Until recently, it was thought that the Dismal Swamp, which stretches from south Virginia through North Carolina, was a modest settlement at best, and that Maroon communities founded by runaways were rare in United States slavery. But recent archaeology has revealed it was a settlement that was sustained over generations. Literally thousands of peo

“[t]he South has tons of black people, so even if you’re racist, you’re still down with the black people. But up there, they ain’t got that many black people so they don’t even know how to act.”

To the east of Jackson, in the center of the state, in 2019, ICE raided chicken factories. They were populated by Mexican and Central American immigrants, doing jobs once done by Black folks. If you’ve ever read Anne Moody’s memoir about growing up in the Black Belt and joining the freedom movement, Coming of Age in Mississippi, you will remember h

I hate how many people who ought to be here in New Orleans are dead while the tourist theater continues. I hate the grief that rests all over this city. I hate that, post-Katrina, people couldn’t come home. I hate that strangers come in and vomit on its streets and buy its wares and demand to be entertained, and the truth is nobody can just say “Fu

Behind the monument was my destination: the First African Baptist Church of Savannah. It is the oldest Black church in North America. It was constituted in 1777, but first organized in 1773 by Pastor George Leile. Leile departed several years later. After fighting on the side of the British in the Revolutionary War, he was granted his freedom and,

Being a Black American requires double consciousness, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, the habit of seeing from inside the logic of race and the lives of the racialized, and from the external superego of what it means to be American, with all its archetypes and interests.

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.

There are some places that tell the ugly beauty overtly, not by innuendo or loud silence. Like the Whitney Plantation, also along the Great River Road, which has been restored as a way to tell the history of slavery. It retains all of its beauty and its horror. In 1811, the largest slave revolt in the US South took place there. About five hundred e

The dollar store is one of many business models given to us by the South, like Walmart but far more modest and even cheaper. Dollar General began in 1939 in Scottsville, Kentucky, as J. L. Turner and Son. In the mid-’50s its name was changed to Dollar General, and in 1968 the company went public. Family Dollar is younger. It was founded in 1959 in