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

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

Orchids are native to Florida, but you’d hardly know, as they’ve been rendered so exotic in our popular culture as to be wholly unfamiliar to us.

So many people live in the ruins of the American drive for prosperity. The residual mining towns are evidence. If you tell a story about the American worker in the twentieth century, you have to talk about the miner, Appalachia’s heroic archetype. Coal was the something indispensable for the industrial revolution. It is one of the most impactful fo

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.

The Clotilda arrived in Mobile Bay in July of 1860, fifty-two years after the slave trade was declared illegal. Slave traders broke the law by importing captured Black people, either from Africa or the Caribbean, and secretly depositing the cargo at hidden locations along the Gulf Coast. It was a lucrative game of cat and mouse. With the Clotilda,

Historians think Vesey was born in Bermuda in 1757. He was sold to a planter in Haiti, who ultimately returned Denmark to his original owner because he had epilepsy. Once Vesey’s master settled in Charleston, a cosmopolitan hub, Vesey became literate. At a crossroads of history, his story is yet another reminder of the breadth of the antebellum Sou

For Black Southerners, preservation has been challenging, even at an institutional level. Take, for example, the bounty that historically Black colleges and universities possess: papers, photos, all manner of artifacts. The wealth gap is evident. Lacking the capital of their White counterparts, Black institutions, even with the most careful of hand

But the truth is, no matter what New York says, hip hop has always owed a debt to the South as per Kiese Laymon’s classic essay “Hip Hop Stole My Black Boy.” You cannot get to hip hop without James Brown and his funky drummer, the sonic foundation of the art. Brown, country as he wanted to be, with his greasy perm, spangly suits, and gravelly drawl

Wells was best known as a journalist for exposing the lies behind the justification for lynching. Negroes charged with recklessly eyeballing a White woman, or worse, were often people who had found prosperity and respect despite the constraints of Jim Crow. The lynchings put them back in their place. Wells nearly met a similar fate, but escaped as