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

In December of 1982, the Cuban-born Luis Alvarez, a Miami police officer, shot and killed Neville Johnson Jr., a young Black Caribbean American man, in an Overtown arcade as Johnson was playing a video game. The following conflagration left eighteen dead and shut down more than two hundred businesses. There was no conviction.

For all the smug assessments of how poor White Southerners vote against their own interests and hate indiscriminately, how rare it is that we attend to their other stories.

Square by square, I walked to a church. I’d been there twice before. But the details keep it from ever getting old. Outside there is a monument that was erected to the “Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue” of the Battle of Savannah during the American Revolutionary War. Eight hundred men from what is now Haiti alongside three thousand Frenchmen

If America is to be salvific, it can only be so because underneath our skyscrapers lie the people who have tasted the red clay, the loamy soil. Lashed, hidden, running, captured. Crucified for gain, bloodying the soil. If their dreams can become “we” dreams, hope will spring. “Greatness” is such an egotistical and dangerous word. But in the land of

If you take an “Are You Southern?” data-mining-type test on social media, one of the questions will inevitably be: “Do you call soft drinks soda, pop, or coke?” The last one is supposed to be the correct answer, but that’s not true everywhere in the South. Rather, it evidences the power of Atlanta as siphon and signifier. And it underscores one of

If you want to understand a nation, or have aspirations for it that are decent, myth ought to be resisted. If we tell the story of the nation as it began, in Virginia, with the founding fathers and the bulk of early presidents and the first permanent British settlement, the terms of our nation are clear. Conquest, violence towards the Indigenous, a

The middle-class African American enclave of Liberty City began to change earlier, in the 1960s, when I-95 was built right through Overtown, displacing residents. And as a result of changes wrought by the civil rights movement, middle-class Black people started to move into neighborhoods previously covered by racially restrictive covenants that had

FOR 102 YEARS, THE REMAINS of Columbus were housed in Havana. They were placed at the Havana Cathedral in 1796, when France took over Hispaniola. In 1898, when Cuba freed itself of Spanish dominion, they sent his ashes with them. In the Bahamas, Discovery Day, in honor of Columbus, was celebrated until 2012, when it was replaced by National Heroes

Southern Black people learned steeliness the hard way, under the thumb of Jim Crow. And perhaps from seeing how the North wasn’t much better, if at all. They learned there was nowhere to turn and no option but to fight back.