harrison (D-MI), Senator Walter George (D-GA), and Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. (D-VA), turned to an ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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