No Captives

What the White South confronted in the movement era was a paradigm shift. There was a model for sustaining White supremacy: terrorizing Black folks, the dispassionate acquiescence of the White North and the federal government, economic control, and an ideological hold on its ranks managed by humiliation and cruelty. But a model only holds as long a

For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we’ve developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don’t, it’s a dark alley a

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

The way private enterprise took over the grounds of public housing and Black life in New Orleans is consistent with the norms of late capitalism in the United States. Everything is subject to markets. Folkways have little power without capital. But there is a particularly sharp way gentrification cuts in the South, a region built by the people who

Like countless other Black Southerners at the time, Pullum’s fate was directly tied to the whims of his white boss, who in 1923 decided to withhold money from Pullum even after he had completed the necessary work. With no available recourse or protection from the state, Pullum decided to take matters into his own hands.