Sublime

but they have warned me that any time the police see a Negro idling, especially one they do not recognize, they will surely question him. This is worrisome, certainly an experience any Negro wants to avoid.

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.

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What saved his life? A 32-month prison sentence. It wasn’t until he went to the prison library and began teaching inmates to read that he woke up from his haze. “You’ll feel like for the first time in your life that you’re doing something for somebody else,” he writes. “That it’s not all about you. And your narcissism will start to wane.”

the papers of the Southern Conference Education Fund, is my mother talking in 1974 about the indigenous prison struggle, meaning Black Southerners recognizing that locking people up was a tool of social control.