Foster Dickson's Blog, page 4
March 4, 2025
Education for Good: Women’s History Month 2025
Education doesn’t only occur in classrooms, and for our culture to thrive, everyone has more to learn: about our history, about our nation, about each other, about ourselves. Below are some of my suggestions for learning more about our history and culture during this year’s Women’s History Month. All of these resources share information or a story about a person or group who didn’t wait for an institution or the government to take the lead; they took the lead themselves, acting first as individuals addressing their own concerns.
OnlineThe Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States
Hosted at SUNY Binghamton, this digital database contains hundreds of brief biographies of women who had local and state-level roles in the voting rights movements of the early 20th century. In addition to the more mainstream groups, the database has sections on black women suffragists and militant suffragists, who are often left out of narratives and documentaries.
Septima Clark’s Citizen Education Project
Born in South Carolina in 1898, Septima Clark was an educator and community activist. Her teaching career began in 1916, but her work with the NAACP led to her firing in the mid-1950s. She then joined the staff of the Highlander Folk School, where she had already been leading summer workshops. Clark understood that education did not only occur in classrooms and with children, and that the best kind of learning leads to real-world improvements for the people involved. Her work became the basis for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Citizenship Schools in the 1960s. A search function is available, so an interested reader can look for people by name, by state, etc.
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library
The iconic country singer Dolly Parton is well-known not only for her music and for her bubbly personality and over-the-top style, but also for her ground-level approach to human rights and philanthropy. Raised in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, Parton’s early experiences with hardship have not been forgotten, and she has been a vocal advocate for helping all people. Her project that makes books available to schoolchildren has reached millions of families in English-speaking countries all over the world.
PBS’s The Vote
This two-part documentary from American Experience gives a strong overview of the Women’s Suffrage movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The movement led to the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote, and this documentary aired in October 2023 to honor the 100th anniversary of its ratification. Each episode runs almost two hours, and its webpage offers extras to the main program.
PBS’s Becoming bell hooks
This one-hour documentary aired in February 2024 and honors the life and work of the writer, educator, activist, and thinker. Born Gloria Watkins in rural Kentucky, hooks is described here as a “universal person,” which is accurate. In more than three dozen books, she explored a broad range of ideas and facets of life: Feminism is for Everybody, Belonging, Teaching to Transgress, All About Love. After a career that spanned more than four decades, hooks died in 2021 at the age of 69. The documentary offers snippets from her life as well as perspectives from people who knew her and others who simply knew her work.
Delores Huerta on Brief but Spectacular
Delores Huerta is widely acknowledged as the co-founder of the Farm Workers movement, alongside Cesar Chavez. Today, Huerta is an icon of organizing and social action. In this ten-minute clip, she discusses her ideas about immigrants and farmworkers, as well as racism, xenophobia, and other anti-immigrant sentiments.
Outside the Magic Circle
by Virginia Foster Durr
from the publisher’s description: “Virginia’s sister Josephine married Hugo Black; and in 1926 Virginia married a young lawyer named Clifford Durr. The Durrs moved to Washington shortly after Roosevelt’s inauguration, and Clifford was one of the ‘bright young lawyers’ whom the new president relied upon to draft the legislation establishing the New Deal. After World War II the Durrs moved to Denver, then to Montgomery, where Clifford became one of the few white lawyers to represent blacks in civil rights cases. During the Durrs’ Washington years Virginia had been active in the movement to abolish the poll tax and in to her liberal causes; and back in Montgomery, she shared Clifford’s commitment to the civil rights movement and served as an inspiration to liberals of both races.”
Hands on the Freedom Plow
edited by Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner
from the publisher’s description: “In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women–northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina–share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. [ . . . ] Each story reveals how the struggle for social change was formed, supported, and maintained by the women who kept their ‘hands on the freedom plow.'”
The Lillian Smith Reader
edited by Margaret Rose Gladney and Lisa Hodgens
from the publisher’s description: “As a writer and forward-thinking social critic, Lillian Smith (1897–1966) was an astute chronicler of the twentieth-century American South and an early proponent of the civil rights movement. From her home on Old Screamer Mountain overlooking Clayton, Georgia, Smith wrote and spoke openly against racism, segregation, and Jim Crow laws long before the civil rights era. Bringing together short stories, lectures, essays, op-ed pieces, interviews, and excerpts from her longer fiction and nonfiction, A Lillian Smith Reader offers the first comprehensive collection of her work and a compelling introduction to one of the South’s most important writers.”
February 22, 2025
Reading: “Earnest Occupations” by Richard Hague
Earnest Occupations:
Teaching, Writing, Gardening, and Other Local Work
by Richard Hague
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Every town needs a Richard Hague. I first came to know Hague’s writing from his unconventional book Lives of a Poem and, through that, learned about his community writing workshops, publishing, and teaching. He and I come from two different generations and two different places – he’s a Boomer from the Appalachian region of Ohio, and I’m a GenXer from the Black Belt of Alabama – but we do similar kinds of work. He was a high school writing teacher, so was I. He stuck around and wrote and taught in the same area where he was from, and so have I. He created projects to publish books by local writers and on local subjects, same again. And we’re also both poets, gardeners, and Catholics. The phrase “cut from the same cloth” comes to mind.
So I was glad when I found this collection of short essays and sketches with the subtitle: Teaching, Writing, Gardening, and Other Local Work. In the opening essay “Local,” Hague gives us his definition of the term, using his own family as examples: “They were all local people. And by ‘local’ I mean that they lived where they lived, steeping themselves in the lore and gossip and complex business, human and otherwise, of their neighborhood.” In my work, this is called a “sense of place” but Hague takes it further with a phrase here that is deceptively simple: “they lived where they lived” [italics mine]. Through the collection, he writes about living in this locale that for him is a long-term, multigenerational experience. We meet his neighbors, his students, his relatives, and his wife, of course, but we also meet his plants, his land, his roads and streets, his school, his church, his local officials and their work crews, some by name though some not. There are shorter essays, which only span a page or two, and a few longer ones, like “The Atmosphere of Names,” which carries forward a theme in multiple parts. One of my favorites was “Guerrilla Gardening,” in which Hague describes his semi-covert attempts over the years to reduce the destructive urbanity around him by adding small bits of Nature and beauty where he can.
The running theme of Earnest Occupations is right there in the title. The phrase comes up often throughout the book, alluding to the writer’s sense of a vocation in which he is making his little corner of the planet better in whatever way possible. Only a conscientious person could undertake such an attitude about life, especially when – and Hague mentions plenty of common examples – there are people in every community who seem, whether due to apathy or selfishness or both, to work in the opposite direction: diminishing beauty for profit, ignoring heritage to embrace throwaway culture, preferring easy solutions to doing things right. I call the kinds of ideas in Earnest Occupations “pragmatic idealism,” because we find hope in the opportunity for work, a cautious optimism coupled with a sense of life’s hard truths. This is where we are, writes Hague, and here is what we can do. Because it takes one to know one, I can say with certainty that that’s definitely the thinking of a teacher and of a writer and of a gardener.
February 18, 2025
Dirty Boots: Mirrors, Windows, and Doors
I have loved movies for as long as I can remember. Ones that come to mind from the earliest parts of my life were the animated adaptation of The Hobbit and the holiday story Emmett Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, both from 1977. There’s no accounting for taste, of course, and later in my 1980s boyhood, other kinds of films captured my imagination: Burt Reynolds’ comedies like Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run, Sylvester Stallone’s ultra-cheesy sequels Rocky III and Rocky IV, and Kenny Rogers’ Six Pack. The mini-series Roots was a little before my time and out of my family’s cultural milieu, but we did watch North and South in 1985. It reminded me of my grandmother’s soap operas. Later, I also recall wondering why my mother watched things like The Thornbirds and Out of Africa. They seemed so boring . . .
Once my tastes were a little more cultivated, two movies that I watched over and over were 1986’s At Close Range and 1983’s Suburbia. By the late ’80s, we had a video rental store that was walking distance from the house, and cheap rentals made for an easy pass-time. Based on a true story, At Close Range is a bleak drama about a family of criminals in rural Pennsylvania. Madonna had made the movie’s theme song, and the video for it caught my attention. The only other film I knew Sean Penn from at that point was Bad Boys, which came on TBS and was frightening as hell. I wasn’t yet old enough to see Fast Times at Ridgemont High uncut, so my image of Sean Penn came from Mick, not from Spicoli. In At Close Range, the main character Brad is living in rural poverty and has no good options for leading a fulfilling life, so he attempts to participate in his father’s criminal enterprise, which doesn’t go well. Suburbia is an equally bleak story about a group of runaway punks who live in an abandoned housing project. What I still admire about the film is how its unvarnished portrayal allows the characters to be three-dimensional. The teenagers are living with no resources in a bad situation, so we alternately feel sorry for them and recognize that they are problematic. Even the two villains are round characters; frustrated by unemployment and by social forces they don’t understand, the two blue-collar guys spend their time complaining, drinking, and lashing out at the punks who are easy scapegoats.
Though I didn’t think of it this way when I was younger, Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop asserted, in a now-often-cited article from 1990, that there are three ways to look at works of literature (and, I’d say, film): to look for mirrors, to look for windows, and to look for doors. Too many of the people I’ve known in my life look for mirrors. When they read or watch movies, these folks want primarily to see what they’re familiar with, what they can relate to, and what they already understand, while judging what is unfamiliar or challenging as bizarre or unacceptable. People who look for mirrors often want to see themselves or their values represented favorably in works of art, literature, and film— this what I’m doing or thinking, this is what it looks like in action, and this shows me that I’m right. We might think of this perspective as being small-minded within a circumscribed life, yet it’s also present in groups we today call “underrepresented,” people who say they are working to “reclaim the narratives” about who they are. Sometimes it’s necessary to seek affirmation from creative works. Looking for mirrors isn’t bad or wrong . . . There are just drawbacks to it.
The second – looking for windows – probably represents my perspective most of the time. Instead of preferring to see my own image and values reflected back to me and liking what I see when it is, I want to see what is beyond me, what is different from me, what this wide world offers, even what was previously unimaginable to me. Certainly, there are films that reflect the kind of life I’ve lived, mostly teenage dramas from the 1980s and ’90s. For me, what is out the proverbial window can come in the form of the reluctant hero Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit or perhaps something more realistic like the Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. It can reveal the surreal experiences of Sailor and Lula in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart or show us the absurdly comical exploits of Kevin in Home Alone.
That third one – looking for doors – is the most rare. Sometimes movies do that, though: show us how we want to live or who we want to become. I’ve heard the criticism that we shouldn’t care about fiction (including fictional stories in films) because the people aren’t real and the things never happened. Even Plato had that complaint more than two-thousand years ago. But there’s a reason that scholars use the term “speculative fiction” for works that ask us to consider a possible truth about life. Sometimes, in the movies, we do encounter new ways of seeing the world, and if those become doorways, new ways of living become possible. Fact-based dramas, like The Blind Side or Selma, seek to be that, and sometimes are. Movies that come to my mind, ones that challenge us to be better, are The Children’s Hour, Boys Don’t Cry, Blindness, and Lost Child.
The late Gloria Steinem has been quoted as saying, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” To truly appreciate the power of movies, we have to accept that we might not always like what we see. Sometimes, I hear people say, “I didn’t like that movie.” My thought is: did you think you were supposed to? The first time I watched Do the Right Thing, I wasn’t sure what to do with my feelings. I can the same thing for different reasons about American Me, which offers a brutal portrait of life in prison and life after it. Other films that have left me deeply uncertain are The Defiant Ones, Ganja & Hess, Macon County Line, Sleepaway Camp, and Beyond the Black Rainbow. In one of my favorite movie endings of all time, Roman Holiday has Gregory Peck’s character walks out of the empty hall alone while we wait for Audrey Hepburn’s princess to come running out after him. She doesn’t, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s also perfect. I’m not even going to get started on the ways that the South and Southerners are often portrayed in mainstream movies . . . Many of those portrayals can be deeply troubling.
Mirrors, windows, and doors. About mirrors, I’m kind of glad that no mainstream movie has ever depicted my experience growing up as a GenXer in the Deep South. It wasn’t done at the time, and by now it wouldn’t be done right. There are some GenX movies that I recognize as having features of my experience – The Breakfast Club, River’s Edge, Say Anything – but none that are set in the South. For me, at this stage in life, movies are about having windows. The idea that, in my early 50s, I’ll encounter a door by seeing something in a movie that will lead me to start afresh, like Eat Pray Love maybe— probably not. But my mind is still wide open to see and consider new things, new ideas, new ways of life.
February 8, 2025
Southern Movie 75: “The Badge” (2002)
The dramatic thriller The Badge from 2002 tells the story of a small-town Louisiana sheriff whose folksy but mildly corrupt ways come into conflict with state politicians when their involvement with transsexual prostitutes might be revealed. Despite his status as local good ol’ boy / tough guy, the sheriff finds himself fighting wars on several fronts as he tries to navigate that precarious situation alongside a divorce from his wife and family conflicts that involved his daughter, father, and brother. Ultimately, we see a Southern man in a position of authority whose powerful allies want him to ignore the injustice of a murdered trans person. Written and directed by Robby Benson and starring Billy Bob Thornton and Patricia Arquette, The Badge is a surprisingly honest film about closeted sexuality, sexual exploitation, and LGBTQ rights, given its release date in the early 2000s.
The Badge opens in relative darkness, and we see a scantily dressed woman running through woods and swamp. We sense that she is running from something. By the time the credits finish rolling, she reaches an isolated two-lane highway where a trucker is driving through the night. After she dashes in front of his truck, it overturns into a flooded ditch alongside a cypress swamp.
Next, we meet our main character Sheriff Darl Hardwick (Billy Bob Thornton). He has passed out in his sheriff’s SUV in front of the local bar. The female bartender wakes him up when she takes out the trash in the morning sunlight and suggests that he come inside for some eggs. Inside, a handful of locals are still knocking them back, and our hungover lawman tries to shake out the cobwebs. While he does, another younger female bartender wanders over and seems to be hitting on him, but he waves her off, saying that she is underage and shouldn’t be there anyway. She swears she’s 21 and seems undeterred. That’s when the phone call comes in, about the overturned truck. (Right away, we see that the deputies know to call the bar early in the AM, if they want to find the sheriff.)
Out on the road, the few local deputies are gathered around the wreck. They only know about the truck, not the dead woman, then find out that the driver doesn’t have insurance. He insists that he wasn’t drunk or anything— a woman ran out in front of him, out of nowhere! Darl then seizes on the opportunity to use the trucker’s uninsured status against him, and they begin to invite everyone in the small town to come get free shoes, which have fallen out of the rig and are scattered all over the swamp. As they gather the shoes, they find the dead woman, laying face up a little further into the woods. She has no ID, no purse, and is dressed in sexy lace clothing but also has a Jesus tattoo on one of her breasts.
Darl’s first effort at finding out who the woman is takes him to a small rural church, half-built and still under construction, where he inquires with the old-hippie-looking female pastor Sister Felicia whether the woman had been around her congregation. No, she doesn’t know the woman. Their main concern is gathering the forces of religion to stop plans to build a fancy casino in their town.
Next stop in the hunt for information carries Darl to a local convenience store, where the proprietor asks him to shoo a group of teenagers who are running off his customers. Outside, we see one boy riding a skateboard around, while several surly girls hang around a car. One of them is Darl’s daughter, whose somewhat-goth style we understand to be a turnoff to her otherwise-redneck dad. Instead of shooing her, he puts her in his car to take her home. That’s when we learn that Darl and his wife – the girl’s mother Carla (Selah Ward) – are getting divorced. The girl smokes cigarettes and asks her dad if she can get a tattoo, typical teenage rebellion kind of stuff.
In the next scene, the twist in the plot comes. Darl is called to the morgue, where the dead woman’s body is being examined. And it has been discovered that “she” has a dick. Breasts and a dick. The good ol’ boys are quite confused by this, and the medical examiner explains what a transsexual is. Their half-witted responses amount to an “OK, whatever.” The quizzical banter is interrupted by the arrival of Darl’s ex-wife Carla, who is also the district attorney for the area, and she wants to know why the body was removed in what should be a murder investigation. The ill will between Darl and Carla is palpable, she doesn’t stay long after being rebuffed, then the fellas return to razzing the examiner about how he knows so much about transsexuals.
The few moments that follow give us more context. Darl is followed to his truck by Deputy Jackson, the only black man on the force, and is questioned about why he isn’t following Carla’s directives. Darl ignores him and looks for his sunglasses. The younger man is quietly miffed by being written off, and soon we see him stopping by the home of the local judge (William Devane), who is playing with his grandson by the waterside. Jackson and The Judge speak off the record about how the elder man wants the case kept quiet, why the seemingly inept Darl should remain on the case, and how this could look bad for the governor in an election year. Jackson doesn’t love it but says OK.
At the station, there is a pretty blonde woman (Patricia Arquette) waiting on Darl, and his first inclination is to hit on her. She isn’t interested in his cheap charm, but has come because her friend Mona was last in La Salle Parish – where the story takes place – but didn’t come home to New Orleans. Mona is the dead transsexual, so the woman, whose name is Scarlett, identifies her. Darl tries to ask her some questions for his investigation but is so clumsy and inconsiderate about it that he doesn’t get good answers. Mona was a stripper/model who “did parties,” and Darl is stunned to find out that Scarlett is his/her wife, legally married.
But their conversation is interrupted by a deputy named CB, who needs Darl to come to the construction site for the new casino. Darl’s father, who was once the sheriff, has a shotgun and is dancing around, hollering inane things, and blasting into the air, all while wearing a Native American headdress. Sister Felicia’s church – the half-built one – had organized a peaceful protest, but old dad showed up with other methods in mind. Darl tries to get him under control but can’t; however, The Judge shows up, stands him down, and takes the shotgun. The situation is diffused, and Darl must take his humiliated and deflated father home. There, we find out that The Judge used his political influence to end the elder man’s career in law enforcement and has more recently been trying to buy his property for the coming casino. Lots of ill will.
Meanwhile, Scarlett has left the station and is investigating on her own. She is at the bus station, where she finds out that Mona never bought a bus ticket to come home. Darl shows up and tries to be cute again, which leads Scarlett to get angry and tell him to “put aside your prejudices” and get to work on solving the murder. A bit scolded, Darl says that he will.
The next scenes tangle up the plot and the conflict a good bit. At a campaign event for Joe Breraton, the handsome young governor who is running for re-election, Darl finds himself isolated among forces beyond his control. His ex-wife shows up at the event, and out in the parking lot, he runs into that young bartender from the early scenes. She is drunk and aggravated that they won’t let her into the event. Darl brings her in anyway and sits her down at the table with his deputies and their wives, but she acts a fool and laughs while doing it. In the bathroom, he is confronted by the business owner whose shoes were in that overturned truck. The guy is pissed and intends to use his connections to get revenge for the massive theft. Here, Darl finds out that the other politicians plan to kick him off the Democratic ticket. Darl comes out and gets in the faces of the other guys, but they blow him off. At the end of the night, he takes the young bartender home but just puts her in the bed and sleeps on the couch himself. As he lays in the dark, Scarlett calls him and gives the local phone number that Mona called from, on the night of the murder. Darl tells her that he is writing it down but doesn’t. He’s got his own problems, and that dead transsexual isn’t one of them.
In the morning, after a trying unsuccessfully to get his ex-wife to let him come over for Christmas, Darl storms into the local campaign office to find The Judge, his lawyer, and Deputy Jackson there. Darl tries to incite a confrontation to clear the air, and The Judge tells him that “the party” – the Democrats, that is – will be running Jackson for sheriff. Darl won’t give up, though, and he goes to the courthouse and gets the petitions to run as an independent. While he does get some signatures, others have already signed for Jackson. To culminate this effort, he asks his deputy CB for his signature but receives a chilly avoidance. Darl reminds CB that Jackson will garner “the black vote” and when he does will probably replace CB with a black deputy. Then CB drops a bomb on him: he found Darl’s sunglasses, the ones Darl is always looking for, in his wife’s back seat. Over at the convenience store, he tries to get Ornell the tow truck driver to sign the petition, but he’s too busy looking through dirty magazines. Out on Main Street, Sister Felicia prefers passing out Jesus fliers to supporting a man who steals shoes and ignores the Sabbath. Darl tells her that he liked her better when she used to smoke weed and have sex with him in her Pinto.
At this point, nearing the halfway mark, Darl is in dire straits and knows it. As he ponders his next move, his father appears and tells him that The Judge probably killed Mona and is setting him up to take the fall. Darl then tears off down the road and stops at the site of the wreck. He parks and walks into the wooded swamp where he finds Mona’s red high-heeled shoe. Tracing that path, he ends up at Tidewater, a hunting club for the affluent locals. There, he runs into the old black fellow tending the dogs and remembers that one of them had been skittish at the scene where they’d found Mona. Then, up on the porch, The Judge appears with two other men, and they share intimations about what may or may not be happening behind the scenes, things Darl may not be glad about.
When Darl returns to his truck, a state policeman, Deputy Jackson, and another deputy are going through his truck. He objects, but the state policeman tells him that he is under arrest for statutory rape. The charge is that he slept with that young bartender, who it turns out is only fifteen years old. The problem for Darl is that he has slept with so many women in town that his reputation makes people think he has slept with this girl, too. However, The Judge lets him off with his own kind of warning. If Darl will plead guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor, they’ll drop the sexual charge. They all saw Darl fix drinks for her, so he’s sunk. Now, having a felony record, he can no longer be sheriff and part of his probation will be that he can’t leave the county without permission.
Although he is defeated in real life, Darl is neither a man who will quit nor a man who knows when to quit. On the street, he is approached by a young black dude in a suit, driving a classic Cadillac. The fast-talking hipster works for the Republican Party and wants to help Darl, since the GOP smells blood in the water. This death has been swept under the rug and sealed away, and they want to know more about why.
Instead of accepting the help from a new team, Darl does what he shouldn’t: go to New Orleans to investigate. Mona had a “JA” stamped on her hand, and that was from a club called Johnny Angel’s. In New Orleans – where isn’t supposed to be, because of his probation – Darl knocks around and can’t find anything, until he ducks into a little gay porn video store. He has gone there to see his brother. The two men have been estranged, and the tension is clear. Darl just wants to know where Johnny Angel’s is, and his brother tells him. (We’ll find out more later.)
At the club, Darl finds Scarlett singing on stage, and after she is done, they talk. Darl shows her the red shoe, and she says that wasn’t Mona’s. He is confused, because: whose could it be then? They share a few tense words, and Darl has a minor altercation with a man who bumps into him. Scarlett is frustrated over the lack progress in Mona’s case, and Darl is frustrated about trying to save his own skin. He storms out, sensing that the conversation is pointless, and she follows him into the alley outside. There, Scarlett lets it out that the cops often let gay bashings and killings go unpunished, seeing it as something that the “freaks” deserve. Darl and Scarlett come to an understanding that each is not what the other initially thought, and they can begin working together on something that can benefit them both. They both know where these stripper parties are happening, and each has an interest in bringing the perpetrators to justice.
Across town at another strip club, Scarlett introduces Darl to another dancer who has been to the parties. She tells him that the women are all paid well to keep their mouths shut, but she lets it out that prominent people, including the governor, attend. The details that we get here are that the girls left La Salle Parish to head back to New Orleans about 1:45 AM and that this stripper saw Mona walking from the place, instead of riding in a car with someone.
At a very different kind of event, Carla is shmoozing with the governor, who seems like her. However, she wants to know more about the situation with Darl, sensing that he might be a flawed character but probably didn’t sleep with that underage girl. The governor claims to know nothing about it, then reminds her that there may be a place in political life for her . . . but there isn’t a place for Darl.
Back in New Orleans, Darl and Scarlett are drinking and talking at the bar. Darl doesn’t understand how Mona could have been a lingerie model, since people would notice the lump in the panties. Scarlett laughs it off and explains how one would tuck it under as to go unseen. In talking seriously about Mona’s case, Scarlett reminds him that she gave him the phone number Mona called from. Darl lies and says that it’s in the files that he can no longer access. But Scarlett has it, so they call from the bar, and the tow truck driver Ornell answers. The number is for a roadside pay phone outside of his gas station and shop. We’ve already gathered that he’s slow-witted, so he isn’t much help. She made the call at about 3:00 AM, and he doesn’t open up until 8:00 AM. Also, when Darl was letting people take all those free shoes, Ornell didn’t get a pair. He mumbles about it unhappily and seems miffed with Darl about the slight.
As the night winds down, Darl and Scarlett have a heart to heart, both drunk. Scarlett asks him to tell something personal about himself, and Darl lets out that his mother died when he was young and that his brother is “off.” He also confesses that, when he was about to run for sheriff, local leaders said they’d back him if he made his brother leave the parish for good. Of course, after the scene in the gay porn store, we know that “off” means gay. But Darl doesn’t share that here.
The pair get back to Scarlett’s house, and there are a few moments when it appears that they will be end up in bed. Yet, Darl thinks better of it and goes outside to sleep in his truck. In the morning, Scarlett finds him and tells him to go in the house while she runs out for coffee. Inside and unsupervised, he discovers Mona’s and Scarlett’s wedding photo, which shows his brother among the wedding party. This epiphany lets him in on the fact that there is more going on than he is being told. Then, before Scarlett returns, an older man in a suit appears for his “appointment” with Mona. Darl is disgusted by the idea of what might be happening, and by the time Scarlett returns he leaves after an angry exchange about unconventional kinds of sexuality.
Darl then returns to Tidewater to tell The Judge and his cronies what he intends to do. He spills the beans about all he has learned, and his opponents speak in vague terms about the parties and what might happen at them. The Judge also counters Darl’s timeline with his own timeline, adding that they’ll have alibis because they were home with their wives by the time Mona was killed. Darl is unimpressed, though, and says that if he isn’t reinstated as sheriff then he’ll go to the press. As he is driving away, the men come out and agree – vaguely again – to his terms. But they must know where to find Scarlett. Darl now has a choice: save his own skin by turning on Scarlett, or going it alone with little to no hope.
But that decision has to wait. Instead, he goes to see his father, who is riding his bicycle down a dirt road. The strange man speaks cryptically to his son, and Darl wants to know about his mother. His father claims that she killed herself, but some believe that he killed her. The possibly insane man insists that she committed suicide with a pistol to her own head during a heated argument. And though he did nothing wrong, but in fact tried to stop her, he was ousted from his old position as sheriff due to the suspicion.
As the film winds down, it turns into something more of an action film. Darl returns to New Orleans and finds that the police are after him. He storms into the strip club, looking for Scarlett, and gets his butt kicked by the bouncers because he went into the dressing room. While he’s bleeding in the parking lot, Scarlett comes out to help him but the two plain-clothes cops appear, wanting to arrest her. Darl jumps up, gets his pistol, frees her from them, and a car chase ensues. Bullets fly, of course. They get away, but the police now know his truck. So they get away on foot, make their way to Darl’s brother’s porn shop, and borrow his Volvo. Their next move is unexpected, taking their story to the Republican Party headquarters to procure the promised help from that young black dude in the Cadillac. But it won’t turn it as they thought.
Inside the offices, the man they’re looking for is in consort with The Judge and his cronies. They are sitting, waiting on Darl and Scarlett. It turns out that the young guy, whose name is Gizmo, had been at Tidewater that night. He was trying covertly to get pictures of the governor with a transexual prostitute, and it was his picture-taking that caused Mona to flee on foot. Did Gizmo kill Mona then? Nope. But it’s not over. Darl and Scarlett want their story told, and they want justice for Mona.
Back in La Salle Parish, the story culminates at Ornell’s gas station. While Darl and Scarlett are paying for some candy bars, Scarlett asks to use the bathroom, and Ornell tells her that women’s restroom has not been cleaned and is thus unavailable. She asks, Then what about the men’s room? Without looking at her, he says no, because that’s not right. He thinks she might be one of those people who try to use bathrooms that they shouldn’t be using. This comment perks Darl’s ears. He goes outside to the women’s restroom and kicks in the padlocked door. Ornell protests but doesn’t act to stop him. In the restroom, Darl finds a peep hole and walks around the building to find out what one would see on the other side. It gives a view of the women’s restroom toilet. And all around the peep hole are pornographic pictures of women, with a jar of vaseline on the table. Darl figures it out. Ornell watches women use the toilet while he masturbates, but that night, when Mona pulled up here skirt, Ornell didn’t see what he thought he would see. Perhaps embarrassed, perhaps enraged, Ornell attacked Mona and shot at him/her with his pistol. Mona ran through the woods with a .22 bullet lodged in her back and fell dead right after the truck just missed.
The movie ends with a funeral service, of sorts, for Mona. Scarlett is giving away Mona’s clothes, and friends are gathering to remember. Here, Scarlett confesses that she knows Darl’s brother and that it was his idea to seek Darl’s help in the murder case. During the get-together, Darl and his brother reconcile, and the small-town sheriff is a changed man. The ending seems to hint that Darl and Scarlett might end up together— might.
If you’ve read this far, consider showing some love!To run across The Badge was an interesting find for me. I don’t remember the movie from the time of its release, but its cast probably garnered it some attention. It came out six years after Billy Bob Thornton’s 1996 hit Sling Blade, so the lead actor was a known commodity by then. In terms of raising awareness about an issue, its 2002 release date puts it on the heels of the murders of Matthew Shepard in 1998 and Billy Jack Gaither in 1999. Though same-sex marriage is one of its lesser themes, The Badge predates the Obergefell ruling by a dozen years.
As a document of the South, this film shows a side of the culture that mainstream audiences would rarely see. Some moviegoers may have encountered this subject a few years earlier in 1997’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. This is gay New Orleans (instead of Savannah), and in The Badge, closeted sexuality and the transgender subculture meet the small-town South (instead of high society). We see the South’s sexual undercurrents, which are often populated by people who claim to be straight-laced and “normal” but who actually lead alternative – some might say deviant – lifestyles. We’ve got characters who transcend or defy heteronormative and binary conceptions of gender, and those elements are troubling or disconcerting for more traditionally minded characters. It is noteworthy that the governor and other politicians are purported to be involved with transsexual prostitutes, while the small town’s sheriff struggles with the idea of it and its tow truck driver can’t abide it. This might imply that the ignorance and closed-mindedness of working-class Southerners is the true dividing factor between mainstream Southerners and the LGBTQ community, since the well-educated elites are participating in same-sex relationships. (The question becomes: if you’re involved in same-sex relationships and are hiding it, why are you hiding it, and who are you hiding it from? ) We also have the statement at the end that being run out of their small town was the best thing that ever happened to Darl’s gay brother, because it forced him to find a place where he could build a life. This “blessing in disguise” motif might be true for some LGBTQ Southerners, but certainly not for all: to have to choose one’s identity and sexuality over one’s family and hometown. The film doesn’t answer any looming questions, but it does open some doors and raise some important issues.
One last thing I was curious about: was using the name Darl a throwback to the William Faulkner character? Readers of Southern literature will recognize the name of one of the Bundren siblings in As I Lay Dying. I don’t see parallels between the two characters, but the use of such an unusual name prompts me to wonder.
January 28, 2025
Education for Good: Black History Month 2025
Education doesn’t only occur in classrooms, and for our culture to thrive, everyone has more to learn: about our history, about our nation, about each other, about ourselves. Below are some of my suggestions for learning more about African-American history and culture during this year’s Black History Month. All of these resources share information or a story about a person or group who didn’t wait for an institution or the government to take the lead; they took the lead themselves, acting first as individuals addressing their own concerns.
OnlineThe Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Founded by Arturo (Arthur) Schomburg, this institution within the New York Public Library system has a vast array of resources, some of which are digitized. Schomburg was born in Puerto Rico in 1874 and came with his family to New York City in 1891. His passion for collecting documents, photographs, and other materials related to African American history arose from an early experience when his teacher told him that black people had no history. His 1925 essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past” is regarded as a seminal defense of the study of African American history. The New York Public Library then purchased his substantial personal collection in 1926 and took on the institutional role of curating it, with Schomburg himself at the helm in the early years. Today, the center is nearing its 100th anniversary.
Septima Clark’s Citizen Education Project
Born in South Carolina in 1898, Septima Clark was an educator and community activist. Her teaching career began in 1916, but her work with the NAACP led to her firing in the mid-1950s. She then joined the staff of the Highlander Folk School, where she had already been leading summer workshops. Clark understood that education did not only occur in classrooms and with children, and that the best kind of learning leads to real-world improvements for the people involved. Her work became the basis for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Citizenship Schools in the 1960s.
PBS’s Making Black America series
This four-part series, hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., offers a portrait what being African American is and what African American culture means within the context of the larger culture. The videos, which are nearly an hour each, included discussions with intellectuals and writers, historical sketches, and other material that put surface-level conceptions into context. We also get explanations for the foundations of the institutions that have underpinned and augmented black life, such a Prince Hall Masonry and abolitionist newspapers. This series is not just another chronological Ken Burns-style documentary, but rather a complex exploration of an interwoven past and present.
Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s
After the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, African American filmmakers began sharing their ideas and vision with mass audiences. though these films were usually (but not always) low-budget potboiler-style “exploitation” films. Some critics hail Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song from 1971 as the first in this genre, although earlier films like 1965’s Murder in Mississippi or 1966’s The Black Klansman deserve a nod. The most popular among the blaxploitation films came in the early 1970s: Shaft, Superfly, and Dolemite. Soon, female actors like Pam Grier joined the mix, starring Coffy, Foxy Brown, and Cleopatra Jones. If viewed not as cheaply made action-thrillers but as a social and political statements, these movies take on a whole different meaning. Among the more obviously political was Black Gestapo. Also lumped into the genre are horror movies Abby and Blacula, the family comedy Five on the Black Hand Side, the teenage-themed Cooley High, the oddball musical Darktown Strutters, and the western Thomasine and Bushrod.
Adjust Your Color: The Truth of Petey Greene
Washington, DC’s Ralph “Petey” Greene was one of a kind. This 2009 documentary provides an overview of the brash and often controversial TV host, who spoke his mind with an unusual degree of honesty and freedom. Greene had been raised in poverty and had gone to prison for years, where an opportunity to do a broadcast for his fellow inmates allowed him to hone a style that demanded attention. He emerged with that distinctive voice, mixing harsh truth with vulgar humor in a way that engaged his urban audience and garnered more attention from wider audiences and from powerful people. Because Petey Greene was a mostly local figure, his name is not as well-known, but many of the things that he was saying between the late 1960s and early 1980s still resonate today.
Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America
edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard
In everyday conversations and often in classrooms, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s is presented in monolithically simplistic terms: Rosa sat down, Martin marched, now we all get along. Not hardly. One truth of the movement that is being exposed more clearly in modern years is that discrimination, segregation, and other forms of bigotry were not only a Southern problem. This fact doesn’t excuse the South’s longstanding practice of Jim Crow, but it does dispel the notion that the South was maintaining a racist culture while other parts of the country were not. The collection of essays, published in 2005, explores thirteen separate social-justice movements in Southern locales, like Alabama and Mississippi, and in cities like Boston, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Des Moines, and Oakland.
January 23, 2025
Dirty Boots: The Grandma in the Louisiana KFC, continued
Read “The Grandma in the Louisiana KFC” first.
. . . and if it were me, trying to push our democracy forward to a better place, I’d consider trying at least some of the following ideas.
First, Democrats in the South could take the lead on either abolishing the electoral college or having every state use a split-vote method like Nebraska and Maine. If that all-or-nothing aspect of our presidential elections were eliminated, every candidate would have to campaign in every state, because every community’s votes would matter. Campaign money would be spread thinner and more evenly, and third parties would shine through in areas where they’re strong, which would open doors for platforms to change. This reform could also effectively un-nullify millions of Southern voters who aren’t supporting Republican presidential candidates. Perhaps most importantly, it could diminish the “why bother?” rationale for not voting. In presidential races, the effects in Texas and Florida alone would be substantial. I believe that there would also be a down-ballot effect that could influence state-level politics. In the South, that could mean a sea change in our political landscape.
Second, Southerners could support election reform that includes ranked-choice voting for as many state and local elections as possible. This would untangle the diverse electorate and allow people’s preferences to show through in a way that a binary choice does not. It might not be feasible in a presidential election, but expanding choice could alter the face of state and local politics in the region. Which could then yield a change in our presidential and statewide office picks.
Third, Alabama (and, in the South, also Kentucky and South Carolina) should end straight-ticket voting. This practice makes it too convenient to reduce one’s political ideals to a single word: Republican or Democrat. If someone still wants to fill in every bubble for every candidate in one party, they still can. For the committed single-party voter, it will change voting from a two-second process to maybe a two-minute process. But it would force voters to look at the names in every race, to at least consider each one as an individual choice. That’s good for democracy.
Fourth, all Southern states should improve their twelfth-grade Government and Economics courses, and should create free Citizenship Schools that offer adult education. About this first idea, the two high school courses have a resoundingly positive answer to the age-old question: How’m I gonna use this in real life? And since many Southerners of all ages could use some serious education in how our government works and in how our economy works, ongoing community-level workshops and seminars that are available to the general public are warranted. This could include including ready-made on-site programming, like canned thirty-minute talks for civic groups’ lunchtime meetings. During the Civil Rights movement, Citizenship Schools are how activist groups like SNCC mobilized voters, and it could work again.
Finally, the South’s Democrats and third parties should try to field vetted candidates in every race possible. Let no office go unchallenged. Give people a choice. Even unfunded, unknown candidates who lose badly will gain something by running: experience and name recognition. In VO Key’s classic Southern Politics: In State and Nation, he acknowledged that, in the South, candidates have to get out there and make their name known. Maybe the first crop or two loses in a landslide— but it’s a step toward winning, since voters respond to names they’ve seen before.
This last thing isn’t a preference of mine, but it’s worth pointing out. On the Store page on the website of the Alabama Democrats, there are an array of graphic t-shirts, including ones supporting the legalization of marijuana. It makes me wonder, why haven’t Democrats run on this issue? This could mobilize voters who have been apathetic in the past. Me, I do my relaxing with craft beer and don’t care about pot . . . but lots and lots of other people do. If a “Free Weed” t-shirt is for sale on the website, then they’re already staking out that position— why not run on it?
After all, it’s time to think about winning.
January 14, 2025
Egerton, 1974
As 2024 closed out, I found myself capping off a nearly two-year stretch of vigorous reading with John Egerton’s The Americanization of Dixie from 1974. I had never read this one, though its subject matter should have prompted me to do so long ago. Last year was the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, an event that went largely unmarked.
Egerton’s now-classic book is a top-notch journalist’s examination of the South, post-Civil Rights. His opening chapter carries us to Miami, to a convention of Southern historians. This event gives him a chance to wax philosophic about the state of the South and to remark that this kind of gathering is only possible because of the idea of Southern exceptionalism. (He doesn’t use that term, but that’s what he’s talking about.) If Southerners didn’t view ourselves as distinctive from other Americans, there would be no Southern writers, Southern historians, etc. After that, his expository prose carries us all over the South with overarching topics serving as the organizational structure. The first of these chapters discusses “Agriculture,” followed by one about “Land.” That initial discussion features a generational small farmer who is being bested by corporate operations, yet he still works to create the circumstances for himself and his children to keep their farm going. The guy is lobbying and organizing, all the things. However, even Egerton acknowledges, he was beaten before he ever began. That theme continues in chapter two as we read about the negative effects of a Tennessee Valley Authority public works project that did not respect the local people, their values, and their heritage when creating a huge recreation area— basically, a massive park. This time, instead of providing flood control or electricity to the countryside, the government had utilized the TVA, the Army’s Corps of Engineers, and other agencies to push aside those who didn’t want to be moved, so city folks on vacation could play outdoors. Near the end of his description of what the TVA did, Egerton wrote this:
The pervasive malaise of so many Americans today seems somehow how tied to a feeling of rootlessness. Family ties are weaker, the past is irretrievable, the future seems uncontrollable, if not unattainable. Identity is the holy grail, the precious thing all seek but few find, and the sense of community is lost and lamented.
Back in 1974, he could scarcely have imagined our twenty-first century culture, where identity is so important, but his words about displaced Appalachian people in the late 1960s and early 1970s sound a lot like modern times. Today, instead of folkways and family land, it’s screen addiction, political tribalism, and economic inequality, but it boils down to the same thing: identity. He also wrote,”What [the TVA project] lacked was the willingness, the desire, to protect the rights of those who wanted to retain a sense of place.” That sounds a lot like modern corporations. The big guys don’t really care what any small group of ordinary people want, and standing in the way of “progress” is a cardinal sin in a Chamber of Commerce worldview.
I’ve done a lot of driving around the South, mostly Alabama, over the last twenty-plus years, and I’ve seen this phenomenon often. My Generation X experience with it wasn’t over physical places, so much as social and economic ones. I first realized the power of corporations in the 1990s when both Barnes & Noble and Books A Million appeared in Montgomery. One by one, a dozen local bookstores were suffocated out of existence, not by the big stores themselves but by the majority of locals choosing to side with “progress.” Our Barnes & Noble ultimately closed in 2009, and the latter became what it is today: a seller of pop-culture toys and novelties, some of which are books. On a broader scale, the most noticeable usurpation was Wal-Mart’s patterned arrival in the South’s small towns. In Alabama, the first store opened in 1979, then the first “superstore” came in 1992. Local businesses have been no match for everything-under-one-roof and the now-infamous “everyday low prices.” It is too late by the time the towns’ people realize what has hit them. Wal-Mart becomes about the only place to shop, and for some, the only place to work . . . for low wages and no health insurance. By the time people start to fight back against a monstrous interloper, the dead weight of corporate enormity is too much, and restarting a local economy is harder than sustaining one. Too many people, who had been the community’s business owners and their valued employees, become disposable wage-earners in little branded aprons. As a kind of appeasement, the corporations that export their daily dollars to a faraway headquarters then show their love of community by building a park or buying uniforms for the school band. More recently, I’ve noticed that revitalization projects in smaller towns have centered on filling the now-empty downtown storefronts, less on recruiting more outsiders to truck in modernity and convenience. The popularity of renovation shows like Hometown out of Mississippi and Fixer Upper out of Texas is further evidence of the South’s desire to get back what we gave away to yet another kind of carpetbagger.
Getting back to Egerton’s book, those first two chapters are followed by one on “Education.” The year 1974 being what it was, the hyperfocus of the education chapter was integration, using Greenville, South Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; and Nashville, Tennessee as examples. The Swann ruling had come down only a few year earlier, and when the book went to press, Richard Nixon would have still been in The White House. The president had won a second term in 1972 and opposition to integration-related busing was part of his platform. However, despite fifty years now gone, the arguments we read about in the book are basically over the same things as today: equity and opportunity, social class and housing patterns, haves and have nots. Egerton does an excellent job of laying out the intricacies for the average reader, including what was ultimately revealed about the actual practice of integration. Though the issue at hand was race, pulling off that scab showed how deep the wound was, how affluence allowed whites with money to flee, how segregated housing was part of the equation, how black teachers and principals would be demoted or laid off, how politicians built careers on the melee, and last but certainly not least . . . how the North was just as guilty of segregation as the South was. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Brown ruling could no longer be avoided, the many manifestations of resistance were revealed, including tokenism, feigned compliance, and segregation academies. The chapter even describes (what I’ll call) counterrevolutionary responses among blacks when they realized how badly their communities were being affected through school closures in their neighborhoods, transfers and dismissals of respected teachers, long bus rides for their children, minority status once they got to school, reduced opportunities for parental involvement, and increased suspensions and expulsions. Those were among the realities that resulted from “compromise” plans that started with closing historically black schools whose facilities were in bad shape and ended with shielding most white children from bus rides and minority status. Egerton’s conclusion in the chapter has proven, ultimately, to be spot on: the South had some racially integrated schools for time, but that in itself didn’t accomplish much in the way of true societal progress.
Reading this chapter with five decades of knowledge that Egerton didn’t have back then, I was struck by a few references to the Department of Housing, Education, and Welfare, sometimes called simply HEW. In May 1980, near the end of the one-term Carter administration, HEW became the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), when the Department of Education was established as its own entity. This caught my eye in light of our current president-elect’s assertion as a candidate that he would eliminate the Department of Education, which was followed post-election by the appointment of a secretary who has experience not in education but in professional wrestling. The appointment seems to be a quasi-comedic combination of the white resistance that Egerton described and the circus atmosphere that modern media demands. Perhaps parent-teacher conferences will now be conducted Thunderdome-style behind chain-link in arenas with ringside crowds cheering and jeering.
The problem with this chapter being titled “Education” is that it wasn’t actually about education. It was about busing, integration, Richard Nixon, housing patterns, and post-movement society. Education is the process of teaching and learning, and people often confuse that term and use it to mean the business of operating schools, which is a logistical and sometimes political concern. As a Southerner living and working in the field in a time well after Civil Rights movement, I see that difference, between what people use the term for and what it actually means. I also know that, like John Egerton in this book, too few people who discuss education seem genuinely concerned with education. They seem concerned with administrative and legal issues. Even when an environment is political, and even when people are struggling for opportunities, actual learning is both apolitical and indifferent to all classifications of gender, race, class, geography, etc. Sadly, since the times that Egerton was writing about, the term education has come to be identified not with learning, but with opportunity. That, to me, is one of the worst consequences.
Moving on to the subject of “Industry,” Egerton has “The New Carpetbaggers” as the subtitle for this chapter, which opens with amalgam of facts and figures, including this: “Less than one-fourth of the people in the United States live in the South, but almost half of the nation’s poor live there.” The introduction is followed by a vague history of boosterism, from Henry Grady to the Sunbelt, which seems to rely heavily upon a reader’s base knowledge. His narrative centers on the idea that the South needed the injection of Northern capital, but it also lost its character when poverty and rural isolation were somewhat remedied. Then, he takes hard turn and devotes most of the chapter to an over-long story about his businessman friend – a sales manager for national corporation – whose rambling tale of international business points to the entire American economy being bullshit. All of this is protected by pseudonyms, and much of it has nothing to do with the South. His point – I guess – is that the South of the early 1970s was the then-current place where corporate colonization and exploitation were occurring. Then two pages later, the chapter is done. I kept reading, reached the end, and thought, That’s what you decided to write in your chapter on Southern industry? Three-quarters of the word count is so-called Bill Robertson’s apologia for becoming rich and successful through a bogus system that fills the world with cheap garbage products by greasing the palms of everyone he can.
By contrast, in The Selling of the South, historian James C. Cobb lays out a long and detailed (and much better) explanation of the South’s Depression-era move toward industrialization, via Mississippi’s BAWI (Balancing Agriculture With Industry) program. This effort, beginning in 1936, sought to coax outside investors with the incentives model that Egerton touches on: free infrastructure, tax breaks, a pool of cheap labor, and government-run employee training. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this was still the paradigm— sadly, it still is. The good news is that this idea brought lots of jobs to the South over the decades. The bad news is that corporations often exploit the tax breaks end and use up the infrastructure then leave an empty facility and spiking unemployment. Drive around the rural South and into the small towns, and there they’ll be: small to mid-sized factories, shuttered and half-hidden behind kudzu and tall grass, with crumbling parking lots and silent loading docks. Sometimes, through the filthy, yellowed windows, you can still see broken office furniture and cardboard boxes full of God-knows-what. This chapter in Egerton’s book carries Cobb’s story forward, into the 1970s, and is basically talking about what happened when international businessman from the military-industrial complex got hold of the South in their own way.
In this discussion, Egerton also remarks briefly upon the Agrarians, and though that group is often decried today as a gaggle of racists and neophobes, this is exactly the kind of thing they warned against. The South, they thought, would be at its best if the region remained rural and bucolic, avoiding industry. Well, they lost the culture war, badly. BAWI was implemented a few years after their manifesto I’ll Take my Stand was published in 1930. Yet, in ways, the Agrarians were right. Today, we have what Pope Francis calls a “throwaway culture,” and most honest people acknowledge that buying crap, discarding that crap, then buying more crap is a practice that is destroying the planet . . . and our humanity. Fifty years ago, guys like “Bill Robertson” may have felt bad about getting rich from peddling cheap goods and making shady deals, but that didn’t stop them. Egerton shares a cautionary tale embedded in his friend’s story, but it wasn’t heeded even by the guy who offered it. No, something was set in motion that has been elevated to juggernaut status.
Which brings us to “Politics,” a chapter that was much more thorough, far more developed, and infinitely more interesting. This was the very beginning of the period of flux when the “Solid South” of the Democrats was falling apart, yet the Republicans hadn’t yet made the region fully their own. The early pages are devoted to Richard Nixon, whose Southern Strategy was big news after this 1972 re-election victory. Mid-chapter, he writes about the changing faces of Southern politics as more Southern Republicans and Southern blacks appeared in elective offices. Yet, it was this passage on the actually diversity of the Southern electorate that caught my attention:
The turbulence [of a changing political landscape encompassing affluent whites, poor whites, and all blacks] remains as new factions emerge and splinter— there are old-line conservative Democrats, New Deal liberals, old-guard Republicans, progressive urban Republicans, populist Democrats, Wallaceites, women and youth groups that nearly constitute independent forces, blacks Democrats, black third-party groups, and even blacks for Nixon. All that is reflective of national trends, and it is fractious and confusing, but in the South, at least, it is certainly more to be desired than the monolithic rigidity of one-party rule.
Though the individual groups that Egerton named have changed, there are just as many kinds of Southern voters today. I know people who can articulate a sophisticated understanding of policy and call themselves “tax and spend liberals” when asked about political affiliations. I know others who can only spout one word: “conservative.” Another change is that we now have a lot more populist Republicans, since Donald Trump altered the make-up of the party. But it’s that latter sentence that couldn’t be any more true. While states like Georgia and North Carolina do have something resembling two-party politics, most Southern states have returned to “the monolithic rigidity of one-party rule.” And that stinks.
Another remarkable passage within this chapter is Egerton’s description of the populist voter, back then considered a third-party “Wallace voter.” The description, which spans a little over a page – thus, preventing me from reproducing the whole thing here – is very, very similar to the Trump voter of today. He describes “the average American,” a white working-class man who feels “intimidated and victimized by bigness,” i.e. corporations, the federal government, major cities. He considers himself “conservative” and “old-fashioned.” This voter’s male-centered, white-focused values center on a particular formula of patriotism, hard work, and intolerance of countercultural forces, like social justice protestors and rebellious youth. His other foes are the ones who fashion his life with their unseen policies and practices, like bankers, union leaders, politicians, and intellectuals. In short, this guy (and probably his wife and friends) feels attacked from all sides, believing that the rich and powerful are out to railroad him and that the strange, the poor, and the non-whites are trying to destroy everything he understands. This may have been the Wallace voter in the early 1970s, but it is definitely also the Southern populist Republican voter of the 2010s to mid-2020s.
Egerton didn’t have an answer for the quandaries he described but still did an excellent job of elucidating the reality on the ground. In the South, we are more complex than the monikers of red or purple states. (Right now, there are no blue Southern states.) We’ve got as many diverse interests now as we had then. Look around the South today, and you won’t find many New Deal liberals, but you will find progressive millennials who are taking their political cues from a nationalized dialogue on social media, not from local ideas. Egerton also didn’t list immigrants, and they’re a whole new political force now— and by immigrant, I mean Latino laborers and South Asian shop owners just like I mean military retirees who came for the weather and the golf, college professors who won’t stay long, and the foreign-born managers of automotive plants. These groups of people, whose presence was barely felt in previous decades, are now affecting Southern culture and politics. And the longer we remain under this current incarnation of one-party rule, the longer we’ll be holding ourselves back with a provincial/populist outlook that is based on fear and resentment. Southern society is becoming more and more diverse, while our politics disables the benefits of that trend.
Next, in “Cities,” Egerton makes the same flub that he did in “Industry.” He spent the whole damn chapter talking about Columbia, South Carolina and barely anything else. Nothing against Columbia, but I can’t think of a single Southern city that’s indicative of most Southern cities. However, the writer answered my concerns somewhat with this:
Something is happening in Columbia – something not unlike what is happening in cities all over the nation – that confuses and frustrates and discourages people, segregationists and integrationists and separatists alike. There are so many manifestations of the malaise that it is almost impossible to describe it, but what is happening is something like this: desegregation has arrived, but inequality persists, and so do friction and hostility and discord. Neither those who sought the demise of segregation nor those who resisted it are pleased with what is now taking place.
To elaborate, other portions of the chapter get into the nuances of the school board and the local chamber, school choice and dissatisfaction. Connecting these facts to the theme of Americanization, we learn that there were 153 cities of 100,000 people or more in the US, and forty-six of them were in the South. Some were already experiencing “runaway growth,” like Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta. Which would mean that the problems won’t be fixed, they’ll just be bigger and more concentrated.
Finally, in “Culture,” Egerton returns to his winning ways, covering a lot of material in relatively few pages. He starts with the venomous writings of HL Mencken and college football at Ole Miss, then moves on to countercultural communes like Koinonia and The Farm, then flows seamlessly into the Southern Baptists. He opens his chapter with a refutation of Mencken’s “Sahara of the Bozarts” comments, reminding his readers that the elder writer’s standards were based on features that the South doesn’t have much of and doesn’t really care to, like museums and symphonies. No, Southern culture is rich and deep and intricate, and it is not based on the same values as wealthy cities in the North. We meet the Goat Man, a traveling preacher who lives wherever he stops in his wagon, and we spend some time with boxer Joe Frazier’s decision to buy his mother a former cotton plantation. Egerton gives us glimpses into the South’s younger generations, some of whom have become interested in charismatic new denominations to become “Jesus freaks.” Finally, he lands on the ways that national media and entertainment – movies, music, TV – have affected Southerners. Down here, folks were watching Clockwork Orange just like they were anywhere else, and then there’s the region’s big export: country music, which was rising steadily in popularity all over the nation. Sadly, that great country music from the 1970s, which was all about working-class people and values, has turned into one big marketing scheme today. (How we went from Merle Haggard to Jason Aldean . . . I’ll never understand.)
The epilogue, which is pretty ephemeral, switches back and forth between a narrative of the writer’s trip home (which is noted in regular font) and paragraph-long fits and snatches of ideas that summarize his findings (which are noted in italics). His point in all of it seems to be that the massive degree of change experienced by the South in the 1950s and ’60s was having results that were more like shuffling the deck than garnering a winning hand. Certainly, the region was becoming less exceptional and more mainstream, but the effects were not all positive, even for the people who sought and got the changes.
Having been born the same year that this book was published, my entire life has been a witness to the aftermath of what John Egerton described here. I grew up shelling peas for my grandmother and also watching MTV. I saw strip-mall developers take over every patch of land that they could purchase during the same years that George Wallace was in the governor’s mansion, a few miles from my house. Attending a Southern Baptist church was, for me, just “church,” and the songs of “crossover” country acts, like Kenny Rogers, were part of the soundtrack for my youth. I attended an integrated elementary school then a segregation academy. I recognized much of what was written in The Americanization of Dixie. Yet, it was strange to read that, in these years, people were already decrying the way that life has become less personal, less intimate, because I remember knowing all of my neighbors. (I certainly don’t today.) Even though, I was Americanized by the forces that Egerton mentions in the “Culture” chapter – music, movies, and TV – I was still a Southerner. And still am. In 2024, I find it hard to live a daily life where people routinely don’t speak to each other, where children don’t do chores, and where a coffee shop means “progress.” But that’s what has happened . . . during the Americanization of Dixie.
January 9, 2025
Education for Good: National History Day 2025
National History Day is an educational program that encourages students to engage with our past through a process of project-based learning, in which they “develop skills in communication, project management, and historical thinking.” Furthermore, it “equips students with the tools necessary to flourish in an ever-evolving democratic society [to be] the next generation of engaged and thoughtful citizens.” The program just marked its 50th year in 2024.
To participate, an individual student or a small group of students would create a history project within the year’s theme. That process begins on the school level and involves cooperative learning and improvement. The website explains that “students present their work to judges, who give all students feedback on their work and select projects to advance to the next level of the competition. Between contest levels, students are encouraged to revise their project based on what they have learned and the judges’ feedback. Students can make any revisions that they want, in accordance with the Contest Rule Book.”
This year’s theme is Rights & Responsibilities in History, a subject that seems particularly important in today’s social and political environment. For teachers who are interested, here the link to Find Your Local Contest. (There is still time to get started; Southern states’ affiliates have Contest Dates set between late March and early May.)
January 4, 2025
Sharing the Good Stuff: “Seeking Common Ground,” on NPR
NPR’s new series “Seeking Common Ground: Conversations Across the Divide” began in November 2024, and its segments now cover subjects ranging from talking to family members with differing views to singing in a choir with diverse individuals. The segments are fairly brief, running from about 4-1/2 to 8 minutes, which means that they offer food for thought more than answers. (If you like answers, try their Life Kit instead.)
Being a Southerner who was raised Baptist, I was particularly interested in “Gospel-focused racial reconciliation in the Deep South.” The story discusses people coming together in Mobile, Alabama to deal with its history.
https://www.npr.org/player/embed/g-s1-35535/nx-s1-5255851-1
January 2, 2025
Dirty Boots: The Grandma in the Louisiana KFC
When I was child in the early 1980s, my family drove across the country to see my uncle in Phoenix, Arizona. We left Alabama one summer morning, and our first stop was for lunch at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Louisiana. Behind us in line was a grandmother with probably half-dozen children around my age. After we ordered and sat down to wait, the old lady began calling the children up one-by-one to order. And one-by-one they came, then came back after hearing what another kid was getting, and then did it again, and again. My family got our food, ate, and were leaving, and that poor woman – I can still picture her – was leaning on the counter, face in her hands, with those kids hollering at her about being hungry.
What I saw that day more than forty years ago is a good metaphor for what I see today among our country’s center-left and progressive-left. In terms of elections, Americans mainly have two choices on most ballots, even though we’re a people of broad and diverse interests and beliefs. For right-wingers and conservatives, the choice is clear, if not always desirable. Over the last thirty years – since Newt Gingrich in the mid-’90s then Dubya in the 2000s – the Republicans have coalesced their “base” by solidly organizing about one-third of American voters around a group of ideas that connect faith, family, guns, law and order, and the economy to form a definitive concept of national identity. (Millions of those voters live in the South.) For those of us whose concerns include workers’ rights, public education, healthcare, voting rights, racial justice, income inequality, gender equity, LGBTQ rights, prison reform, the arts, and/or the environment, we must find a political home within the battle royal of competing interests that is today’s Democratic Party.
While my beliefs haven’t changed and what I stand for hasn’t wavered, it is my humble opinion that today’s Democratic Party is struggling for the same reason that grandma in the KFC did. As a GenXer who grew up working-class in the South, I learned a valuable lesson from our family dinners, including the one in that KFC, and it applies to the current political dilemma. Back then, a meal was put on the table, and I could eat what was there with my family, or not eat at all. In 2024, the national Republicans did with Donald Trump what my folks did with meals. And it worked in our election system. Republicans in Alabama have done this for years, and they’ve held every statewide office and a supermajority in the legislature since 2010. For a political party to have earned that level of support for that long, you’d think they were doing some A++ public administration. They’re not. Republicans are winning elections by putting up recognizable candidates with a cohesive message against a cacophony of unrelated, competing, individual interests represented by a party that squabbles internally and often doesn’t field candidates in state and local races.
I was already feeling this when, in mid-November, I read an essay in The New York Times that asked, “When Will Democrats Learn to Say No?” In it was this:
Democrats cannot do this [win elections] as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power. [ . . . ] Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate.
What he’s saying is: it’s time to stop worrying about pleasing every single person. It might be time to acknowledge that a majority could vote for a candidate even when many have to hold their noses and pick their lesser of two evils. Getting candidates into elected offices to enact policy seems to be the goal of the whole thing. I don’t have the insider’s view to know who or what might coalesce a center-left and progressive-left “base,” but I do know this: It’s time to start thinking about winning.