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

by Imani Perry

Howard, founded on March 2, 1867, just after emancipation, is a gathering place, one of those precious ones, for Black people, American and beyond. This is where William Leo Hansberry, the Mississippi-born father of African studies, taught leaders of African independence movements. This is where Charles Hamilton Houston crafted the Brown v. Board of Education litigation strategy. This is where the nation’s first Black sorority was founded. And though it may seem counterintuitive to many, Howard is one of the places that makes DC lean Southern. Sites of Black higher education are overwhelmingly Southern. When Toni Morrison left home, she went south, not as far south as the place her foreparents began, in Alabama, but to a place that had some old ways made of Maryland and Virginia. Countless others did the same. The South, even if it did not necessarily house the bulk of the Black middle class through the twentieth century, certainly educated them.