Singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman made history last year when she became the first Black artist to receive the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year Award, after Luke Combs remade a song she wrote—the 1988 hit “Fast Car”—and it soared to No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart.

If only the late, great Black singer-songwriter Ted Jarrett had been alive to witness Chapman’s achievement. Like Chapman, Jarrett sticks out as a kind of oddity—the rare Black musician who wrote a country No. 1 and became renowned for it. That there are not more examples of hit country songs written by Black songwriters speaks to America’s racial divide, which, for many decades, dictated how music was marketed. The fact is, Chapman’s and Jarrett’s songs, and the country stars who perform them, have a great deal in common. They express in uncomplicated and memorable ways the everyday experiences of everyday Americans. Looking at it that way, Chapman’s CMA honor was not an anomaly; it was inevitable, if long overdue.

Country music and Black folk music are rooted in centuries of symbiotic relationships between southern Black and white singers, songwriters, musicians, and audiences. As early as the 18th century, African American traditional fiddlers were familiar sights on slave plantations in the South. They were “the center of social activities during the evenings for relaxation as well as during holiday festivities, providing music not only for blacks but for the white slave owners on holidays and for their private parties,” wrote musical polymath Terry Jenoure in 1981, in the journal Contributions in Black Studies.

The banjo, an instrument with African origins, became the signature sound of string band and bluegrass music beloved especially by southern white migrants toiling in northern factories and stockyards. Jazz genius Louis Armstrong and his wife Lil Hardin Armstrong accompanied Jimmie Rodgers, one of country music’s first modern superstars, on Rodgers’ 1930 recording of “Blue Yodel #9.” African American harmonica player DeFord Bailey was one of the first artists heard on WSM’s “Grand Ole Opry” radio broadcast. Black country crooner Charley Pride garnered CMAs and Grammys. Ray Charles’s two Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music albums became bestsellers in 1962.

Jarrett’s life and work reflect this give and take.

Theodore Roosevelt “Ted” Jarrett Jr. was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 17, 1925, just more than a month before Nashville station WSM launched the “Grand Ole Opry,” the radio broadcast that turned Nashville into the country music capital. Jarrett’s upbringing was a riches-to-rags story. His father, Theodore Roosevelt Jarrett Sr., earned enough money working for a bootlegging enterprise to enable his family to employ a housekeeper, a cook, and a nurse. But after Ted Sr. was shot and killed, Jarrett’s mother, unable to maintain the family’s standard of living, sent 7-year-old Ted Jr. and his sister, Dorothy, to live with their grandmother and step-grandfather on their Antioch, Tennessee farm. When they were old enough, Ted and Dorothy joined their grandparents in picking cotton and doing other farm work.

Ted always had an imaginative mind, and from knee pants, he spent what little free time he had writing poems. In his pre-teen years, Jarrett was intrigued by newspaper ads that shouted about the “thousands of dollars” to be made by submitting song poems, or lyrics, for publication. Ignoring his step-grandfather’s dismissive retort that “Black boys don’t write songs,” and with surreptitious support from his grandmother, Ted eagerly sent samples of his song-poems to the advertisers. To his dismay, the so-called publishers turned out to be nothing more than “song sharks” who preyed on the hopes of amateur lyricists, only to defraud them in the end.

Disappointed but not daunted, Jarrett made music throughout high school, and enrolled in the music program at Fisk University after graduation. He had to delay his studies when he was drafted during World War II, and again later, when his GI Bill money ran out. To pay the bills, he dove full-time into Nashville’s postwar music scene, fitting in a class or two at Fisk whenever he had extra money.

Jarrett wrote songs and pitched them to Music City publishers. He also worked as a disc jockey on pioneering African American radio station WSOK, as a pianist in the city’s then-booming R&B club circuit, as a talent scout for the R&B and country label Tennessee Records and, briefly, as tour manager for Nashville’s Radio Four gospel quartet. In 1955, his song “It’s Love Baby (24 Hours a Day)” became an R&B hit for local unit Louis Brooks and His Hi-Toppers, and for bigger stars like Ruth Brown, and the vocal group the Midnighters.

Jarrett wrote his first No. 1 Country hit, “Love, Love, Love,” that same year. The song, an exuberant pledge of eternal affection, caught the attention of Webb Pierce, a white singer, guitarist, songwriter, and Opry star known for wearing elaborately decorated “Nudie Suits.” Pierce’s version of “Love, Love, Love,” which gave Jarrett’s song a pedal-steel-drenched reading that sounded like a long-lost Hank Williams piece, spent 32 weeks on the U.S. country chart, eight at number No. 1. In November 1955, Billboard presented the song with a Triple Crown Award for being the most played country record on radio and jukeboxes, and the best-selling country record in stores. The December 10, 1955 issue of the trade magazine the Cash Box featured a smiling Jarrett holding 78 rpm singles of three versions of the song: one by Pierce, one by pop crooner Johnny Ray on Columbia, and his own recording for Nashville imprint Excello.

From there, Jarrett grabbed the music industry with both hands. Music, regardless of genre or marketing category, was his passion. He championed Black artists who crossed over from R&B to pop, managed acts, and founded record labels such as Calvert, Champion, Ref-O-Ree, and T-Jaye. In total, Jarrett wrote approximately 300 songs, several of them portending the rise of southern soul music. The Rolling Stones covered “You Can Make It If You Try,” arguably Jarrett’s best known composition, on their eponymous 1964 debut album. All the while, Jarrett never gave up on his dream of a college degree, receiving a bachelor’s in music from Fisk University in 1974, when he was in his late 40s.

But all of Jarrett’s success didn’t shield him from the racism embedded in the music industry. Take an incident in 1956, when the Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), an organization that represents songwriters and music composers and publishers, saluted Jarrett and “Love, Love, Love” at Nashville’s Hermitage Hotel. Arriving in black tie at the hotel where his mother once worked, Jarrett was stopped at the door by a white police officer who thought he was trying to crash the party. The mishap was quickly rectified, but Jarrett reflected in his 2005 memoir that initially “all the people inside [the event] stared at me, wondering what a black man was doing at the country awards.”

Jarrett only had one big country hit. But he maintained a relationship with the country music community by helping the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum curate “Night Train to Nashville,” a 2004-2005 exhibit that chronicled Nashville’s significant but often overlooked contributions to R&B. A two-album compilation inspired by the exhibit earned a Grammy in 2005 for Best Historical Recording. (Today, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, you can view the “Night Train to Nashville” exhibit online.)

By his death at age 83 in March 2009, Jarrett had showed his step-grandfather, and the world, that “Black boys” could write songs, even hit country songs for white artists. More importantly, Jarrett—and now Chapman—demonstrated that a good song is a good song, no matter who sings it, when, where, or in what genre.

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Cultivars, or “cultivated varieties,” are variants of domesticated plants adapted to specific uses, climates, and soils. Soybean Digest printed the names of varieties recommended for specific locations over an outline map of the U.S. that extended far enough west to include a corner of Texas.

Unlike names for apples or other public-facing produce, the names for soy cultivars were not intended to entice consumers with appetizing imagery. Instead, they were a pragmatic means to keep a wealth of genetic lineages straight: single proper names chosen, it often seemed, for reasons known only to the breeders. What to make of “Clark” and “Kent,” often recommended for neighboring counties in the North? Or, in the South, such varieties as “S-100,” “CNS,” and “JEW 45” (bred by South Carolina farmer John E. Wannamaker, who lent his initials)?

There were, however, discernable shifts in naming practices. In the early 1900s, when the USDA began taking an active hand in importing thousands of samples of soybeans from Asia and sorting them into cultivars for American farmers, names indicating geographic origin, such as “Peking,” were common. By the late 1940s, names like “Mandarin” and “Hongkong” had become increasingly rare. Breeders instead chose names for soybeans, still widely regarded as a “botanical immigrants,” that more firmly rooted them on American soil. Northern breeders favored the names of presidents—“Adams,” “Madison,” “Lincoln”—and tribal nations: “Chippewa,” “Blackhawk,” “Ottawa.” Southern names of the time included “Arksoy,” “Volstate” (for Tennessee, the Volunteer State), and “Pelican” (in honor of Louisiana’s state bird).

These practices were inconsistent, though, next to one that emerged in the South in the mid-1950s that embodied a very specific regional identity. Somehow, a century after losing the Civil War, Confederate generals had returned—at least on the inside pages of an obscure trade journal. A new form of geographic identity was appearing in the South, beginning with a smattering of “Jackson” and “Lee” cultivars. By the last map of the series, in 1966, the rout of older varieties was nearly complete. They were crowded out by “Hood,” “Hill,” “Hampton,” “Stuart,” “Bragg,” “Hardee,” and “Pickett.”

This was not simply an invasion on paper. It pointed to a dramatic transformation of Southern agriculture, in which new soybean varieties played a major role once held by cotton. It was also a vivid indication of how this transformation largely excluded African Americans sharecroppers, who were being actively pushed off the land.

Every year between 1948 and 1966, the Soybean Digest published maps detailing “Recommended Varieties” or “Best Adapted Varieties”—sometimes including the caution to farmers, “Do not plant varieties north or south of their recommended latitudes.” Cultivars named for Confederates are highlighted in red, and spread through the South over time. Courtesy of Matthew Roth, adapted from the Soybean Digest.

Every year between 1948 and 1966, the Soybean Digest published maps detailing “Recommended Varieties” or “Best Adapted Varieties”—sometimes including the caution to farmers, “Do not plant varieties north or south of their recommended latitudes.” Cultivars named for Confederates are highlighted in red, and spread through the South over time. Courtesy of Matthew Roth, adapted from the Soybean Digest.

Every year between 1948 and 1966, the Soybean Digest published maps detailing “Recommended Varieties” or “Best Adapted Varieties”—sometimes including the caution to farmers, “Do not plant varieties north or south of their recommended latitudes.” Cultivars named for Confederates are highlighted in red, and spread through the South over time. Courtesy of Matthew Roth, adapted from the Soybean Digest.

As much as the Confederate cultivars reflected large structural forces at play, they were largely the work of a single man, responsible both for the painstaking scientific work it took to breed them and for the choice of this particular naming practice.

Edgar E. Hartwig was not a born Southerner. He grew up in Minnesota and received his Ph.D. in agronomy from the University of Illinois. He joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1941. Founded in its current form during the Civil War, the USDA was tasked with conducting research of direct benefit to American farmers, often in cooperation with state agricultural research stations. In 1948, Hartwig was assigned to oversee the cooperative soybean breeding program for 12 Southern states: the 11 former Confederate states, plus Oklahoma. The North/South divide in cultivar breeding was not unusual. Soybeans, like many crops, are sensitive to conditions that vary markedly from north to south, such as summer daylength and the length of the growing season. An unintended consequence: soybean breeding did rather precisely map onto American sectional divisions.

Hartwig’s outsized influence on Southern soybeans was, in part, due to his consummate skill at the exacting and time-consuming technique of backcrossing. Previous generations of American soy breeders had largely focused on sorting through existing lineages from the rich genetic heritage of Asia to find those well adapted to the country’s needs. Backcrossing was a more active form of breeding, in which two variants were mated, and then one was bred with successive generations of the resulting crosses until the other’s contribution was diluted to a small cluster of genes or even a single desirable trait.

This ability to mix and match genes was crucial for the success of soybeans in the South. Earlier in the 20th century, existing cultivars in the region were generally short and bushy plants, grown for hay. Increasingly, however, the real money in soybeans was coming from growing beans that could be processed into oil and animal feed. This required plants tall enough to be harvested by combines, pods not easily shattered by mechanical harvesting, and high yields of long-maturing beans rich in fat and protein. Northern cultivars had these traits, but breeders needed to combine these qualities with adaptations to Southern conditions, including shorter summer days and more numerous plant diseases. Hartwig was adept at the work, and as his cultivars went into circulation, soybean acreage in the 12 states in his program increased sixfold between 1954 to 1974 to almost 16 million acres, one quarter of the nation’s total at the time.

While the supply of new cultivars was crucial for this growth, it was only because fundamental changes in the agricultural economy of the South had created demand. New Orleans, for instance, grabbed a big share of the growing soybean export market to Europe, which sought the crop to help raise the postwar standard of living through increased meat production. Initially, this benefitted Midwestern farmers who could ship down the Mississippi, but Southern farmers soon recognized the opportunity as well. Soy acreage in Louisiana accordingly shot up from 73,000 acres in 1954 to 1.8 million in 1974. This period also saw the rise of the “broiler belt,” ranging from Arkansas, down into the Gulf states, and up through Georgia and the Carolinas, where caged chickens bred for breast meat were fattened on soy-enriched feed. The poultry industry helped Georgia’s soy acreage increase by a factor of 31 in 20 years.

Above all, soy appealed to farmers because it was not cotton. For decades, the region had struggled with gluts of its main cash crop and consequent low prices. The government periodically attempted to limit supply through acreage allotments and marketing quotas, but with limited success. Reformers had long sought to convert the South’s cotton monoculture to mixed rotations of small grains, oats, and winter wheat, but the Southern landowners were uninterested in any system that did not provide them a robust cash flow. This is what Hartwig’s soybeans provided, enabling them to cut back cotton production. By 1960, American farmers were planting a little more than 15 million acres of cotton, down from almost 45 million acres at the crop’s peak in the 1920s.

This might provide the best clue for Hartwig’s commitment to naming cultivars after Confederate generals. (Beyond acknowledging the obvious fact that this was his practice, he never publicly discussed his reasons.) As an agricultural modernizer, he was selling Southern landowners on an entirely new, mechanized system of agriculture, of which soybeans were only one element. Confederate generals, memorialized throughout the region in monuments and the names of parks, towns, and military bases, were a readily available form of nostalgia to drape over disruptive innovation.

Key to the effectiveness of this pitch was the race of the intended audience, which remained a constant as the region shifted from sharecropping to mechanized farming. Nearly 90 percent of landowners were white, who were initially attracted to the prospect of increased earnings. With cotton, they had customarily sold the fiber while allowing their tenants to sell the cottonseed to local mills. Now they could dispense with the labor of sharecroppers and keep the profits from soybeans for themselves. As a Louisiana State University bulletin calculated in 1943, it took 184 hours of labor for each acre of cotton, compared to 10 hours for soybeans.

The tradeoff was the need to invest more heavily in equipment, such as combines, as well as fertilizers—particularly potash and phosphates—and pesticides. As Hartwig emphasized in the many articles he wrote for such venues as Soybean Digest, the large yield of beans promised by his new varieties required this kind of capital investment. At a meeting of farmers in 1975, he in fact chided them for only getting 22 bushels of beans per acre. “You ought to get 35,” he told them. At the same meeting, however, an agricultural economist reported that soybean processors had “soybean meal coming out of their ears” in a tight buyer’s market, indicating that there was no guarantee that farmers would recoup their investment.

This highly competitive environment cut both ways. As the number of farm operators decreased by more than half between 1954 and 1987, the number of farms in the South partly or fully owned by their operators rose from 71 percent to 91 percent, making the region’s agriculture in this sense more equal. But it was those best positioned to receive credit and government aid who benefitted. Such farmers were predominantly white. African Americans, poorer to begin with, suffered from discriminatory practices by both private and public lenders, notably the Farmers Home Administration, which systematically shut out Black applicants from government loans.

In 1920 there were 920,000 nonwhite farms in the South, a majority of them operated by tenants. In 1954, this had fallen to 430,000, or 26 percent of the region’s farms. By 1987, the number would drop to a mere 27,000, or 3 percent of farms in the South. This decline represented the virtual disappearance of Black sharecroppers, but also of tens of thousands of Black owner-operators unable to compete on a fair basis. Ten years later, the number was 19,000.

So as Southern agriculture became less unequal, it also became much whiter. Even at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, Hartwig could thus avoid pushback from Black farmers over his choice of symbolism.

The influence of the Confederate cultivars waned after the 1970s, when commercial seed developers—given more patent rights to their seeds through the Plant Variety Protection Act—largely took the reins from USDA breeders like Hartwig. With a deluge of new cultivars, proper names were supplanted by alphanumerical designations like “AG2702” and “5344STS.”

In the meantime, Hartwig persisted in his enthusiasm for Confederate cultivar names, suggesting an embrace of Lost Cause mythology that went beyond strategic persuasion. He used all three of Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest’s names on separate cultivars. “Lamar” was probably named after Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar of Georgia, who, while not a general, was famed for being the last Confederate officer killed in the Civil War. Lamar also invested in the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade as late as 1858. Hartwig’s last Confederate soybean was “Lyon,” released in 1993, three years before his death.

By then, he was widely honored as the “father of soybeans in the South.” An endowed chair in Soybean Agronomy at the University of Mississippi was named after him and his wife. He was awarded the USDA Superior Service Award and the USDA Distinguished Service Award.

The Confederate soybean cultivars have receded into the past, but they were part of a larger pattern of systemic racism whose legacy can be felt to this day. Facing decades of pressure, the federal government has made halting progress toward redressing the wrongs it committed to farmers of color, most recently by promising them $4 billion of debt relief in the latest COVID aid package. Critics such as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have decried this as reparations. In this context, is worth recalling Hartwig’s soybeans as one illustration of the USDA’s longstanding, built-in assumption that it served, above all, the interests of white farmers.

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reflect that the pelican is Louisiana’s state bird.

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Joe Biden won the state by running up huge totals in metropolitan counties that have been among the most popular destinations for African Americans migrating to Georgia in recent decades. Not long after that triumph, New York Times columnist Charles Blow, having himself relocated from the Big Apple to Atlanta, urged Black Northerners to move south to enhance Black political power, and inspire similar political earthquakes across the region.

The election results, and Blow’s widely discussed invitation, represent the latest chapter in a long and circular story about domestic migration and its impact on the dynamics of American politics.

Between 1900 and 1940, 2 million Black people abandoned the South. They were pushed by extreme poverty and racial persecution, and pulled initially by the prospect of filling jobs in northern and midwestern cities left vacant by World War I-era disruption of European immigration. Not only were these migrants leaving the South, where they couldn’t vote, for larger cities where they could, but also, they would be casting their ballots in states where the electoral vote payload was more substantial. Northbound Black Southerners not only contributed to the shift of the majority of Black voters into the Democratic column in the 1936 presidential election, but by sheer numbers alone, they helped to push the party into a more sympathetic stance on civil rights.

Slow and grudging as it was, the Democratic Party’s move to combat racial discrimination in the South ultimately led to a mass exodus of white Southerners in 1964. Between the turn of the century and the mid-1960s, more than 10 million southern whites, seeking higher-wage factory jobs in and around cities like Detroit or Akron, headed north. By and large, these white migrants did not appear to divest themselves of the racism, religious fundamentalism, and suspicion of new ideas that had been imbued in them back home. As both voters and organizers, they would contribute to Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s surprisingly strong showings in northern presidential primaries in 1964 and 1968. They also helped to infuse elements of the traditionally Democratic northern white working-class with a newfound conservatism that left them ripe for Republican plucking.

By the end of the 1960s, however, those northward migrations, by Blacks and whites alike, started to reverse themselves.

Once a magnet for southern émigrés, the northern manufacturing states were then beset by a devastating combination of obsolescent technology, rising foreign competition, and continuing union pressure on wages. The resulting “Rust Belt,” stretching from Michigan to Connecticut, began to hemorrhage jobs and people to the more inviting meteorological and economic environs of the “Sun Belt.”

Predictably, Florida was the biggest beneficiary of the Rust Belt exodus, followed by Georgia and North Carolina, both of which gained nearly 12,000 new residents from the decaying Industrial North in 1973-74 alone. The first, predominantly white wave of northern newcomers seemed to find the region’s political climate strikingly attuned to their own priorities and values. So much so that worried liberals were soon warning that, ironically enough, a second Yankee invasion was rapidly enhancing the staunchly conservative South’s influence on national politics to the point of fueling the ominous rise of a far-right “Southern Rim.”

Northern population losses became the South’s political gain, as its share of the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the White House rose from just below 50 percent in 1968 to 63 percent after the 2010 census. Population increases also translated into a net gain of 29 congressional seats.

Yet, by the early 1970s, white Republicans weren’t the only ones heading South. That decade saw the once unthinkable reversal of the migration patterns of Black Americans (4.5 million whom had fled the South since 1940 alone). With the demise of Jim Crow and an accompanying surge in economic opportunity, net migration by Black Americans to urban and metropolitan areas in the South swung positive and stayed that way.

Of the roughly 347,000 new Black residents gained by net migration in the entire South between 1995 and 2000, Georgia accounted for nearly 40 percent. These new Black Georgians, like their counterparts in other states, were younger, more affluent, and better educated than the resident Black population overall, meaning they were also more likely candidates for political mobilization.

Accordingly, since the year 2000, the Black share of Georgia’s eligible voter population has grown by 5 percent, while the white share has shrunk by 11 percent. During the same period, the state’s growing Latino and Asian populations saw their portion of the electorate increase by more than 200 percent.

The political implications of these demographic shifts became strikingly apparent in 2018 when African American Democrat Stacey Abrams came within slightly more than 50,000 votes of defeating her GOP gubernatorial runoff opponent, Brian Kemp. The core of Abrams’s support was the Atlanta suburbs, where people of color accounted for more than 46 percent of the population, as opposed to a national suburban average of 28 percent.

Alanna Madden, of the moving consultant firm, MoveBuddha, has offered a timely and gratifyingly precise new analysis of interstate moving patterns during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. It shows that Georgia’s most popular destinations for in-migrants between March and November were the four largest suburban Atlanta counties: Fulton, Gwinnett, DeKalb, and Cobb. Among them, only Cobb, at 49 percent, fell short of a majority nonwhite population. Together, these counties accounted for half of Joe Biden’s vote gains over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 showing in Georgia.

Madden acknowledges that much of the credit for the Democratic victories here belongs to the massive effort by Stacey Abrams and others to curb voter suppression and expand minority registration. Even so, based on data amassed by MoveBuddha, Madden ventures that recent in-migrants may have been critical to the breakthroughs as well. Her detailed analysis of survey information from 4,474 households who moved to Georgia during this period shows that 75 percent came from traditionally Democratic counties in other states. The data also show that a corresponding share of the new arrivals settled in Georgia counties with a recent history of voting Democratic as well.

The Democratic bastions of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco were the top five cities contributing to the outsider influx into Georgia. But even many of those coming from red states like Texas and Florida hailed from Democratic enclaves like Houston and West Palm Beach. Overall, 15 of the top 20 municipal destinations for all of Georgia’s newcomers were in counties that went for Biden in November 2020.

In-migration has been tied to Democratic advances in metropolitan counties in other southern states as well. For some time, a large stream of new arrivals from outside the South has emptied into the cities and large suburban counties of Texas, which attracted more than 82,000 former Californians in 2019 alone. This inflow helped Democrats pick up 14 seats in the legislature in 2018. One of the nation’s hottest destinations for domestic in-migrants is Williamson County, just north of Austin, which has gained some 160,000 new residents in the last decade. The county went to Donald Trump by nearly a 10-point margin in 2016, but flipped to Biden four years later, while Trump’s statewide margin shrank from 9 percent to 4 percent, as well.

North Carolina has also been a magnet for in-migrants, many from predominantly Democratic areas in other states, which have provided 4 in 5 of its new residents over the last five years.

Current in-migration patterns in these states may augur well for the Democrats in future national elections. But in-migration also stands to intensify internal political conflicts as the cities and suburbs become not only more Democratic and diverse, but also richer and more powerful in the bargain.

In Georgia, the MoveBuddha analysis reveals some striking imbalances in political clout between counties that benefit from in-migration and those not attractive to newcomers. Just seven of the 11 metropolitan counties boasting the 20 most popular localities for in-migrants gave Biden 242,000 more votes than the state’s 152 remaining counties combined.

Meanwhile, though Georgia’s 129 Trump counties may show up on an election map as a menacing ocean of red threatening to overwhelm 30 islands of Biden blue, the reverse is actually closer to reality. The 80 percent of Georgia’s counties that went for Trump may be home to 70 percent of its white voters, but many of those counties are in economic decline and steadily losing residents to Biden counties, which already account for 55 percent of Georgia’s registered electorate.

Such imbalances can readily ignite bitter resentment among those who find themselves losing ground both politically and economically—and trigger a defiant, knee-jerk rejection of any proposed changes in law or policy, no matter how minute.

For example, the recent, striking swerve to the right among North Carolina’s Republican legislator represents more than a xenophobic reaction to an influx of Latino immigrants. It also reflects a backlash against a domestic invasion of young, diverse, highly educated, and more liberally disposed professionals drawn to dynamic metropolitan areas like Charlotte and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triad, where President Biden ran up huge margins in November.

With in-migration likewise fueling the concentration of political firepower in the dynamic cities and suburbs of Texas and North Carolina, these states may ultimately follow Georgia into the blue column in national politics. But within the respective states, the potentially transformative political effects of such an influx stand to be delayed or blunted to some extent by the chronic overrepresentation of sparsely populated and deeply conservative rural counties so common to southern legislatures.

Meanwhile, an ongoing procession of newcomers into metropolitan areas promises to leave these already embattled rural counties at an even greater economic and demographic deficit. As a result, the struggle for partisan advantage within the increasingly polarized political interiors of these states is likely to be both bitter and intensely competitive for some time to come, regardless of what their exterior colors in presidential contests might suggest.

The post How Domestic Migration Keeps Changing American Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Some brought enslaved African Americans with them. Others purchased workers in the slave markets of New Orleans, Natchez, and Memphis, which had been stocked by traders who brought laborers from the Southeast, where owners supplemented their income by selling children away from their parents, and husbands and wives away from each other. Motivated by the possibility of getting rich quickly, planters drove their enslaved people without mercy, displaying little of the paternalism sometimes shown by well-established Southern planters to the east.

In all, more than 750,000 of these unwilling African American immigrants were brought to the Mississippi Valley between 1820 and 1860, their new lives far more difficult than their old ones had been. And so, they frequently fled. There were “heaps of runaways” living near Natchez, Mississippi in 1854, an elderly enslaved man told the future landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, then a correspondent working for the New York Times. They were seeking freedom from oppression—but also, like any other Americans, the opportunity to build better lives, in grand and small ways.

The history of these most persecuted of escapees is chilling. But it also gives us some idea of how people in impossible situations still managed to shape their own destinies.

Enslaved men and women fled for many reasons, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles from home. Courtesy of McPherson & Oliver, photographer/Library of Congress.

Today we associate escapes from slavery in the United States with the Underground Railroad and heroic flights to Canada. But white Southerners used the word “runaway” to describe any enslaved person absent from his owner’s control without permission—and escapees sought freedom in many different ways.

Many left plantations for only a night or two to visit friends and lovers, or to attend clandestine parties and religious services. Others “lay out” in nearby swamps and forests for weeks or even months, or fled to cities and blended into Black communities made up of both free and enslaved people. Some who left for good tried to return to the places from which they had been taken. A few attempted to reach Mexico, which abolished slavery in the 1820s. Some headed north on steamboats.

Most runaways didn’t get far. In the memoir Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northrup tells the story of his friend Wiley, who had been enslaved in South Carolina, with a responsible job operating a ferry, before being sold to a trader who carried him to Louisiana. During the 1830s, Wiley wound up on Edwin Eppes’ small plantation on Bayou Boeuf in the northern part of the state, where Northrup lived as well.

One night, Wiley went out without permission to visit a friend. The local slave patrol caught him, unleashed their dogs on him, whipped him, and then took him back to Eppes—who whipped him again. Several weeks later, having had enough of his new home, Wiley tried to return to South Carolina. He escaped an early pursuit by fleeing into a nearby swamp, and made his way to the Red River, 20 miles away. He was captured and jailed in nearby Alexandria. Soon again he was working in Eppes’ cotton fields.

A few escapees managed to return home. In 1836, a man named Sam fled on foot from Mississippi to South Carolina, where he was from, only to be seen by local residents in Barnwell County, who armed themselves and gave chase. Hunted like an animal and armed only with a knife and club, Sam was hit by bird shot but refused to surrender until receiving a mortal wound.

Ginny Jerry was a determined runaway who fled often but always remained close to owner Bennett Barrow’s large plantation in Louisiana’s West Feliciana Parish. Barrow kept track of Jerry’s frequent escapes in his diary, sometimes getting angered when Jerry came back from prolonged escapes heavier than when he left, presumably thriving. An 1856 editorial in a Baton Rouge newspaper raged about the way runaways like Jerry fed themselves. “These runaway slaves kill your cattle … they do not remain all night in the dark, dreary swamp … they visit your servants in your own yard … there is scarcely a night of the week that your poultry yard is not inspected by some black rascal.”

In the fall of 1837, Jerry was gone for six months until Jack, likely another of Barrow’s enslaved workers, found him, beat him badly with a club, and brought him home. But Jerry persisted. Once in 1839 he claimed to be sick, and Barrow told him to “work it off,” but the servant instead chose “to woods it off.” Ginny Jerry’s last recorded escape occurred in 1845. It ended after three months when Barrow hired professional slave catchers to find him. Their dogs tracked Jerry and forced him into a tree; Barrow allowed the animals to pull Jerry down and savagely bite him.

The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole brought their enslaved people with them on the Trail of Tears to what is now Oklahoma. In one noteworthy account of escape, an enslaved named Ben, who had been left on the eastern side of the Mississippi, ran away from his owner to follow his wife, who had been sold to a Choctaw man who took her west. Ben was captured and jailed in St. Francis County, Arkansas, but broke out and continued his journey.

Enslaved people in the Lower Mississippi Valley were less closely supervised than those in the country; urban owners relied on their enslaved servants to shop, run other errands, and bring in money while “hired out” to work for other people. This was especially true in New Orleans, where the population in 1850 included 90,000 white people, 10,000 free Black people, and 17,000 enslaved people. In a typical 12-month period in 1853 and 1854, some 1,300 enslaved people were arrested as runaways—although most of them might be better described as walkaways, since they left one part of the city only to relocate in another.

Advertisements for escapees in the New Orleans Daily Picayune suggest that many intended to pose as free people and use their previous experience to get paying jobs. Among them was a young woman named Lucy, who was well-known to customers in her owner’s “Soda, Pie, and Cake Shop.” George Anderson’s pre-escape career included work as a livery stable hand, a horse-drawn cab driver, and the operator of a milk wagon for Citizens Dairy. An enslaved man named Gus did carpentry work, Dennis built barrels, Philina was “a superior dressmaker and seamstress,” Susan dressed hair, and Ben Nash unloaded bales of cotton from steamboats.

A reward posted in the Daily Piayune for capturing an escapee. Courtesy of the Daily Picayune (New Orleans), September 17, 1841.

Some fled for the North on steamboats, often assisted by boat crews that included enslaved people and free Blacks. The Daily Picayune was convinced that “colored stewards, or cooks, or hands on boats use their cunning and the means peculiar to their positions to conceal slaves on board boats till they reach safe places for landing.” The ease of steamboat travel created an opportunity for individuals not suited for long escapes on land. Eleven-year-old Harry, who was 4 feet 5 inches tall, managed to avoid discovery until his boat got north of Vicksburg. He wound up in the Chicot County jail in southern Arkansas. Peggy, a “delicate and small” woman who worked as a milliner in New Orleans, fled with four dresses as well as what the Adams County jailer in Natchez, Mississippi, called “many other articles of clothing too numerous and too tedious to enumerate.”

The people best positioned for successful escapes were those who worked on steamboats. John Scott had already fled from one boat and been captured on another when John McMaster of New Orleans purchased him at a bargain price. McMaster, anxious for the $25-a-month that Scott earned as a cook, sent him out on at least three different steamboats, and the upwardly mobile man rose to second steward on the Louisiana before he jumped ship in Louisville, in the slave state of Kentucky. The record stops there, but he may have gotten someone in the Black community there to ferry him to freedom on the north side of the Ohio River.

Enslaved people often faced violence when they tried to flee. White southerners viewed apprehending runaways as a civic responsibility. Many were also attracted by the $10 they received by law for taking captives to jail, as well as rewards sometimes privately offered by owners. Non-owners were not supposed to damage other people’s property except in self-defense, but the law was seldom enforced, and many Blacks were killed while on the run. In the early 1850s, for example, near Marksville, Louisiana, the Picayune reported, “a young man shot a negro boy, supposed to be a runaway,” and a young man in Union Parish who killed a runaway was said by the Picayune to be “justified in the act”—without further explanation.

Fugitives sometimes fought to prevent being captured. One runaway killed the overseer who found him entering a slave cabin on a plantation near Woodville, Mississippi. A man was ferrying Bill and Roland to jail in a rowboat on Bayou Salle in 1842 when the two captives got loose, threw him overboard, and shot him in the water with his own gun. In New Orleans a runaway escaped after stabbing two men who tried to capture him; participants at a Congo Dance threw bricks at three police officers who attempted to arrest a fugitive among them; and someone murdered a slave catcher, targeted because of his profession.

From “fugitive slave” to “runaway,” the historical language used to describe these people who were fleeing from injustice and oppression does not adequately describe their experience. Risking life and limb for the chance at various degrees of liberty from bondage, today they are being recognized for who they really were: “freedom seekers.”

The post The Black Freedom Seekers Who ‘Managed to Shape Their Own Destinies’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the early history of our republic, Independence Day was often the biggest community festival of the year. Barbecue, which developed as a new, fusion cuisine well-suited for festive occasions by the late 1600s and early 1700s, became the ultimate party food during the period when Fourth of July celebrations gained civic and social momentum. The two have been linked up ever since.

Barbecue, of course, was a thing long before the British colonists ever thought about declaring independence from their sovereign. I’m not talking about hamburgers and hot dogs on a kettle grill. I’m talking about “old school” barbecue, where a whole animal carcass was skewered with wooden poles and cooked over a trench filled with burning coals from hardwood trees. Pre-20th century, African Americans typically did the labor-intensive cooking. They used the piercing poles to flip the carcasses periodically and seasoned the meat by basting it with a sauce primarily made of vinegar and red pepper. Today, we tend to fall into stereotypes about which meat authentically represents the barbecue of a region, but back then, anything could go over the pit regardless of geography. Cows, pigs, sheep, and even opossum were the most common.

In the American South, the ideal setting for a barbecue was a rural open space with beautiful trees and a spring nearby. In between plates of food, people would play games, get their drink on, and shoot guns. Barbecues were originally social get-togethers for family and friends, but eventually any life event, like a funeral or a wedding, was an excuse for a barbecue. By the late 1700s, barbecue was already a cooking process (verb), a descriptor for a kind of cooked meat (adjective), and a form of entertainment (noun). All three were very much a part of social life in the American South, especially in Virginia.

Barbecue’s backstory is rooted in the culinary traditions of the Indigenous people who lived in what would later be called “North America” after European contact. Historian Joseph Haynes shows in his well-researched book Virginia Barbecue that British settlers in the Virginia colony melded their meat-cooking techniques with the meat-smoking techniques of the Powhatans who lived in that area. Barbecue, as we understand it today, was born. As Virginians migrated to, and settled in, other parts of the American South, they took barbecue with them.

In the Northern colonies, British cooks didn’t quickly embrace the barbecue their counterparts developed in Virginia. Northern cooks often stuck to what they knew: the “ox roast.” This festive tradition in England dates to the Middle Ages. With this method, the ox carcass was pierced with a metal rod and cooked evenly before a fire, with a team of cooks slowly rotating the spit from each side. It was also a good way to feed a good-sized crowd, so the Northern colonists’ attitude was, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Though some July 4th celebrations featured an ox roast, southern-style barbecue became the favorite meal. Thousands of Philadelphians ate thousands of pounds of barbecued beef and lamb after a July 4, 1788, procession through the city. Thomas Jefferson hosted a barbecue dinner in Paris for expatriate Americans on July 4, 1789, shortly before the French Revolution. On July 4, 1791, Joseph Ingraham, captain of the Hope, a fur trading vessel, barbecued a 70-pound hog for his crew on the beach of Washington Island in the Pacific Northwest.

On the mainland, Independence Day celebrations shared common elements: a military procession, a reading of the Declaration of Independence in its entirety, speeches by local politicians, toasts to local and federal dignitaries, music, fireworks, and a free meal for the masses—which was usually barbecue. These celebrations drew several thousand spectators, and barbecue was well-suited to meet their needs because it was scalable.

These events were usually hosted by prominent white men who covered all of the costs. These men secured the land where the event was held, procured all of the meat used (often this was donated), bought other supplies, and hired the workers. In many cases though, enslaved African Americans did the work of clearing the land, preparing the food and serving it to guests. These large and scalable barbecues could happen anywhere. It was a moveable feast that fed not just thousands of people, but tens of thousands of people. Typically, whites ate first, and the African Americans present ate afterward.

There were some key reasons why hosts might have preferred barbecue to an ox roast. Given the lack of refrigeration, the animals meant for a barbecue were kept alive until shortly before the event. Thus, smaller animals like pigs and sheep were easier to transport, butcher, and cook than a large ox. Also, the ox roast relied on heavy equipment that included metal and bricks. It’s a lot easier to just dig a really long trench for barbecue than it is to lug around and assemble what’s needed for an ox roast.

The final key factor that tied barbecue to Independence Day celebrations in the South was the key role of enslaved African Americans in preparation and cooking. For some whites, what distinguished a barbecue from a bunch of adequately cooked meat seemed to be the involvement of African Americans. In 1919, John Bell Keeble, while serving as the dean of Vanderbilt Law School, validated this sentiment when he addressed a national convention of architects who had gathered in Nashville, Tennessee: “Some things have always been typical of a Tennessee welcome. Some you will get, and some you will not get. A barbecue was one of them. I do not know whether altogether we have lost the art or not. So many of the old negro barbecue cooks are dead that a barbecue is a rather difficult matter to bring up to the old-fashioned standard.”

After the Civil War, Southern whites who supported the Confederacy harbored sore feelings about being on the losing side. Independence Day celebrations in the South dropped off because they reminded white rebels of their defeat. Some commentators feared that the holiday would disappear altogether in the American South. In 1874, the Louisiana Democrat editorialized, “[T]he glorious Fourth of July has come again and gone again, unhonored, unsung.”

But African Americans in the region continued to vigorously celebrate Independence Day with barbecue and fried chicken. In 1901, the Atlanta Constitution newspaper reported, “[T]he [Fourth of July] is here, as in most places in the south, given over to the negroes, who celebrate [it] in truly royal fashion.” By the 1920s, Southern whites were back to hosting civic celebrations of Independence Day.

The traditional gargantuan Independence Day festivities downsized in the 20th century in two significant ways. First, as Adam Criblez points out in his book Parading Patriotism, after the Civil War, people lost their appetite for huge gatherings and many opted to attend smaller gatherings or family events. Due to higher meat prices and having to pay actual wages for labor, as well as the logistics of pulling off such huge events, more and more communities shifted to smaller events—and they started charging people to attend in order to recoup their costs. These events still got a sizable number of attendees, sometimes numbering in the thousands, but they just weren’t on the scale of the massive feeds that had frequently taken place a century before.

Second, barbecue changed in the 20th century as well. The trench method fell out of fashion as cooks shifted to using brick-lined pits and cooking smaller cuts of meat. The brick pits allowed barbecuers to control more variables during the cooking process. And in urban environments, digging a hole would have been impractical or against health codes. Cooking smaller cuts of meat is also easier and less labor-intensive than cooking a whole animal. By the 1920s, more people were eating barbecue in restaurants or building barbecue pits in their back yards, paving the way for the kettle grills that would explode in popularity during the 1950s. Over the century, the connection between barbecue and Independence Day stayed in our national consciousness, but the meal itself moved from civic spaces to public parks and private homes.

There’s a lot more to the story of barbecue, much of it hotly contested: African methods of cooking meat outdoors and whether they did or didn’t influence American cooks, the various types of sauce, regional differences in the American South, and much more. Thanks to technological innovation, barbecue can now happen almost anywhere, and cooks feel free to throw anything on the grill. Yes, this includes hamburgers and hot dogs. That’s all right. Though I have my purist tendencies, I’m fine with barbecue reflecting a “melting pit” of food traditions. My own Fourth of July plate is usually piled high with pork spareribs, hot link sausages, chicken, baked beans, coleslaw, an ear of grilled corn, potato salad, and a nice, ripe wedge of watermelon for dessert.

For me, it’s about celebrating with friends, family, and loved ones. It’s also a chance to pause and reflect on what it means to “celebrate” a nation that still falls short of its promise, but one that I call home. I live in the country that I love, and I want it to be better. Perhaps having diverse people sitting at a table and enjoying barbecue in all of its glorious forms, even kosher and “vegan,” and respectfully discussing the issues of the day can be a first step to a more perfect union. When it comes to barbecue and the Fourth of July, what pitmasters and politicians have beautifully joined together, let no one pull asunder!

The post Why Americans Still Eat Barbecue on July Fourth appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s a question that the University of North Carolina historian William Sturkey, the winner of the 10th annual Zócalo Book Prize, investigated over a decade as he researched and wrote Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White.

The book prize is typically awarded at a live, in-person event in Los Angeles that celebrates the best nonfiction book published in the U.S. on the subject of social cohesion and community. Past recipients of the $5,000 prize include the Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen, NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, MIT social scientist Sherry Turkle, and the Canadian politician and Central European University president Michael Ignatieff. This year, the event moved to an online stream, drawing an audience from around the country, including residents of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, into the conversation.

Sturkey, after introductions from Zócalo executive director Moira Shourie and new Zócalo board chair Krist Novoselić, offered a detailed description of the “incredible black community that existed during Jim Crow” in Hattiesburg.

Founded in 1882 and located 100 miles northeast of New Orleans, Hattiesburg was a place where black and white people from around the South came in search of opportunity, Sturkey said. For black residents, it was also a place of inequality, disfranchisement, and violence. “But,” Sturkey added, “that’s not the complete story of black people in the South.”

The black community of Hattiesburg helped birth the Civil Rights Movement that eventually toppled Jim Crow. By the 1930s, that community had built up dozens of vital institutions that served local people. These organizations raised money for needy residents. They built a park and eventually a high school for the children. How did they do it?

The first factor: “their community was rooted in a sense of collective experience,” said Sturkey. “No matter what you did, no matter what you said, you were black.” They knew exactly what brought them together, and what they shared.

The second: “they were intensely local.” Black Hattiesburg residents responded to the racism and violence directed against them by Mississippi politicians and policies by turning their energy inward, toward their own community. “There is something we can learn about thinking and operating locally, and that sometimes means more quietly,” said Sturkey.

The third: “institution building.” Black residents were kept out of white institutions so they built their own, from churches and schools to food and toy drives. They also shopped local and patronized black-owned businesses.

And the fourth: they invested heavily in their children—with time, money, and energy. Sturkey found that the local PTA roster was full of volunteers who were neither parents nor teachers. He recalled the words of one Hattiesburg resident: “All of the children were community children.’”

At the conclusion of Sturkey’s prepared remarks, Yale University historian David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, joined the live stream to interview Sturkey, using his own questions and those drawn from viewers across the country.

“Here’s a story of people proving that it is not just a cliché that suffering can lead to ideas and growth and creativity,” said Blight. But, he asked Sturkey, what accounts for their pride in their community, a place of both struggle and triumph?

“There was a pride in the bricks and mortar they built,” Sturkey replied. “That’s something that really bound them together.” Black residents were also only decades removed from enslavement; they were full of ambition and creativity. Clubs of all kinds were launched, even for factory workers. And people had an eye towards history. Sturkey mentioned how the Smith family—whose stories are at the center of Hattiesburg—named one of their children William Lloyd Garrison Smith, after the abolitionist.

When Blight asked how the author came to this topic, Sturkey said that segregation and whites have dominated the story of the American South for too long. While local newspapers had only named black people if they were arrested, harmed, or killed, Sturkey found in black newspapers like the Chicago Defender and Indianapolis Freeman an alternative history of stories and community.

Blight and Sturkey discussed how the Hattiesburg community fared during the Great Depression and World War II, then moved into the period that inspired Sturkey to write his book: the Civil Rights Movement. Blight pressed Sturkey about why so many people from Hattiesburg were so important to that movement.

The answer lay in the rich and longstanding tapestry of institutions and associations of black neighborhoods, which gave people the support they needed to develop into leaders. Sturkey recalled July 2, 1964, the day Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and the day that Hattiesburg churches held their first day of Freedom School to prepare black people to vote. The school filled to maximum capacity swiftly, and it wasn’t an accident; it was the result of institutions black people had been building for decades.

Before bringing the evening to a close, Blight asked Sturkey a few questions offered by audience members on the chat. The first was about the role of women in the community.

“It [was] a patriarchal society without a question,” said Sturkey, with male pastors and businessmen as key figures. “But women are really the engine of everything that’s happening here.” Despite the fact that women faced more discrimination than men and were more limited professionally, “they become the vanguard of the Civil Rights Movement,” often pushing more conservative male leaders toward activism, Sturkey said.

In response to a skeptical question about integration, Sturkey emphatically explained that the civil rights fight was about the right to vote. “If black people had had the right to vote the whole time, segregation would have looked very different,” Sturkey said, adding: “Voting should be the most important cultural and political dynamic of black life in America based on what was denied to African Americans for so long.”

Blight concluded the evening by asking Sturkey about a line he loved in Hattiesburg: “At the end of the book you say, ‘This has been a story of losses embedded within iconic victories,’” said Blight, noting that it challenges the American belief that believes “everything is progress.”

In response, Sturkey said that he was fascinated by a festival that celebrates Hattiesburg’s Jim Crow-era black neighborhood. “I don’t think anyone is nostalgic for Jim Crow, but they’re nostalgic for that sense of community and togetherness,” he said. What he sees in Hattiesburg’s story are the ways in which people were able to do incredible things as a community, in spite of everything they faced.

As much as we might love stories of extraordinary people rising above their circumstances, what we need to recognize is that there are far more people in our country, even today, who are not getting the opportunity to do so. As a result, “we’re not going to have an opportunity to learn and grow from them,” Sturkey said.

The post <i>Hattiesburg</i> Tells Us What America Has Lost, Gained—and Still Needs to Fix appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This was hardly welcome news a scant five miles to the northeast, where experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were warning that such a move would be extremely risky until “the incidence of infection is genuinely low.” Although these same Atlanta-based experts had cautioned in mid-February that people who contracted the virus but remained asymptomatic could still infect others, Kemp claimed to have heard that early warning for the first time only on the eve of his grudging and long-overdue April 2 announcement that he was imposing restrictions in the first place.

The CDC has been in Atlanta since its beginnings in 1946. Its rise to prominence as one of the world’s most respected public health protection agencies has long been a point of pride for the city’s perennially image-polishing, growth-obsessed leaders. By the 1970s their ardent courtship of the approval and capital investments of Fortune 500 executives had led disgusted rural Georgians to complain that Atlanta had been surrendered to the Yankees yet again, and this time without a single shot being fired. 

But rural antagonism toward Atlanta is hardly of recent vintage. It has been a defining element in Georgia politics for almost 150 years. And therein lies much of the story behind the story of the Georgia governor’s apparent aloofness to the health jewel in his own capital’s crown, and to all the CDC expertise that could have helped avoid the healthcare disaster that may soon envelop his entire state.

The physical and financial devastation of the Civil War left Georgia’s farmers, white and black alike, trapped in an accelerating down swirl of dependency and debt. But by 1900, Atlanta, which had been a modest railroad hub of some 9,500 in 1860, had blossomed into a flourishing state capital and commercial and transportation center of 90,000. Atlanta was not only Georgia’s largest city. It had risen from the ashes, and proudly so. Its biggest booster, editor and orator Henry W. Grady, declared it a gleaming embodiment of a “New South.” With Atlanta as its guiding light, Grady predicted, the rest of Georgia would quickly shed its dependence on agriculture to embrace industrialization, urbanization, and commerce and soon be savoring the fruits of an unparalleled prosperity.

This divergence of urban and rural economic fortunes and momentum did not go unnoticed in the countryside. As the largest state by land area east of the Mississippi, Georgia already had 123 counties by 1870. Growing unease over the growth of Atlanta’s population and potential political clout helped to explain why the rural majority in the legislature took the lead in adding of another 29 counties over the next half century. But the sense that even this further dilution of Atlanta’s potential clout might be insufficient to safeguard rural prerogatives gave rise to one of the most blatant and brutally effective anti-urban political artifices ever devised.

Used informally for over a decade before it gained legal sanction in 1917, the “county-unit system” supplanted the popular vote as the means of determining the outcome of statewide elections in Georgia. This arrangement was basically a downsized and even more egregiously anti-democratic version of the national Electoral College. Under the system, each county, no matter how tiny its population, was assigned at least two unit votes, while no county, no matter how populous, was granted more than six.

The effectiveness of this device in neutering Atlanta politically was proven in countless elections, including the 1946 Georgia gubernatorial primary, when fewer than 1,100 votes cast for one candidate across three of the state’s most sparsely populated counties effectively countered more than 58,000 votes cast for his opponent in Atlanta’s home county of Fulton. The beneficiary of this particular thwarting of democracy was Eugene Talmadge, who was elected governor four times between 1932 and 1946 by appealing to rural voters with such proven stratagems as inviting them to join him on the front porch of the governor’s mansion in Atlanta so they could “piss over the rail on those city bastards.”

It was a point of pride for “ol’ Gene” that he had never campaigned in a county where there were streetcars. And he relished his studied role as nemesis to all things cosmopolitan and erudite, intimating more than once that he felt that any home boasting a Bible and a Sears, Roebuck catalog had as much of a library as it needed.

Understandably enough, as a historian of that era reported, upper-class Atlantans embarrassed and repelled by the buffoonish mockery of their refinement and expertise that emanated from the countryside were “quite evidently not proud of [the rest of] Georgia.” Such feelings were hardly a secret, and, if anything, served only to stoke the Atlanta-bashing that remained a fixture of Georgia gubernatorial politics between 1920 and 1962, when not a single urbanite managed to claim the state’s highest office.

Carl E. Sanders, who hailed from Augusta rather than Atlanta, managed to break that protracted dry spell in 1962, after the courts had finally forced Georgia to scuttle the county unit system for good. Finally free of its anti-progressive clutches, Georgia saw a rapid and vitally important expansion of Atlanta’s generally moderating political influences within the state—which, despite the ranting of rural politicians determined to preserve segregation at all costs, may ultimately have kept Georgia from joining the full retreat that wrought such havoc and horror in Alabama and Mississippi.

The demise of the county unit system seemed to point to a more sophisticated approach to statewide campaigning, but old habits die hard. Even more progressive candidates were still not above pandering to enduring anti-Atlanta, or at least anti-urban, sentiments. These included Jimmy Carter, who portrayed himself in the 1970 gubernatorial primary as just a simple, hardworking country peanut farmer, while referring to his principal opponent, former governor Sanders, as “Cufflinks Carl,” an elitist, country club liberal wholly out of touch with the common folk of rural Georgia.

Although Carter proved the exception, gubernatorial candidates who used Atlanta as a punching bag historically reserved a few licks for African Americans and other minorities as well. None in recent memory has sunk so low as Eugene Talmadge, whose deliberate attempts to inflame racial passions in the 1946 campaign set the stage for the lynching of two black couples in rural Walton County shortly after the votes were cast. Race-baiting was Talmadge’s stock-in-trade, but his rhetoric was especially heated in 1946 because, courtesy of a recent court decree, that contest was the first truly meaningful election in the 20th century in which more than a relative scattering of black people had been allowed to vote in Georgia.

Black voting would remain limited, especially in Georgia’s rural counties, until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which quickly boosted black registration from 34 to 55 percent of the eligible population, rendering outright race-mongering a bit risky for any white candidate in a statewide contest. The Voting Rights Act also accelerated the exodus of white Georgians from Democratic Party. During the 1964 presidential election, a few months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the state moved into the Republican presidential column for the first time. Save for three elections, two of them involving Democrat Jimmy Carter, it has remained there since, paving the way for a Republican takeover of both houses in the state legislature in 2004.

Because this political revolution was so overwhelmingly race-driven at the outset, Republican strength in Georgia has been most apparent, not in Atlanta or its immediate environs, but in the majority-white counties most geographically and culturally distant from them. Meanwhile, over a strikingly short time, metropolitan Atlanta counties have seen a massive influx of more affluent white and African American people from outside the state, and upwardly mobile black people have also left the city proper for the suburbs and even the exurbs. The result has been a decided “purpling” of these heavily populated counties adjacent to Atlanta, reflected in the Republican Brian Kemp’s meager 1.3 percent victory over Democrat Stacey Abrams in the 2018 gubernatorial election.

A former Athens businessman, Kemp appeared to reach straight back into the old Gene Talmadge playbook in that campaign, presenting himself as a rural superhero who flaunted his disdain for political correctness and other city-slicker signifiers. This persona came through vividly in his ads. One showed him, clad in cowboy boots and jeans, pointing his shotgun at his daughter’s supposed boyfriend; in another, he sat behind the wheel of the slightly dented pickup truck, which he promised to use to round up undocumented migrants.

Kemp’s calculated rusticity served him well in the 125 predominantly rural counties where he racked up an average victory margin of 38 percent, but it almost backfired on him statewide. Abrams persuaded her metropolitan base of minorities and moderate whites to turn out in large numbers. With the county unit system gone, it makes a difference that some 60 percent of Georgia’s voters now reside in the fast growing, larger metro Atlanta counties, where, on average, Abrams bested Kemp by 17 percent in 2018. Kemp’s narrow escape illustrates why he and his Republican colleagues have dedicated themselves to suppressing minority voting, a role he embraced with bravado in his previous post as Georgia’s Secretary of State. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, (another local entity not high on his list) reported that in 2017, as he prepared to run for governor, he had managed to purge the rolls of some half-million, largely black and Hispanic would-be voters.

Kemp’s hostility to immigrants seemed to put him solidly in step with President Donald Trump, at least until the governor declined to appoint ardent Trumpite Republican Congressman Doug Collins to fill the seat left vacant by the resignation of U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson. Kemp’s eagerness to get back into Trump’s good graces may help to explain why he leapt well ahead of other Republican governors to respond to White House pressure to re-open their states during the COVID crisis. Another explanation might be that much of the lobbying for the sheltering in place and restrictions on business operations came from in and around Atlanta—rather than the less populous rural counties where Kemp’s political biscuits are buttered.

Up to this point, residents of Georgia’s rural areas have been noticeably more inclined than their metropolitan counterparts to see social distancing and cutbacks in business operations as unwarranted disruptions instigated by outsiders, including scientists and liberal politicians, with no sense of the importance of maintaining the familiar economic and social rhythms of their communities. Ironically, with reported cases now on the rise in rural Georgia, it is there that the worst fears about Kemp’s decision to reopen the state early may be realized.

Rural black counties—with older and poorer-than-average populations beset by heart disease, lung disease, and diabetes, and lacking ready access to health care—have already registered death rates from the virus that are 50 percent higher than in metro areas. These same health problems are also well-known in many of the white majority counties claimed by Kemp in 2018. More than a third of these white counties are currently without a functioning hospital.

Kemp’s country cracker guise worked just well enough to get him into the governor’s office. But it also may have obligated him to artificially distance himself from the CDC. If so, his stiff-necked resolve to adhere to the Georgia political tradition of defying the Atlanta intelligentsia, rather than heeding the most informed advice available for combating an epic medical emergency, may wind up being more catastrophic for his political supporters than for those who opposed him.

The post How COVID-19 Exposed the Deep Divide Between White Rural Georgia and Atlanta appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Since 2011, the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize has honored the author of the U.S. nonfiction book published in the previous year that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. Though there have been many moments in the past decade that have reinforced for us the importance of this work, the announcement of the 10th annual book prize occurs as the novel coronavirus creates myriad new challenges to community cohesion, not least the need for social distancing.

This year we honor historian William Sturkey, for his extraordinary portrait of a community in his latest book, Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White.

Sturkey has produced a meticulously detailed study of the historical, cultural, and economic roots of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction “New South.” Through personal profiles of black and white citizens of Hattiesburg over multiple generations, Sturkey weaves a moving narrative that exemplifies the purpose of the Zócalo Book Prize.

Our judges found in Hattiesburg “a finely woven microcosm of American society as a whole [that] points to the immense work still ahead to make it into a more perfect and just union.” The judges particularly recognized Sturkey’s achievement of “a rich and deeply nuanced account of the development of the white and black communities of Hattiesburg, Missisippi, under the apartheid system of Jim Crow.”

One aspect of the book that struck many of them was its seamless melding of cultural and economic history. Another was the nostalgia of many of Hattiesburg’s African American residents for the community that disappeared with the victories of the civil rights movement.

Why would people miss a time when they had fewer rights? Sturkey’s book describes the ways in which the African American community of Hattiesburg found strength in one another and the institutions they built. This is the subject of Sturkey’s Zócalo Book Prize Lecture: “How Do Oppressed People Build Community?” He will deliver the lecture and accept the prize, which includes a $5,000 award, during a live event streaming on Zócalo’s YouTube channel on May 20 at 5 PM PDT. Jai Hamid Bashir, winner of the ninth annual Zócalo Poetry Prize, will deliver a public reading of her poem “Little Bones” prior to the lecture.

Previous book prize winners include Michael Ignatieff, Danielle Allen, and Jonathan Haidt.

We had a chance to speak with Sturkey, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill historian, about the research, themes, and structure of Hattiesburg.

The post Historian William Sturkey Wins the 10th Annual Zócalo Book Prize  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mary Turner, the marker’s named victim, was eight months pregnant. The mob targeted her because she spoke out against the lynching of her husband Hayes. A crowd of several hundred watched the men hang, burn, and shoot Turner, then cut out her fetus and stomp it into the ground.

From 1998 to 2011, I researched and wrote a book about Mary Turner’s lynching. I examined the responses of activists, artists, writers, and local residents to this appalling act. Turner’s story has had a long, complex afterlife: a tangled mixture of shock, outrage, grief, shame, and, too often, silence. The ways we remember, forget, and erase the history of this lynching is an inescapable part of its story: Even the monument to Mary Turner’s death contains bullet holes from a Winchester .270, normally used for killing deer.

The horror of Turner’s lynching did not stay secret. During the late 1910s and early 1920s, the incident galvanized anti-lynching protest around the country. Writers and artists including Angelina Weld Grimké, Meta Warrick Fuller, Anne Spencer, and Jean Toomer saw the lynching as an example of how racial violence traumatizes individuals, families, and communities. Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) used Turner’s death in magazine exposés and informational pamphlets as evidence that lynching was less about punishment for black male criminality and more about the public performance of white supremacy.

The Anti-Lynching Crusaders, arguing that lynching was an attack on women as well as men, featured Turner as the centerpiece of a campaign to support federal legislation against mob violence. The Crusaders raised money and awareness for the 1922 Dyer Bill, sponsored by Leonidas C. Dyer, a Republican Representative from Missouri, which proposed to make lynching a felony. The bill passed the House but stalled in the Senate when Southern Democrats threatened a filibuster. Although Turner’s lynching was barbaric, more conventional excuses for mob violence—what Ida B. Wells called the “rape myth”—remained intractable.

In time Turner’s name became a historical footnote, as stories like those of the Scottsboro Boys, in 1931, and Emmett Till, in 1955, dominated headlines.

It was not until the late 20th century that writers and artists began to recover Turner as an example of how mainstream history marginalizes black women. The title of Freida High Tesfagiorgis’s 1985 painting about Turner, “Hidden Memories,” captures the sense of erasure that many others find in her story.

Since then, author Honorée Fanonne Jeffers has published short fiction and poetry about Turner, most notably the poem “dirty south moon” in her 2007 volume Red Clay Suite. Playwright Lekethia Dalcoe’s depiction of the incident, A Small Oak Tree Runs Red, was produced in Chicago (2016) and New York (2018). This February, artist Rachel Marie-Crane Williams brought original images from her graphic narrative in progress, Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage, to Valdosta State University (VSU)—about 20 miles from where Turner died—for a monthlong display.

The historical marker is by the side of State Road 122 in Lowndes County, Georgia. Photo courtesy of Julie Buckner Armstrong.

For some locals, however, Turner’s story remains taboo—and an open wound. The “Lynching Rampage of 1918” occurred during a single week in mid-May and was spread out over two Georgia counties—Brooks and Lowndes. 11 victims were confirmed. Other bodies of African-American males were found but not identified, and others disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Walter White, who investigated the lynchings for the NAACP, publicly named 16 local mob ringleaders, but in fact a large swath of the population likely saw or took part in the events. Hundreds—from Brooks, Lowndes, and surrounding counties—witnessed Mary Turner’s murder, as well as those of Will Head and Will Thompson, two men accused of complicity in the death of the white farmer Hampton Smith. Hayes Turner’s body hung on a main road, just outside the town of Quitman, for a day before it was cut down. When Sidney Johnson, who killed Smith during a wage dispute, was finally captured and shot, the mob dragged his body the 20-plus miles from Valdosta to the small town of Barney, near the site of the present-day historical marker. How many people watched this terrible parade is unclear.

There is no question that the week’s violence affected victims, families, perpetrators, witnesses—and their descendants. Yet when I began researching Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching in 1998, records were almost impossible to locate. People rarely, if ever, spoke publicly about what happened. Keepers of official civic memory claimed a history of positive race relations, even though Georgia had the second-highest rate of lynchings nationally (following Mississippi). Brooks and Lowndes Counties, because of the 1918 incident, had some of state’s highest numbers.

In the early 2000s, the Mary Turner Project, a small but dedicated group based out of Valdosta State, spearheaded a coalition to erect the historical marker, hoping to end the silence. The marker went up in 2010. Within a year, someone shot a bullet right through its middle.

The approaching 100th anniversary of “Lynching Rampage of 1918” prompts me to consider what I have learned since writing about Mary Turner.

And so much of my knowledge rides on that bullet.

My son found the casing. He was 10 at the time, an eagle-eyed hunter of lizards and bugs. We drove up from our Florida home via I-75, took Exit 29 to Highway 122 heading west, and pulled onto the gravel embankment of the Little River. The book had just come out, and I wanted to make peace with an emotionally difficult project that I had carried around for more than a decade.

I already had heard about the bullet hole. A graduate student passing through for a conference had put a flower in it and snapped a picture, to show me. When the marker went up, the area was nicely landscaped with perennials and mulch. By the time I visited, the flowers were dead. I poked my finger through the bullet hole; my son wandered around in the weeds that were taking over. “Hey Mom,” he said, holding up the casing. “Is this what you’re looking for?

Since then, the marker has been shot at least three more times.

The marker’s text was the result of negotiation between the local Mary Turner Project and the Georgia State Historical Society. Photo courtesy of Julie Buckner Armstrong.

Other historical markers for racial violence have met similar fates. In Florida, the marker depicting the 1923 Rosewood massacre has been repaired multiple times. On my last visit several years ago, chunks were blown out of its protective concrete frame. In 2017, two different Mississippi markers for the 1955 Emmett Till murder were defaced—one by bullets, another by a blunt object. The marker for the 1964 murders of Mississippi Freedom Summer workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner was vandalized multiple times and eventually stolen.

Some people actively try to destroy the past. Some erase more passively, waiting for amnesia’s weeds to take over.

Others refuse to let memory die. For the scholars, filmmakers, artists, and writers who continue producing work about Mary Turner, she symbolizes a double injustice. On one level is her brutal death. On another is the way that she ebbs and flows from historical memory.

One might see artist and activist response to Turner as a forerunner of the recent Say Her Name campaign, which attempts to make sure that women are included in public discussions of violence. Decades before the social media hashtag #SayHerName, Mary Talbert’s band of Anti-Lynching Crusaders circulated pamphlets featuring Turner’s story, trying to move women from the margins to the center of a male-dominated narrative.

Turner’s lynching, although gruesome and shocking, was hardly an isolated incident. While statistics vary, a recent attempt by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to quantify racial violence in the American South documented 4,075 lynchings between 1877 and 1950. The EJI’s report does not separate victims by gender, but University of North Carolina Wilmington criminologist David Victor Baker has confirmed there were 179 female victims. At least three pregnant women other than Turner were lynched. These numbers may be small, but they are significant.

The temptation, when reading stories such as Turner’s, is to think, “down there, back then, not me.” But that impulse is really the desire to silence: the need to place protective distance between our ideal selves and the reality that anyone can be witness, victim, or perpetrator.

Attacking pregnant women has a long and telling history. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies documents multiple occurrences—from the Holocaust to more recent incidents in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—of perpetrators singling out pregnant women for torture, mutilation, and removal of fetuses. The practice goes back to Biblical times. The book of Amos mentions God punishing Ammonites for cutting open pregnant women in Gilead during a border war. An Assyrian poem from c. 1100 B.C. glorifies a military battle where the victor “slits the wombs of pregnant women.”

Looking at Mary Turner within this long, international context reminds us that such violence can take place anytime, anywhere. The sudden ease with which a community can become a mob, or a society can degrade into political violence, is a frightening but sad fact of our shared humanity.

Shooting a hole in a marker does not change the history of Brooks and Lowndes Counties, or the long history of humanity either. Only by confronting—as individuals, communities, and societies—the truth of how we came to be the way we are today, can we make the world better for ourselves and for our children.

My son agrees. As our family drove away from the “Lynching Rampage of 1918,” he told me he hoped the shooter would one day feel remorse and try to make amends.

He said, “You don’t have to like the marker, but you should respect it.”

The post A Hundred Years After Her Lynching, Mary Turner’s Memorial Remains a Battleground appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Becoming free involved figuring out the inconsistent rules and behaviors of these new authorities. The government, even as it sponsored freedom, was not always a just actor—nowhere more egregiously than in the case of vagrancy laws, which were grounded in the racial prejudice that black people are criminals.

On the surface, vagrancy has nothing to do with race. The homeless and the jobless come in all colors. And the idea of criminalizing people who are “wandering about without proper means of livelihood” (as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it) has been around since medieval England. But, in the Civil War-era United States, that described nearly everyone who had been a slave.

Vagabondage may sound like freedom to a hobo singing “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” but to the upstanding citizen it sounds like crime. In the wake of the Civil War, African Americans found themselves caught amid the same kind of dissonance: What freedom meant to them—unfettered mobility, access to education, and the security of their families—was not what it meant to white people.

One of the testing grounds for the post-war racial order was Memphis, a Southern city that fell to federal forces only about a year into the Civil War, in June 1862. The city became a magnet for African Americans in the surrounding countryside, who first came behind Union lines to flee slavery. But as the war went on, they came seeking jobs, reunion with loved ones, and a sense of community. By the end of the war, Memphis’s black population had grown from 3,000 to 20,000.

The growth of Memphis’s free black population meant that west Tennessee plantations were proportionally emptied—to the dismay of cotton planters who needed laborers in their fields. Vagrancy laws provided a convenient solution to the labor shortage: Memphis blacks who could not prove gainful employment in the city were presumed guilty of vagrancy and subject to arrest and impressment into the agricultural labor force. They were brought back onto the plantations, and forced to sign labor contracts.

Using vagrancy laws to enforce “slavery by another name” was an innovation of the post-war South, but the way had been paved long before. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the figure of the vagrant had become distinctly entangled with race, and rhetoric about vagrancy had bled into national debate about emancipation.

In parts of the South, where modest populations of free blacks stood outside the purview of slave codes, vagrancy laws had restrained the movements and behaviors of those African Americans who weren’t enslaved. In free states along the border, like Pennsylvania, rising numbers of fugitives from slavery found themselves ensnared in vagrancy’s legal web.

By the 1860s, with the wholesale abolition of slavery appearing on the horizon, standard rhetoric about vagrants merged with white anxieties about labor markets swamped by a wave of freed slaves. Some whites believed blacks were inherently lazy and would not work if not forced to; even many abolitionists worried that slavery had so brutalized African Americans that they would be incapable of self-sufficiency.

“Worthless” and “idle”—two of the adjectives that most commonly modified the word “vagrants” in the antebellum United States—were ill-suited to describe enslaved people, who had tremendous market value as commodities and were forced to labor unceasingly. But once freed from slavery, black people were slapped with all the standard labels for vagrants.

In Memphis, the convergence was especially pronounced. The Freedmen’s Bureau, which was created in March 1865 to assist former slaves in their transition to freedom, instead wielded vagrancy statutes to do the bidding of white planters. The first superintendent of the Freedmen’s Bureau office in the city was ostensibly sympathetic with former slaves—he loudly deplored “injustice to the Freed people”—but even he said he was “determined that the Freed people shall not become a worthless, lazy set of vagrants living in vice and idleness.” That superintendent’s successor, Nathan Dudley, wrote that Memphis had a “surplus population of at least six thousand colored persons [who] are lazy, worthless vagrants.”

So it was that the Freedmen’s Bureau—the part of the federal government charged by Congress and Abraham Lincoln to ensure the integrity of black freedom—could authorize patrols that were arresting black Memphians indiscriminately and delivering them up to white employers for bounties ranging from a dollar to five dollars “per head.”

As Anthony Motley, an African-American barber, put it in a letter to Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner Clinton Fisk, “the great Slave trade Seems To be Revived in Memphis.”

One of the leading voices of black protest was another barber named Warner Madison. Though barely educated, he was more literate than most African-American Memphians, so he penned multiple letters of protest, including some on behalf of a committee of citizens. In a letter to Fisk he began by describing what was going on: “they go around and arrest all they Can find regardless whether they are employed or not Just ask if you dont want to go with Mr who ever it May be they dont find out whether you want to go or not atall they Make out the agreement sell you for the price that the Man give them.” Then Madison narrated an instance of a young African-American man being taken away “By the point of the baynet” at the direction of a Freedmen’s Bureau agent.

As his letter rose to a pitched fury, Madison began to punctuate almost every word, as if stabbing at the paper with his pen: “i think, it is, one of the most. obnoxious. and foul, and, mean. thing. that exsist on, anny. part. of. the. Beauraur. Why My Childrem has, to, get. passes, now. to, go, to. schooll.”

Madison’s climactic complaint—that black children on their way to school were being considered “vagrants”—echoed in other Memphians’ protests. Anthony Motley drove home the same point in his own letter to Fisk: “Children going to School With there arms full of Book have Been arrested and Put up in Pens Like Sheep.”

Fisk replied politely but made no mention of these schoolchildren. When Nathan Dudley of the Freedmen’s Bureau investigated these and other claims and issued a report to his superior, he concluded, “I can find no evidence whatever that School children, with Books in their hands have been arrested, except in two or three cases, which was done by a misconstruction of the order.”

It is a curious turn of logic to say that when something is done two or three times, however inappropriately, there is “no evidence whatever” of its having happened. But that would not be the last time an egregious racial injustice was written off as an anomaly, rather than seen as a red flag. It would take 100 years and a great protest movement before U.S. courts acknowledged vagrancy laws’ enormous potential for abuse. During the Civil Rights era, most of them were invalidated.

What hasn’t disappeared is the cultural and legal association of blackness with criminality. In Memphis in 1865, the apparent innocence of being a school-bound child didn’t trump the presumptive guilt of being black. And in Memphis as recently as 2012, African-American youth were more likely to be incarcerated than white youth with the same criminal records—among other racial inequities severe enough to warrant intervention by the U.S. Department of Justice. And even as Memphis marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination this month, its juvenile court will remain under federal oversight.

Less strict oversight, though: The current administration backed off last summer. This inconsistent defense of our racial justice remains yet another legacy of the Civil War era.

The post After the Civil War, Memphis Vagrancy Laws Kept African Americans in ‘Slavery by Another Name’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.