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

Princeton, New Jersey, is in the Northern US. Perry is a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, where a block for auctioning enslaved people once sat. The university has a racist legacy and ties to enslavement. Indeed, the School of Public Policy at the university was named for Woodrow Wilson, who served as president of the university and later of the nation. Wilson was a known racist, and the school’s name was changed only after an outcry in 2020. One faculty member likened the students who led the protest to “terrorists,” and fellow pupils ostracized them (181). Members of the university’s swim team once donned blackface for a talent show, and bomb threats followed conversations about racism on the campus. Thus, “Princeton retains an echo of the plantation” (179). A notable number of Perry’s departmental colleagues share a connection to the southern city of Nashville. Indeed, Perry’s own grandmother attended Pearl High School there, as did the relatives of others with whom she works. Princeton and the South are linked.

Pearl High School was established in the late 1800s and during Jim Crow. It educated middle-class Black students who often went on to study at one of two HBCUs in Nashville: Fisk University or Tennessee State University. Vanderbilt University, where Perry is invited to speak, was not accessible to her ancestors, but some of them worked there. Later, some of her family members attended the university.

Vanderbilt is the home of a group of white Southern academics who called themselves the Fugitives. They resented stereotypes of the South as “backwards” (192) and created a literary magazine that published significant American authors. Some of the Fugitives also joined a group called the Agrarians, who likewise defended the South, including segregation and the heroes of the Confederacy. They ignored the South’s history of enslaving Black people: “The Fugitives and Agrarians sought reclamation and recognition. Black people like my ancestors labored with neither option in their midst. In Black studies, we have countered the lie of inadequacy. We repair the breach” (194).

At HBCUs like Fisk University, being Black did not make one “the other.” Instead, students found “culture and community” there (195). These institutions provided upward social mobility for their graduates and their families, despite white supremacy. In contrast, at predominantly white institutions like Princeton, Black students’ acceptance is “diminished by a claim of unearned benefit” (197). Black students face accusations of being admitted only because of affirmative action. Yet systemic racism means that college admissions are inherently biased. Black applicants’ achievements “don’t count for nearly as much as opportunity” (197). As W. E. B. Du Bois argued, “Whiteness was offered as a promise” (197). Some white people struggle despite hard work, while others “come from powerful edifices, who can point to paintings on Vanderbilt’s or Princeton’s walls and see their genealogies” (198).

Perry and others like her are exceptions. Many of Nashville’s Black inhabitants remain impoverished. Perry is indebted not to the universities that bestowed her degrees but rather to her ancestors, such as those who cleaned the halls of the buildings at Vanderbilt University.

Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, is a popular tourist destination today but was once part of a historically Black neighborhood in the segregated city. During the Jim Crow era, racist violence dogged Memphis. Three Black grocers were arrested and lynched in 1892 for simply running a successful and competitive business on Beale Street. The Black journalist Ida B. Wells had to flee Memphis after exposing the violence and injustice of such lynchings.

Memphis is the birthplace of rock and roll music, which Black artists created, although white musicians enjoyed success and recognition that eluded Black creators. Elvis Presley, for example, spent time wandering down Beale Street, was influenced by Black musicians, and imitated their styles of dress and performance. Presley is falsely reported to have once said that all a Black person could do for him was clean his blue suede shoes, but Perry argues that such myths “reflected the economy of race and entertainment” (201). Indeed, Presley “knew why he could get what they [Black artists] didn’t” when claiming that he was “an apprentice to Black musicians” (201). Presley’s former home in Memphis is a well-preserved and popular tourist destination. In comparison, Aretha Franklin’s Memphis residence was boarded up when fans arrived to mourn her death in 2018. Perry writes that both artists are “one-name icons,” but the inequitable conditions of their homes are characteristic of Memphis. This trend continues as white musicians like Justin Timberlake, a Memphis native, enjoy widespread success while appropriating Black styles.

White supremacy also controlled Black labor in Memphis. The poor working conditions that Black sanitation workers in the city experienced led to marches in 1968 in the lead-up to a strike. Martin Luther King, Jr., participated in a march down Beale Street that became violent. He was forced to leave before the city’s police could target him with the same violence they unleashed on the marchers. Two months later, King returned to Memphis, where he gave his last speech, known as the “mountaintop speech.” A white assassin’s bullet killed King the following day as he stood on the balcony of his motel.

White supremacist urban planning claimed land in Memphis. Perry writes, “Race cuts up” (207) because Black residents were literally cut off from accessing parts of the city through conscious and deliberate planning. Although plans to build part of an interstate through Overton Park, which would have cut off Black inhabitants’ access to this public space, were stopped via litigation, the plans are indicative of a pattern. White residents tried to dictate the movements of their Black neighbors.

Memphis sits on the banks of the Mississippi River, which is one of the most polluted waterways in the nation: “The use of the river to fill coffers and steal lives has been the American way for a long time” (211). Gentrification also impacts Beale Street; landmarks of this formerly Black section of Memphis are demolished to make way for new urban developments along the tourist-filled waterfront. Although the city is a predominantly Black one, Beale Street’s waterfront is markedly white today.

Today, Americans enjoy music that Black people created, but Perry cautions readers to remember that “the sounds of this nation that captured the whole world were born out of repression” (212).

Perry explores the historical and contemporary significance of the South’s crescent-shaped Black Belt that stretched across Alabama and Mississippi, focusing on the cities of Montgomery and Jackson. Perry sees the Black Belt as the “core” of “‘the South’ as a historic location” (217). The Black Belt remains largely rural and has a large Black population.

The “Black Belt Theory” appeared in the 1930s. Formulated by Black communist thinkers, this theory holds that Black residents in this part of the country formed an “internal colony of the United States” and, thus, should fight for independence, as other parts of the world struggled for liberation from their Western imperialist overlords. This theory affected Black author Richard Wright, a native of Mississippi whose book Black Boy influenced Perry’s thinking; he wrote about “hunger” in existential terms. Slavery’s abolition did not destroy the South’s “badges of servitude” (215).

Cotton was king in the “Black Belt,” and there are links between its cultivation, enslavement, international trade that demanded cotton’s production, and the rise of the US as a global, imperialist power. Cotton planters demanded an influx of laborers, so that “the Black Belt became the destination of the internal slave trade” (217). Millions of enslaved people were forced down the Mississippi River to work on cotton plantations.

Most of the Black people who migrated out of rural areas during the Great Migration, both northward and to cities in the South, departed from the Black Belt. This fact speaks to the hardship and terror that they were subjected to in this area of the South. Simultaneously, however, economic conditions also encouraged this migration. White migrants outnumbered Black ones, but white people often returned to their places of origin. Black migrants who left did not return to the Black Belt.

White identity operates as “an article of faith” that “redeemed suffering” (220). This is because, as W. E. B. Du Bois explained, white workers used their skin color to distinguish themselves from their Black counterparts. Race trumped class; moreover, it “afforded compensation in the ability to feed bloodthirstiness” through racists’ violence (220). Poor conditions for Black Americans persist in the Black Belt, despite slavery’s abolition and the ending of Jim Crow. Poverty and mass incarceration are rampant. It is no surprise that blues music comes out of the Black Belt. Perry questions why inhabitants stayed in the Black Belt: “The answer is home. If everyone had departed, no one would have been left to tend the ancestors’ graves” (228).

Montgomery, Alabama sits within the rural Black Belt. During her most recent visit to the city, Perry notes, the place that was once the capital of the Confederacy appeared renewed and different. Perry credits the Equal Justice Initiative with this positive shift that made the city “a site not simply of historical remembrance but of reckoning” (232). The organization operates a museum that allows visitors to experience the emotional impact of imprisonment and racist violence. Though the Thirteenth Amendment ended the practice of enslavement, it permits involuntary servitude as punishment for criminal activity. Incarceration destroys families: “Love has to be scheduled when it comes to people who are locked up” (233).

Perry addresses the intersection of the present #MeToo movement and the racist history of lynching after visiting the city’s lynching memorial. Black men who died by lynching were frequently falsely accused of raping white women. During her trip to Montgomery, Perry attended a talk at an HBCU, Alabama State University. Perry asks, “What do we do with #metoo on the grounds of the lynching tree?” (236). White supremacists historically wielded rape accusations as a tool of violence, and Black women have frequently been victimized by white men. Black communities must recover from these past injustices while also confronting internal sexual violence.

Perry’s next visit is to Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson’s current mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, is a Black man and the son of a freedom movement organizer. Lumumba’s father was active in the New Afrikan movement that confronted US imperialism by envisioning an independent Black state in the South, drawing on the Black Belt Theory. The Black Power movement is often viewed as something that emerged out of cities like Oakland, on the West Coast, but Perry argues that the South is its true birthplace: “Black nationalism and Black secession and Black armed self-defense had always been a part of the political imagination of the Black South” (240). Submission was not an option for Black Southerners.

Prior to the 2020 presidential election in the US, Russian trolls used fake news and disinformation to foment fears about the creation of an independent African state in the South. Perry wonders, “[...] had the idea of Black self-determination and self-governance become so preposterous that it was the wildest trick imagined?” (241).

The freedom movement lives in the Black Belt, as exemplified by Mayor Lumumba. Yet Perry argues that the spirit of the plantation is alive in the form of forced prison labor and exploitation of migrants from south of the border. Today, immigrants from Mexico and Central America work on the chicken farms that were once staffed by Black laborers. When white employees went on strike, Black workers “were brought in as scabs and, more importantly, as people hungry for work” (247). Today’s immigrants are paid wages below subsistence levels and experience exploitation that echoes that of prior generations. Progressive historical changes must not prevent one from seeing the oppression that continues to exist.