South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

all identity is in part myth, the kind that we can use to sort out living, for better or worse, depending upon its uses.

Today Houston is one of the most diverse and cosmopolitan US cities. Anglos, White people who are not Latino make up 24.6 percent of the population. African Americans make up 22.5 percent, and the Latino population is 44.8 percent of the city. Asian Americans make up nearly 7 percent of the population, and Houston has the largest Nigerian populatio

About a mile away from the Orleans Ballroom, on St. Charles Avenue, stands the old headquarters of the United Fruit Company. There they traded in bananas, shaped the history of Central America, and provided the template for the modern multinational corporation. The heyday of United Fruit can be traced to Samuel Zemurray. In 1877, he was born to a J

Ironically, then, like places throughout the South, Harpers Ferry is a monument to the defeated. Only here the defeated are wild-eyed radical abolitionist John Brown and his companions, and not the Confederate dead.

The civil rights struggle in Appalachia, as elsewhere in the South, was an effort at remaking what it meant to be Americans. The Highlander Folk School is one of the most important institutions in that generations-long endeavor. In 1932, in the Tennessee hills, Highlander was established.

In 2019, the Highlander Center’s main office building caught fire. This was just a year after another, more publicized fire had raged in Tennessee’s mountain range. That was discovered to be an adolescent accident, tragic but largely innocent. This time, in the detritus and ash left after the flames were extinguished, a souvenir remained. It was a

MIAMI IS THE MOST CARIBBEAN of American cities. But it is not just peopled with people from the Hispanophone Caribbean. It is a palimpsest of historic inequalities and a threshing of cultures where the heat radiates in waves off the concrete. Spanish explorers arrived in what is present-day Miami in 1513. But they struggled with forming a permanent

In 1979, police officers chased thirty-three-year-old insurance salesman Arthur McDuffie on his motorcycle, claiming he’d made a vulgar gesture at them. When McDuffie toppled off the bike, police removed his helmet, beat him to death, and then replaced the helmet. My father used to have a copy of a poem about this event on his wall, titled “Who Kil

Immediately after World War II, and after my grandparents had already left, German scientists arrived in Huntsville as part of Operation Paperclip. First the scientists built ballistic missiles and other weapons. Later they worked on establishing NASA. The leader among them was a rocket scientist named Wernher von Braun. A Nazi, he was a master of