Review

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, cities and metropolitan regions were often portrayed as (and often were) spaces of economic turmoil and social upheaval. From December 2007 to June 2009, “more than eight million Americans lost their jobs, nearly four million were foreclosed each year, and 2.5 million businesses were shuttered.”1 Foreclosures and underwater mortgages decimated real estate markets from Los Angeles to Orlando. Housing starts evaporated. Underfunded and overburdened state governments cracked under the pressure generated by millions of newly unemployed workers, many in cities and suburbs. Businesses contracted or closed and municipal governments faced layoffs and cut programs because of declining tax revenues.

In Austin, Texas, though, growth had rarely been stronger or more dynamic. Its population grew by 30 percent from 2000 to 2013—when it became the fastest growing city in the United States. Popular publications lauded its economic resiliency; Forbes and Time named it the top city for small business and economic growth in 2011. In 2012, Austin experienced a 6.3 percent growth in its economy, easily the best among the 102 largest US markets. The city’s success became a model others sought to emulate. Eliot Tretter, quoting Andrew Park, observes in the opening pages of Shadows of a Sunbelt City that “everywhere you look, cities big and small are trying to get in touch with their inner Austin" (2).

Yet as Tretter forcefully argues, the sunny portrayals of Austin’s economy, cultural vibrancy, creativity, environmental progressivism, and overall quality of life obscure the race and class discrimination below the surface that is closely tied to the city’s history and contemporary landscape. Understanding structural dimensions of this discrimination is paramount to creating cities where resources are shared more equitably. Austin, imagined as a liberal anomaly in a state long defined by conservativism, is quite similar to other more conservative cities throughout the US South in terms of its urban planning, elites’ desire for economic growth and political power, and race relations.2

But Austin stands out in its approach to growth. The uniqueness of Tretter’s argument lies in the local circumstances that elites used to transform Austin from a midsized university and state government town to an emergent global hotspot of technology, sustainability, and cultural production. While the city benefited from a migration of people and capital, its leading sectors of development differentiated it from cities of neighboring states. The University of Texas was key because it generated and fostered a knowledge economy that, combined with the state government, allowed elites to pursue a path for growth that eschewed heavy industry. As national and global priorities began to trumpet high technology in the 1970s and 1980s, Austin was in a prime position to prosper. Tretter explains this process using David Harvey’s “tertiary circuit of capital,” in which “the growing significance of technological and knowledge-rent seeking” increasingly drives economic growth in the developed world (18).3 To Tretter, “cities of knowledge such as Austin, and their growth coalitions, strongly supported by federal policy, succeed because they are able to switch capital into the tertiary circuit and expand infrastructure that supports knowledge-rent taking” (19). Research universities, with their wealth of knowledge labor, scientific infrastructure, and public-supported capital, are central to this process, generating private wealth through patenting, technology transfer, and spinoff companies.4 In his first chapter, “The Making of a Globalized Austin,” Tretter unpacks this technical argument and relates it to broad changes in global capitalism since the 1970s.

Central to Austin’s growth, the University of Texas has acted as the primary force in transforming the city’s urban space, with consequences that reveal a consistent pattern of historical racial discrimination. Tretter examines the role of the university in developing land and shaping geography to facilitate the type of growth desired by political, economic, and university elites—who were often the same people. He gives a broad account of the university’s expansion efforts during the early and mid-twentieth century, emphasizing the conscious effort to improve its research capacity and capture federal research and development dollars in the 1950s. The university used federal urban renewal funds as well as eminent domain laws to enlarge the campus by roughly a hundred acres. The choice to expand into predominantly African American neighborhoods to the east, rather than the white neighborhoods to the north and west, reveals discrimination most clearly. Tretter argues university administrators employed a “racist theory of value,” which assumes “that African American neighborhoods, households, and bodies were simply less valuable and desirable than those of whites” when deciding which neighborhoods to eviscerate (49). Predictably, the outcome was terrible for the already marginalized African American community. Around a thousand people were displaced, dozens of businesses shuttered, and overall racial segregation was intensified as most African Americans resettled in areas further east heavily populated by African Americans. Tretter’s use of University of Texas archival documents is effective here; he demonstrates the racist and often contradictory logic used by University of Texas administrators to justify dispossession of vulnerable residents.

Tretter pursues a similar theme in the 1970s and 1980s, but expands the scope to include the state of Texas as part of the growth machine. Following Harvey and other critics of neoliberalism, Tretter argues that a new era of competitiveness emerged in the 1980s in which universities, as well as cities and states, became more entrepreneurial in attracting investment and generating revenues.5 Texas, looking to diversify its economy, viewed the university as an entity capable of supporting high levels of industrialization because of its research and development capacity. Federal and state liberalization of patent and technology laws incentivized this “academic capitalism” by making it possible for both researchers and universities to profit from high tech patents and licensing. Universities became more profit-oriented. In an original and important argument, Tretter emphasizes how universities, with their quasi-public status, were also lucrative assets because of their ability to develop land that could provide incentives for outside investment. This strategy paid off when the state, city, and university partnered to attract two major research consortia, Microelectronic and Computer Corporation in 1983 and SEMATECH in 1987, largely by offering university assets: space, labor, capital, and land. Along with other branch facilities and a growing sector related to the defense industry, high tech formed the core of Austin’s growth in the 1980s and established the city as an important technological hub and emergent global city.

“Urban Transformations,” the second half of Shadows of a Sunbelt City, emphasizes the role of urban planning (particularly Smart Growth and urban sustainability) and its relationship to municipal governance in contemporary Austin. Why did sustainable planning emerge so forcefully here? How did it affect vulnerable residents, homeless people and minorities? Tretter chronicles how sustainability and environmental quality became central to Austin’s growth in the 1990s. After decades of bitter confrontation, the city’s pro-development and anti-development coalitions struck a deal where the city’s pristine western hinterland, long the concern of environmentalists, would be protected from intensive development. In return, environmentalists supported bonds and zoning changes that incentivized development in Austin’s urban core, effectively transferring the city’s geography of development from suburban to urban. The city council adopted Smart Growth policies, which encouraged higher density, environmental protections, and other New Urbanist ideals. These changes, Tretter argues, increased Austin’s competitiveness but necessitated increased policing of the homeless who were seen as impediments to the livability of downtown. Austin’s growth advocates came to understand environmental amenities and quality of life as marketable features that could further their interests.6

Tretter assesses the outcomes of sustainability on Austin’s populations of color, concentrating on the chasm between mainstream environmentalists and the Latino environmental justice group People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources (PODER). He concludes that minorities bore the burden of sustainability because the growth coalition saw their neighborhoods as potentially lucrative to redevelop but also because PODER couldn’t convince mainstream environmentalists that minority displacement was an environmental concern. Improvement in the lives of vulnerable minorities, writes Tretter, will only be possible through an inclusive redefinition of the “environment.”

Examining the historical relationship between urban governance and urban planning in Austin, Tretter charts the major changes in the structure of the city’s government (from a ward system to a commission to a city manager system from 1900 to 1924, and the adoption of at-large voting) and correlates them with large-scale urban planning initiatives (e.g., the 1928 Austin City Plan). He follows this line of inquiry through to the present, with business elites still the leading actors in urban planning.

Supported by much research—interviews, archival materials, and interdisciplinary secondary source material—Shadows of a Sunbelt City is effective in its theoretical intervention (though as a geographer, Tretter’s major conversations also engage that field). Emphasizing the university as land developer is the book’s most important contribution to urban studies; this aspect has long been overlooked in favor of research universities’ knowledge production and patenting, production of skilled labor, and ability to generate private firms. Tretter complicates our understanding of the relationship among sustainability, growth, and uneven social and spatial relations. Numerous maps and graphs enhance his arguments. Tretter’s engagement with David Harvey and the tradition of materialist geography demonstrates a commitment to principles of justice, as does his concern with uneven power relations and the myriad ways that growth paradigms undermine the rights and autonomy of vulnerable populations. Shadows of a Sunbelt City is a theoretically sophisticated and critically thoughtful book that improves our understanding of the knowledge economy, sustainable urban practice, racial discrimination, and urban governance and power.

A more developed introduction could have identified a stronger central theme tying the book together. But to his credit, Tretter points out that Shadows of a Sunbelt City is “not written to reflect a straightforward historical narrative,” and offers multiple reasons why Austin is important to study (5). Each chapter intervenes in different discussions and contains several claims. Tretter’s chapter that follows changes in urban governance throughout the entire twentieth century, while richly detailed and convincing, could have been more strongly connected to the rest of the book.

Although the “Sunbelt” of the book’s title is offered as a unifying concept, it is neither defined nor explained, nor does Tretter does contextualize Austin in relation to other “Sunbelt” writing. Tellingly, the term does not appear in the index. This is a glaring omission given the long-standing arguments over what constitutes the Sunbelt. Neither is “Environment,” also in the title, analyzed in the manner readers might expect. Tretter offers an insightful analysis of how the environmental movement and environmental politics unfolded in Austin, but very little about how the natural world was augmented as Austin grew. As urban environmental studies are documenting, environmental improvements, policies, and ideology are often active components in the oppression of minorities during urbanization.

Shadows of a Sunbelt City offers a compelling analysis of the power that universities wield in regional development and their complicity in reshaping the urban form to benefit powerful actors, often at the expense of vulnerable residents. As he examines how policy and social relations transform cities, Tretter challenges the narrative that sustainable urban policy, and the knowledge economy that undergirds it, is universally beneficial.

About the Author

Andrew M. Busch is an assistant professor in the Honors Program at Coastal Carolina University where he teaches interdisciplinary courses on urbanism, environmental studies, globalization, and US History. His first book, City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2017.

• 1. Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, “The Great Recession: Over but not Gone?” Northwestern Institute for Policy Research, accessed October 23, 2017. http://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/about/news/2014/IPR-research-Great-Recession-unemployment-foreclosures-safety-net-fertility-public-opinion.html.
• 2. See for example, Joe Feagin, Free Enterprise City: Houston in Political Economic Perspective (Camden, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Christopher Silver, Twentieth Century Richmond: Planning, Politics, and Race (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984); Christopher MacGregor Scribner, Renewing Birmingham: Federal Funding and the Promise of Change, 1929–1979 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); David R. Goldfield, Race, Region, and Cities: Interpreting the Urban South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1997).
• 3. The primary circuit consists of the primary production process (transforming natural resources into finished products, for example) and the secondary circuit consists of investments in infrastructure that facilitates the production process. The tertiary circuit consists of “social infrastructure,” the increased application of science to production to maximize the productive power of labor. Also see David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London, UK: Verso, 1999).
• 4. For academic capitalism and the role of the university in generating economic growth, see Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Roger L. Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policy, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
• 5. David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler B 71.1 (1989): 3–17.
• 6. John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

Introduction

"Good roads take people both ways," said a Madison County resident, anticipating the completion of I-26 from Charleston, South Carolina, to the Tennessee Tri-Cities area (Bristol-Kingsport-Johnson City). Starting in 1994, I began photographing, interviewing, and collecting objects to document the cutting of a nine-mile stretch of I-26 through some of North Carolina's most spectacular vistas and some of the world's oldest mountains. During the surveying, mapping, core rock sampling, removal, and construction phases, I made over ten thousand negatives and hundreds of finished prints, gathered more than two dozen oral histories, and collected boxes of information and artifacts. I wondered what something so materially "real" as the coming of I-26 might evoke through the framing, detail, and texture of photography. The result was not a pro- or anti-development project, but one that voiced a range of emotion and opinion, often from the same people (whether newcomers or natives).

Like all newcomers, I was often greeted by, "You ain't from around here?" And, people were right to ask, to question my motivation. Why was I here? What right did I have to assume that I could represent in my documentary work a culture I knew little about? I was sometimes embarrassed that my photographs offered no tangible benefits in a place that seemed to value useful things that aided survival: firewood, bean seeds, a cut of cloth. Then, as I grew more certain of my photography, I felt that pictures offered memories full of historical and personal detail, conveying the texture and feeling of the life around me. Rather than seek the perfect photograph, the longer I lived in Madison County, the more I became interested in recording the process of events, and in documenting social and environmental change. When I arrived in Madison County, North Carolina, in 1973, I possessed every stereotype possible about mountain people. And I am certain that my new neighbors had equally suspect notions about me and the small wave of people moving into their midst. At first, I intended to produce the definitive book of photographs on mountain culture. I had very preconceived ideas of what that meant. I was taken with the romantic idea of wizened faces, old women in doorways, men plowing into the sunsets, hog butchering in the misty morning light. That's what I thought the place was about. Those early photographs, as I look at them now, feel like clichés. Given time, my increasing personal involvement, and the challenges of earning a livelihood, I was able to overcome my preconceived notions and try to understand the county's people for who they were and are.

To comprehend the costs of something as transformative as I-26 we must value intangible, but real concerns often dismissed as "nostalgia"— heartbreak for times past and beauty lost — joined with an awareness of environmental degradation, and anger over the direction in which our society often moves. But how do we place a value on a story? Or on a grave marker? How do we choose the narratives that affect our future? What price do we pay for allowing our memories, our environment, our places to be dismantled one step, one mile, nine miles at a time?

About Rob Amberg's Work

I have been photographing, interviewing, and collecting along the site of the I-26 Corridor since 1994. This has involved coverage of the mapping, core rock sampling, removal, destruction, and construction phases of the project. Highway work, and my documentation of it, continued until 2003. To date, I have produced over 10,000 negatives, 110 finished prints, 25 oral history interviews and collected boxes of other narrative information and artifacts from the Corridor.

Photo Essay

Click on each lettered site to see the associated images.

About Madison County

Madison County is a rural, agricultural county located in mountainous, northwestern North Carolina. Throughout its history, the county's rugged terrain has prevented easy access to outlying cities such as Asheville or Knoxville. Winding mountain roads and insular hamlets have meant long bus rides for school children and extended trips for basic services such as food and health care. Twenty-five percent of Madison County's land is federally owned, which, coupled with a small manufacturing sector, has meant a minimal local tax base. Historically, the county has had one of the lowest per capita incomes and educational levels in the state. Home to small-farm families growing a diversity of household crops and livestock, and sustaining a variety of traditional culture forms (music, foodways, religion, storytelling, handicrafts), Madison was also the state's leading producer of burley tobacco.

Interview with Mars Hill mayor Raymond Rapp about the prospects for planned development. (November 17, 2000. Approx. 1 1/2 hours. Streaming audio and transcription of interview. Source: Documenting the American South, Southern Oral History Program, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-253/menu.html Interview with Darhyl Boone, Mars Hill, NC, town manager, who describes Madison County and the changes I-26 may bring. (December 5, 2000. Approx. two hours in streaming audio. Accompanied by transcription of interview. Source: Documenting the American South, Southern Oral History Program, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-246/menu.htm

In the latter part of the twentieth century, like rural counties across the United States, Madison experienced rapid change. In the 1960s, a significant number of newcomers entered Madison County from outside the Southern Appalachian region. The earliest of these were back-to-the-landers and individuals seeking a slower pace as well as a sense of community and belonging in the mountain culture. Adjustments in the federal tobacco program and an aging population took a toll on the county's family farms. The majority of Madison residents now work away from home and their grown-up children are choosing to live elsewhere. Access to higher-paying jobs has often come with the severing of deeply-rooted local connections.

Interview with Richard Lee Hoffman, Jr., a real estate broker who expresses his ambivalence about Madison County changes. (November 8, 2000. Approx. 1 1/2 hours. Streaming audio and transcription of interview. Source: Documenting the American South, Southern Oral History Program, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-505/menu.html Interview with Sam Parker, a Madison County Probation/Parole Officer about his leaving suburbia in the 1960s for rural life and the transformation of the area. (December 5, 2000. Approx. 1 1/2 hours. Streaming audio and transcription of interview. Source: Documenting the American South, Southern Oral History Program, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-252/menu.html

Since the early 1980s, a steady stream of new residents has arrived, including retirees and young professionals, with no ties to the area and, often, with little interest in its past. Tourism plays an increasing role in the county's economy through river rafting, hiking, and events such as music and craft festivals. In the early twenty-first century, life in Madison County combines the persistence of established local networks with the transformations accompanying new technologies, a diversifying and more transient population, new money, and the effects of I-26, a transportation corridor that connects the Ohio Valley with the Atlantic Coast.

The Arrival of I-26

With construction of the Tennessee portion of I-26 nearing completion in 1995, the North Carolina Department of Transportation surveyed the route the road would take across Madison County. The I-26 Corridor was promoted as a safe alternative to the existing road and as an economic boon to the area. Old US Route 19-23 was a steep, winding, unimproved two-lane shared by school buses, elderly residents, and tractor trailers, where accidents and fatalities were a regular occurrence. By early 1997, the project was underway with rights-of-way secured, timber being removed, and bulldozers chewing on Reed Mountain and Ramsey Ridge. The blasting of mountainside and the filling of valleys for this link of new highway displaced more than forty families, and forced the relocation of three churches and their cemeteries. From the three thousand foot elevation of Sam's Gap on the North Carolina-Tennessee border, engineers designed I-26 to descend at a maximum six-degree grade to the college town of Mars Hill (at 2,200 feet). Construction of the six-lane, $230 million section of road was finished in 2003.

The I-26 Corridor was the largest earth-moving project (fifty-million cubic yards) ever contracted by the state of North Carolina. It includes the tallest bridge in the state and the largest single order for culvert pipe ever recorded in the United States. The nine-mile section of road cuts through some of the most rugged country in the eastern US, along centuries-old routes used by Natives and settlers. Construction required the removal of hundreds of acres of hardwood forests, high upper pastures, and farmland. The highway cut through National Forest land as well as prime black bear habitat, and crossed the Appalachian Trail.

Most Madison County residents remain skeptical about the promised economic benefits. While I-26 provides a direct link between the southern Ohio Valley, the mountains of western North Carolina, and the coastal plains of South Carolina, given the county's topography and history, job growth is likely to be minimal, beginning with fast food franchises, and chain motels, and the service jobs that accompany them. Land prices, however, have already markedly increased, as have taxes, and residential growth. Priced-out of the purchase of land, longtimers struggle to keep what they have, and find it difficult to pass land on to their children.

Interview with Jerry Lee Plemmons, a Madison County native, about the highway construction's effects upon the environment. (December 10,2000. Approx. 1 1/2 hours. Streaming audio and transcription of interview. Source: Documenting the American South, Southern Oral History Program, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-506/menu.html Interview with Taylor Barnhill, an environmental activist with the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition, who expresses distress for how the I-26 project affects North Carolina communities and wilderness. (November 29, 2000. Approx. 1 1/2 hours. Streaming audio and transcription of interview. Source: Documenting the American South, Southern Oral History Program, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-245/menu.html

About the Author

Rob Amberg is an artist and photographer living in Madison County, North Carolina. His work documents social life and customs in the rural US South, focusing specifically on North Carolina. He is the author of The New Road: I-26 and the Footprints of Progress in Appalachia (Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2009), and Sodom Laurel Album (University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Current work and updates can be found on his website, Pictures and Words.

Publication History

Completed work on I-26, Corridor of Change has been presented in a number of formats. An exhibition of photographs, captions, and text panels, titled "I-26, A Work in Progress," was mounted at the North Carolina Museum of History in 1999 and traveled to other venues since then. Essays and portfolios of photographs have been published in the Marshall News Record, Southern Changes, the Southern Quarterly, and Audubon Magazine. This work was also presented as a performance and lecture piece that includes music, slides, and an oral history dialogue, to the Oral History Association 2000 Conference and the 2001 Appalachian Studies Conference. The project is also presented to public libraries, universities and community groups with the Speakers Bureau of the North Carolina Humanities Council.

Publication Update

In fall 2017, Southern Spaces updated this publication as part of the journal's redesign and migration to Drupal 7. Updates include image and text link adjustments, as well as revised recommended resources and related publications. For access to the original layout, paste this publication's url into the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine and view any version of the piece that predates August 2017.

The Great South

From 1873–74, towards the end of Reconstruction, journalist Edward King travelled the former Confederacy attempting to unpack the meaning of "the Great South" (1875) for largely northern readers of Scribner's magazine.1 Along with Scribner's publishers and illustrator J. Wells Champney, King aimed to provide "the reading public a truthful picture of life in a section" recovering from the ravages of war (i). King divided his documentary travel narrative into serialized segments largely along state and town lines.2 King's empathetic analysis brought to light many of the problems (political, racial, economic) afflicting the still-occupied former Confederacy; "The South can never be cast in the same mould as the North," he wrote (793). One had to experience it to understand it. King's work reified and reinforced conceptions of how the idea of the South functioned in the American imaginary of that time: an exotic "other" land to be penetrated, explored, known, purposed.3 Nearly 150 years later, despite numerous changes and persistent discussions of the demise of distinctly southern ways of being and doing, scholars and popularizers continue to debate and deploy variations of King's Great "Southern question" (794).

In different ways, both John Wharton Lowe's Calypso Magnolia and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro's Island People descend from King's documentary travel memoir. While Lowe's Calypso Magnolia is written in an academic idiom, he extends The Great South to a larger Circum-Caribbean geography, proposing a movement across and not simply within. In contrast, Jelly-Schapiro's Island People draws from the well of Caribbean thinkers and documentarians in enacting theories of place through the practice of experience. Lowe travels imaginatively through literary texts. Jelly-Schapiro travels literally to examine histories and cultures of the islands he visits. However, like King, both ask readers big, overarching questions—what and where is the Great (circum)Caribbean?—and, more importantly, does it matter?

"Hyphenating Waters": Calypso Magnolia and the circumCaribbean

Lowe approaches these questions through a diligent analysis of books spanning the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) to the more recent Cuban American writing of the 1980s–90s. He invests substantial energy in altering the grand, exceptionalist narrative of southern literary studies, which goes (reductively) something like this: for decades after the Civil War, the South was a "Sahara of the Bozart," devoid of anything resembling "high" culture, until the arrival of native (white) sons such as William Faulkner4 and the Nashville Agrarians, who almost single-handedly were responsible for a cultural Renaissance that proved "the South" to be a place of great, autochthonously conceived and produced, art. Like much other recent scholarship, including Candace Waid's excerpt in Southern Spaces which challenges the idea of the white exceptionalist Southern Renaissance, Calypso Magnolia seeks to rethink the South and southern literary history through specific attention to movement and migration across geographic and imaginary borderlands, and against any essentialist, bounded notion of "the South," southern racial demographics, or "southern culture." Lowe aims to "cross artificial boundaries,""to unlock old geographical and cultural restrictions," to "help us see ourselves anew" (ix, xi). Lowe invites us, as readers and scholars, to "reconfigure the South and the Caribbean" (11). These are large tasks that Calypso Magnolia sets and achieves to varying degrees.

Lowe's work enters existing scholarly conversations in what some have called the "New Southern Studies."5 In responding to the article which formed the basis of Lowe's book-length study, Kimberly Nichele Brown firmly places "Calypso Magnolia" within this scholarly trend: "the South" becomes "unmoored from its local or provincial connotations" and "finds its rightful place within transnational discourses" (82). Like others before him, Lowe uses an aquatic metaphor, "crosscurrents," in his scholarly act of drawing connections between "the South" as traditionally conceived and the broader circumCaribbean.

Lowe models his frame—"circumCaribbean"—after the "circum-Atlantic" work of Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach, among others.6 Spatially, writes Lowe, the circumCaribbean "embraces the coastal Gulf and the Caribbean, as well as the islands that dot the seas and the western Atlantic" (xi). Lowe moves around and within, creating a geography that is boundary crossing and somewhat nebulous by definition and limitation. In such a vast space, what is the rationale for the foci of individual chapters? Admitting the difficulty of language barriers and distinctions, Lowe opens the conversation to other scholars with greater proficiency in the non-English speaking locales of this circumCaribbean (11).

He begins with the Mexican-American War via southern writers who wrote about it, William C. Falkner (great-grandfather of that Faulkner), Arthur Manigault, and Raphael Semmes. Next, he presents two enigmatic figures of the nineteenth century—Lucy Holcombe Pickens and Martin Delaney—as writers who "saw the affinities of the coastal South with the Caribbean lands and had their characters crisscross Gulf waters" to and from Cuba (60). For Lowe, Pickens and Delaney were writers of the Caribbean imaginary who saw, from different worldviews, equal benefits in this crisscross movement. Calypso Magnolia then follows the seismic shift of the Haitian Revolution in subsequent literature. Lowe centralizes the work of Floridians Zora Neale Hurston and James Weldon Johnson and Tennessean Madison Smartt Bell, but he is careful to include non-US southern writers such as Victor Séjour, C. L. R. James, and Alejo Carpentier. Lowe then turns to the travel writing of northerner Constance Fenimore Woolson and the peripatetic Lafcadio Hearn, who "limned a new sense of the circumCaribbean" (18). His chapters five and six offer comparative readings of contemporaneous authors: Zora Neale Hurston through the prism of Claude McKay, and Richard Wright through George Lamming. Calypso Magnolia closes with the experience of Cuban American writers in south Florida largely in the final decades of the twentieth century.

Lowe is exhaustive and syncretic, weaving disparate strands across multiple locales from multiple perspectives. He is a close reader from the outset, and his copious plot summaries serve as helpful entrances into unfamiliar texts.

As necessary and vital as Lowe's molecular moves are to thinking anew about "southern" literature and scholarship, the overarching narrative still favors a certain way of perceiving. At the beginning of this project, before Lowe coined circumCaribbean and was talking only about the "Caribbean Side of the South," he aimed "to rupture the artificial boundaries of region and nation to reach out to the Caribbean" ("Calypso Magnolia," 60). Why must the US South "reach out"? Why must the "South" have a "Caribbean Side"? What if the Caribbean has no desire to be reached out to? What if there's no South to reach out? What if the gaze was reversed? Arguably, Lowe's impulse teeters on making the Caribbean an exotic "side-chick" to the central story. Why centralize Hurston and Johnson and Smartt Bell in a discussion of the Haitian Revolution? Why read Wright through the prism of Lamming and not complicate this impulse more thoroughly?

Lowe aims "to pursue narrative as it cuts across maps that create artificial lines around peoples and cultures" (7). Why not, then, make more radical departures in authorial choices and texts? For example, why not read Reinaldo Arenas's pre-exile La Vieja Rosa/Old Rosa (1980) as a "southern" text clearly speaking back to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! from a distinctly Cuban-to-US South direction?7 As Kimberly Nichele Brown writes, "What would it mean to southern literary studies to cast Faulkner not just as a southern writer, but as a Caribbean one?" (86). How would such a reversal in perspective "cut across" more disruptively and make us rethink cultural hegemony more deeply? Such questions persist in a work that could justify its organizational logic more forcefully in conjunction with its larger aims. The "currents" of the Caribbean, after all, flow in multiple directions.

Additionally, Lowe writes, "I mean to suggest through the term 'Calypso Magnolia'" a "kind of cultural overlapping" (67). Overlapping seems to imply a one-directional filter that places something "new and fresh" atop a foundational norm, simultaneously rethinking and reifying it. Consider what Lowe labels "the overarching pattern of [his] book":

the movement of Southerners both physically and imaginatively, out of the constructed boundaries of the Southern United States into the wider world of the circumCaribbean, a process that unsettled notions of exceptionalism and nationalism alike, while simultaneously, and paradoxically, creating a vision of a new Southern empire, which would conjoin slave-owning states with the plantations and territories of the Caribbean, Central America, and beyond (22).

Aside from political and economic implications, what are we to make of the imperial cultural ramifications evident in this statement of the larger "pattern" of Calypso Magnolia? Throughout, Lowe brilliantly elucidates what "Southern" writers gain from such a physical and/or imaginative movement. What do those writers or thinkers "beyond" gain from this movement? The book lays "out the myriad ways the 'South of the South' has affected the inhabitants of the U.S. South," and attempts gestures in the opposite direction (1). However, the whole remains too linear and one-directional. Calypso Magnolia could benefit from a more circular, messier approach.

A weightier "Introduction" might have offered a firmer sense of what Lowe means by "crosscurrents" as an organizing principle. This is a substantial missed opportunity. Current is a term of physical movement. In more directly defining "crosscurrents," Lowe might have pulled together his circumCaribbean frame with other critical movements and interventions. As is, Calypso Magnolia leaves us with currents as an aquatic, uniting metaphor:8 where all is "tied… together across and upon the currents of the great sea" (19).

Lowe asks readers to cross those currents via his case studies. Calypso Magnolia's final and most exciting chapter, "Southern Aijaco: Miami and the Generation of Cuban American Writing," addresses crossings as they impact identity, pondering what it might mean to feel "crossed" or hyphenated in southern-Caribbean-ness. Spatially, Florida seems the perfect confined locale for Lowe's larger study: not quite "southern," not quite "Caribbean," but somehow a cross of both. He considers the work of Cuban-Americans of the "'one-and-a-half' generation," such as Gustavo Pérez Firmat's Life on the HyphenandNext Year in Cuba, Cristina García's The Agüero Sisters, Virgil Suarez's Going Under, and Roberto Fernández's Holy Radishes! (293). Lowe's readings of Cuban American fiction and memoir, often "in and on the liminal space of the hyphenating waters between Cuba and Florida," are some of the most original and engaging in Calypso Magnolia (332). In reading lives on the hyphen, Lowe opens the door for future studies of hybridity modeled after his circumCaribbean framing. Despite my concerns, Lowe's writing is careful and specific, and always exemplary. As it seeks to shift the kinds of questions we ask, Calypso Magnolia's "crosscurrents" will help readers think beyond and across hyphenating waters.

"So Many One Night Stands": Island People and Island Hopping

In Calypso Magnolia's chapter on Woolson and Hearn, Lowe mentions Edward King's The Great South as making "extravagant claims as to the novelty of its 'discoveries,' which were achieved through 'penetration' and 'investigation'" (147). The Great South helped a nascent American empire"train the eye southward" as testing ground for its global ambitions and depicted in its illustrations stereotypes of African Americans and poor whites (147, 167). Unlike Lowe, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro's Island People: The Caribbean and the World never mentions The Great South. Similarly, many of the figures discussed by Lowe are not mentioned in Jelly-Schapiro's travel narrative. There are two small exceptions. While Lowe devotes half a chapter to Lafcadio Hearn, Jelly-Schapiro casually mentions a parking garage in Fort-de-France named in Hearn's honor; while Lowe seems to primarily read George Lamming only in relation to Richard Wright, Jelly-Schapiro reads Lamming directly in relation to Barbados, casually nodding to Wright in describing Lamming as a "native son" (341, 287). Otherwise, one should not approach a comparison of Calypso Magnolia and Island People via the figures they mention and/or study but the ideas and questions they elicit.9 For US readers, Jelly-Schapiro's Island People again trains "the eye southward," to the "South of the South." However, unlike The Great South, Jelly-Schapiro does not present the Caribbean as a place of discovery, penetration, or investigation. Island People is an experiential travel narrative in which orientalism and exoticism are mostly resisted and the Caribbean is firmly centered.

What is Jelly-Schapiro's idea of the (circum)Caribbean? And why does it matter in/to the "World" of his subtitle?

While Edward King is understandably absent in Island People, another titan of travel writing hovers over many of its pages. Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Traveller's Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands (1950) seems IslandPeople's singularly most direct antecedent. Both are "pitched neither strictly at scholars nor at holiday makers" but at a general readership (Island People 11). Jelly-Schapiro returns to The Traveller's Tree throughout as he narrates his travels sometimes in relation to Fermor's own 1940s-era perceptions; it comes as little surprise to learn that Jelly-Schapiro wrote a new introduction to the 2011 reissue of Fermor's classic.10 The genealogical link is apparent. Like Fermor, Jelly-Schapiro is, among many other things, a travel writer. Like Fermor, Jelly-Schapiro comes from elsewhere.

Fermor is not the most important figure looming over Island People. As a Caribbeanist thinker, Jelly-Schapiro is influenced largely by C. L. R. James. In fact, Island People begins and ends with James and feels like an epic homage to him: "But the Caribbean, James argued, was unique" (5); "I had… adopted C. L. R. James as a kind of intellectual hero and style icon alike" (401). For Jelly-Schapiro, James was "his first big intellectual crush," and it is easy to see James's influence on Island People (401). In James, Jelly-Schapiro finds a great syncretic thinker who brought together disparate strands of philosophy, culture, and history into a coherent narrative in which the Caribbean was central (not marginal) to "the larger telos" of modernity, capitalism, and democracy (3). Island People, in its structure and vastness, also aims to be a syncretic work mapping and describing the central importance of the Caribbean in the world.

Unlike Lowe, Jelly-Schapiro is not a literary critic but a geographer, and in large part, Island People reads as a much more "centered" and "bounded" investigation. Like Calypso Magnolia's "circumCaribbean-South,"Island People considers its subject, "the Caribbean," as both "place" and "idea" (6). Although Jelly-Schapiro mentions the full range of Caribbean thinkers, Island People feels more invested in specificities of place and practice than theories or philosophies. "The abstraction was also a place," he writes (335), and "This book ponders not merely what the Caribbean is but where it is as well" (12, emphasis provided). Unlike Lowe, Jelly-Schapiro does not move around the circumCaribbean rim, but dwells on the subaquatic link of islands that form the Greater and Lesser Antilles. He "centers on the islands," viewing the "Caribbean as an archipelago: as a 'sea of islands'" (13). Whereas Lowe aims to move around and form connections, Jelly-Schapiro island hops, with nearly every chapter focusing on a singular island in the archipelago.

As a result, Island People often reads like a disjointed narrative of island hopping tourism, a text structured around what José Quiroga calls "scattered" islands that form "so many one night stands."11 Like Fermor's Traveller's Tree, the structural logic lies in sections divided by island nations: part one, the "Greater Antilles" of Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola; part two, the "Lesser Antilles," including Martinique, Dominica, and Trinidad. While Jelly-Schapiro often makes a joke of Caribbean tourists, some in thrall to "stories about how Papa Hemingway" got drunk on daiquiris on a Havana barstool "after a day of marlin hunting in the Florida Current," the lingering effect is of so many island-hopping one night stands in which the experience is fleeting even if fulfilling (117). The power of Island People is that it attempts to be something other than that story. It is a documentary effort to let the islands, their peoples, histories, and cultures, speak for themselves, from the Caribbean to the World.

Island People's textual logic constantly reminds readers that this is a book in which an outsider, a tourist, is describing, probing, and organizing a narrative to tell the rest of the "world" about it. No matter his affinity, deep care and carefulness, Jelly-Schapiro is still a traveler leaving traces in his archipelagic tour. You can, for example, follow his trail of hotels throughout.12 As historically well-researched, fiercely intelligent, and superbly written as Island People can be, readers never stop travelling. You may choose to "enter" at the island of your choice. (I began with Cuba). All of this amounts to what can feel like a lack of foundation for important claims and moments to resonate.

Island People is immensely satisfying. If it often fails to resonate, it constantly reverberates. We learn about Brand Jamaica, run with Usain Bolt, hear Bob Marley, Pete Tosh, and Lady Saw, find Stella's groove, and search for the "moments of filial love" and the "ghosts of colonial violence" (49, 58); in Cuba, we enter the "empire of vice" (99), find cubanidad, Fernando Ortiz, El Taino y la yuma, José Martí, Carpentier, Batista, Che and Castro, have a "love affair with spandex" (113) and phallocentrism, meet Eleggua and Abakuá, Antonio Maceo and Bola de Nieve, Assata Shakur and Carlos Moore, and many more. And so on and on across the islands13 until finally, Trinidad gives us Beyoncé (yes, that one), Eric Williams, Derek Walcott, "soul calypso," New Orleans and the rim of Carnival, Palance, "queer subcultures" and "gay-bashing norms," the "Black Power Killings,"Stuart Hall, and the inevitable return to C. L. R. James.

Jelly-Schapiro's exhaustive, four hundred page, highly syncretic, travel narrative is indeed full of people, places, things, and historic events. Yet, in breaking the Caribbean into its disparate parts, Island People falls short in crafting coherent meaning—realistic, theoretical, or phantasmagoric—of the Caribbean idea. Perhaps this is an impossible request due to sheer scale, genre (travel narrative/history), and intended audience (general). However, many a Caribbean thinker has articulated a central argument for the basin's meaning and function—Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, Antonio Benítez-Rojo's Repeating Island, Kamau Brathwaite's tidalectics, Wilson Harris's cross-culturality, Stuart Hall's "home of hybridity," and Derek Walcott's "sea is history," to name a few. Jelly-Schapiro touches on many of them in Island People, revealing both his deep knowledge of his subject and his recognition of the almost sheer impossibility of unifying the Caribbean idea into any original tidy narrative.

Is the Caribbean exceptional or relational? Island People does not seek to answer this question. Instead, in refusing to form concrete connections between the islands of the Caribbean and other comparative sites, Jelly-Schapiro follows his hero C. L. R. James in extrapolating Caribbean history and meaning to make larger claims about modernity and "the World" of his title: "It was in the Caribbean that many of the salient characteristics of the Americas at large—traumatic histories of colonialism and genocide and slavery; migration and creolization as facts of life; the persistent sense of cosmopolitan possibility and newness inherent to a New World—were brought into starkest relief" (8). Whereas Lowe's Calypso Magnolia works to rethink traditionalist readings of southern literary culture, Jelly-Schapiro's Island People refutes V. S. Naipaul's claim that "History is built around achievement and creation, and nothing was created in the West Indies" (11). In its aim to center the Caribbean in the World and document the West Indies as crucible of syncretic creation and significant global influence, Island People succeeds tremendously.

Wade in the Crosscurrents

Together, Lowe and Jelly-Schapiro have written one important work: Calypso Magnolia-Island People. Where Lowe is sometimes too lofty in his desire to bridge, Jelly-Schapiro is often too reductive in his discrete articulation of separate island spaces. Jelly-Schapiro's justification of a book solely about the Caribbean can seem too specific and isolationist. Lowe's constant syncretic desire to move across raises questions of positional privilege and universalist tendencies. In reading them side-by-side, readers can wade in the crosscurrents and decide for themselves what and where the (circum)Caribbean is.

The conversation between Calypso Magnolia and Island People benefits all who join it. In an era when a US travel ban seeks to curtail the movements of individuals and groups of people and much is made of walls and constructed borders, Lowe and Jelly-Schapiro remind us of the history of colonization, enslavement, exploitation, exoticization, narrativization, and migration at the heart of all histories of the Americas. Lowe cuts across the "artificial borders" confining the US South to rethink national borders and cultural restrictions; Jelly-Schapiro invites us on a journey in which America signifies much more than the myopic vision of any one nation-state and the Caribbean, place and idea, takes center stage in a history of all of the Americas.

Understanding what we mean when we say "South,""(circum)Caribbean," or "America" matters as our definitions and limitations directly affect those who get included and those who get excluded from our spaces and our ideas of place. Jelly-Schapiro writes, the "ways in which a place is imagined, especially by those with power to act on it, matters" (7). Both Calypso Magnolia and Island People help put into perspective how our ideas of place matter and reverberate locally and beyond.

About the Author

• 1. See King, "This book is the record of an extensive tour of observation through the States of the South and South-west during the whole of 1873, and the Spring and Summer of 1874" (i).
• 2. See King's subtitle: "A Record of Journeys in Louisiana, Texas, the Indian Territory, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland."
• 3. See Jennifer Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
• 4."The emergence of William Faulkner as the centerpiece of narrowly focused notions of Southern identity seemed to crystallize the inward-looking aspect of the discipline" (5).
• 5. In a June 2001 special issue of American Literature, Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Dana D. Nelson coined the phrase "new Southern Studies" as an "emerging collective already producing a robust body of work" in rethinking southern culture (231). Baker and Nelson cite Patricia Yaeger's Dirt and Desire (2000) as one of these works. Baker's Turning South Again (2001) represents his own venture at this scholarship.
• 6. Lowe cites Glissant, Foucault, Bhabha, and Brent Staples as further influences. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). One can see Lowe approaching the term "circumCaribbean" in his earlier article on these subjects; in writing of Roach's "path-breaking" work, Lowe praises him for adumbrating "a culture of performance that circles around the Caribbean rim" (71). See Lowe, "'Calypso Magnolia': The Caribbean Side of the South,"South Central Review 22, no. 1, 54–80.
• 7. Lowe broached this type of critical move at moments. In his final chapter, he posits a reading of Cristina García's The Agüero Sisters alongside Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. However, the aims of Calypso Magnolia seem to be more syncretic and surveying (317).
• 8. As Brown writes in her review of Lowe's earlier "Calypso Magnolia,""I can see many benefits of using the sea… to find points of connection between the South and the Caribbean" (83).
• 9. Other than a passing reference to Faulkner's Mississippi, the only traditionally defined "southern" writer to appear in Island People is Georgian Flannery O'Conner, whose relationship to depictions of race is mentioned in reference to Jean Rhys (12, 367).
• 10. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, "Introduction," in The Traveller's Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands (New York: New York Review of Books, 1950, 2011), ix–x.
• 11. José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York: New York University Press, 2000), xiii.
• 12. The reader follows Jelly-Schapiro from Kingston's Myrtle Bank Hotel (44) to Havana's Hotel Nacional (99) and Havana Hilton (100) to San Juan's Condado Vanderbilt Hotel (175) to La Romana's Casa de Campo (216), Port-au-Prince's Hotel Oloffson (260), George Town's unnamed Hotwire.com recommendation (281), Grenada's Heliconia guesthouse (296), to Antigua's Sandals and "Florida-style condos" (309), St. John's Heritage Hotel (310), Fort-de-France's Hotel L'Imperatrice (336), Dominica's Pointe Baptiste (369), and finally, Jelly-Schapiro's last stop, Trinidad's "ugly new Hyatt" (400).
• 13. A small list of Island People's inhabitants: in Puerto Rico (via the Bronx), we find Rita Moreno, Pedro Albizu Campos, Luis Muñoz Marín, Tito Puente, "El Cantante" Héctor Lavoe all sharing the same island; in the Dominican Republic, we read about tigueres, the Coliseum of Cockfighting (208), the "sex economy" (206), Trujillo, "los morenos" and a lack of "pride" in "racial hybridity" (221, 203), perejil and el corte; in Haiti, centered in the text, "at the core of the Caribbean story" (226), again revealing C. L. R. James's influence, the same perejil and el corte, Kreyol, the Massacre River, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Dessalines, the Citadel and Henri Christophe, Boukman, the Duvaliers, Tonton Macoutes, Carnival of Flowers and earthquakes where the "'earth moved like a wave and all was ruined'" (261), Titanyen and bodies, Wyclef Jean, Cité Soleil, Katherine Dunham, and "people's invisibility to their own state" (265); in the Lesser Antilles, we read about George Lamming and Rihanna, Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, Maurice Bishop, Barbuda's "breeding myth" (308), Montserrat's "volcano crisis" (315), Martinique's Aimé Césaire, Glissant, Fanon, Chamoiseau, and other "literary riches" (358), Jean Rhys and Dominica's "Candy Land for lovers of nature and calm" (365).

Essay

Sociologist Rupert Vance wrote in the 1930s of the "cotton obsessed, Negro obsessed" Mississippi Delta as "the deepest South." A half century later, writer Richard Ford called the Delta "the South's South." In the 1990s, historian James Cobb referred to it as the "most southern place on earth." Few other regions within the American South have taken on the overtones of representing that larger section as the Delta has done, but its history shows shifts in meanings ascribed to it, reflecting environmental forces, the dynamics of an evolving biracial society, and the Delta's relationship to broader southern, American, and global forces.

The "Mississippi Delta" is actually the delta of the Yazoo River, in the eastern floodplain of the lower Mississippi River. It is sixty miles at its widest point from the Yazoo to the Mississippi, in what poet William Alexander Percy called "a badly drawn half oval." Elevation goes from 205 above sea level below Memphis to eighty feet at Vicksburg, averaging 125 feet in height from Greenwood to Greenville. Flooding has been endemic, as formative as any factor in shaping the life and culture of the Delta.

Native Americans lived on the land that became known as the Delta from around 1000 B.C. They practiced small-scale farming and took part in a commercial hunting economy with whites after their arrival around the turn of the nineteenth century. The Delta became officially open to white settlement after Indian treaties between 1820 and 1832. One traveler in the 1820s, Paul Wilhelm, described a rich ecology, noting migratory birds, kingfishers, herons, ducks, eagles, and the soon-to-disappear Florida panther. Prevalent trees included sweetgum, hackberry, cottonwood, persimmon, and river cane, the latter growing in dense patches.

Whites and their black slaves soon transformed the land, building vast cotton fields to replace the forests, canebrakes, and marshes, changing the economy, ecology, and visual landscape. Successful agricultural work required reservoirs of slaves and money, making the Delta a region dominated by a planter elite from the early nineteenth century. The Hamptons of South Carolina, one of the South's most famous and successful families, bought land in the Delta in the 1840s, and by the time of the Civil War, Wade Hampton III owned 900 slaves on property scattered over two Delta counties. Greenwood LeFlore was another successful planter, a Choctaw who owned 400 slaves and decorated his home with the finest furniture from France. Large cotton yields and accumulating wealth created a powerful social group, the Delta planters, who would dominate the region's economic and political life for generations.

The Civil War and Emancipation brought major changes to the Delta, challenging the preeminence of the planter definition of the Delta as the site of a slaveholders' empire and forcing them to confront new visions of the Delta among African Americans. Freedmen from across the South saw in the post-Civil War Delta a frontier of opportunity, a relatively undeveloped region without the long settled social arrangements of the eastern South and with land that could be richly productive if cleared. Blacks hoped for land ownership during Reconstruction and asserted their political rights in the Delta, and even with the restriction of political rights at the end of Reconstruction, African Americans continued coming into the Delta through the end of the century in hopes of gaining greater economic opportunity there than elsewhere.

Outside forces helped remake the Delta after the Civil War. Timber companies cleared land for sale, and railroads entered the region, connecting Delta planters to newly accessible markets. The federal government passed flood control legislation, providing funds to begin containing the tumultuous floods that prevented the agricultural utilization of much Delta land before the Civil War. In the early twentieth century, foreign investors began buying and operating Delta plantations; the British-owned Delta and Pine Land Company became one of the world's largest cotton-producing operations. All of these forces nurtured the economic modernization of the region, not as a commercial-industrial site but creating plantations as factories, marked by industrial-like management techniques and close control of costs, including exploitation of a large pool of cheap labor, on which Delta plantations depended. By 1910, tenants operated ninety-two percent of Delta farms, and ninety-five percent of those tenants were African American. New ethnic groups also appeared in the region in this period, including Chinese, Jews, Italians, and Syrians.

Despite their embrace of agricultural modernization, planters nurtured their self-image as an Old South gentry. Their style emphasized personalism and paternalism, and they indeed pursued the good life, with their financial resources enabling frequent travel, elaborate parties and dances, tasteful decoration of homes, the best food and drink, and education of children at fine schools and colleges across the South and the nation. The railroad linked the Delta to New Orleans and nurtured a cosmopolitanism among planters who could afford its pleasures.

Cotton culture pervaded the Delta. David Cohn referred to cotton growing in the Delta as "a secular religion," one that "was the staple of our talk, the stuff of our dreams, the poesy of many of our songs." As the white landowning class prospered around cotton, African American fortunes grew more desperate. Delta society was rigidly segregated along racial line, and blacks living there in the early twentieth century had to face the devastation of their post-Civil War dream of the Delta as a place for upward mobility. They faced declining economic fortunes, political disfranchisement, rising violence, especially lynching, and virtual powerlessness in the criminal justice system. Coupled with inferior educational institutions and poor health facilities, these social problems led African Americans increasingly to head out of the region, especially to Chicago, a main migration location for Delta blacks. The Illinois Central Railroad became a powerful symbol to African Americans of escape from the Delta and connections to a broader world.

African Americans in the Delta produced a vibrant culture that sustained them through hard times. The region produced the blues, a music that grew out of traditional work songs and articulated the sufferings of blacks and the way music could transcend them. The black church also insulated its believers from the traumas of living in an oppressive society. The one institution controlled by blacks under racial segregation, the church offered a sense of self respect and esteem for people who rarely received respect from the institutions and customs of the larger society.

The federal government also helped to define the Mississippi Delta in the mid-twentieth century. It began with the government's reaction to flooding, which continued to disrupt the agricultural economy. Delta people lived through eleven major floods between 1858 and 1922, but the 1927 Mississippi River flood was the worst of all, devastating the Delta, killing between 250 and 500 people and leaving more than 16.6 million acres and 162,000 homes under water. Soon after, Congress appropriated $325 million for an extensive flood control system. The New Deal introduced the most extensive federal government presence in the region since Reconstruction. Planters used New Deal appropriations to their advantage, accepting payments to take land out of production and leaving their tenants with few resources. World War II provided jobs that drew tenants away to the military and defense projects, creating a labor shortage that promoted the consolidation of farm lands, diversification of crops beyond cotton, and the mechanization of plantations.

Beginning with the Dixiecrat movement of the 1948 presidential campaign, the Delta became a stronghold for the final defense of legal segregation. Estimates are that ninety-five percent of the Delta vote went for the Dixiecrat ticket, which included a Deltan, Fielding Wright, as vice presidential candidate. The Delta birthed the Citizens' Councils in the 1950s, which organized intimidation of civil rights advocates and cooperated with state government efforts to defend the Jim Crow caste system.

The civil rights movement nonetheless found crucial support in the Delta, putting forward a vision of the region as a source of African American political influence if its predominantly black population became empowered through enfranchisement and economic improvement. Voter registration drives became the battles that eventually brought political change, leading to increased African American political participation in the Delta. Civil rights leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, and Amzie Moore became central figures in a new iconography of the Delta.

The Delta's writers, musicians, and artists have invested the region with imaginative appeal, from Tennessee Williams's theatrical plays of the decadent white elite, to Robert Johnson's brooding blues of a haunted crossroads in Delta, to William Faulkner's stories of the taming of the natural environment in the Delta. German filmmaker Wim Wenders, in Wings of Desire, portrays a dying man in Berlin who muses on what he has not done in his life—including visiting the Mississippi Delta, still a distinctive place in the imagination.

Publication Update

In fall 2017, Southern Spaces updated this publication as part of the journal's redesign and migration to Drupal 7. Updates include image and text link adjustments, as well as revised recommended resources and related publications. For access to the original layout, paste this publication's url into the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine and view any version of the piece that predates August 2017.

Introduction

Born in 1811 on a riverboat in Siam, Chang and Eng, the original Siamese Twins, were brought to America in 1829 for a touring exhibition as freaks. They soon broke free from their enslaving masters and ran the show by themselves. Having made a fortune in a decade, they retired to western North Carolina, bought land, built houses, married two white sisters, and owned slaves. Yunte Huang's new book, Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History, tells the gripping story of how Chang and Eng, an odd pair, beat impossible odds, living their conjoined life with grit and gusto. In this excerpted chapter, "Mount Airy, or Monticello," Huang investigates the history, implications, and contradictions of Chang and Eng's ownership of African American slaves.

Excerpt: Mount Airy, or Monticello

"She was a slave, and salable as such."

—Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson

Allow me to fast forward 160 years in our story and describe an event of which the seed, like everything else, was sown in the past. In July 2003, about a hundred descendants of the Siamese Twins congregated in Mount Airy, North Carolina, for their Bunker reunion. A tradition that began years ago, the annual gathering is always held on the last weekend of July, at the White Plains Baptist Church, which the twins had helped build with their bare hands on a hill adjacent to the farmland that still belongs to the family. By some estimates, there are about fifteen hundred Bunker descendants today, spread throughout the world, although most of them have stayed close to their ancestral haunt in North Carolina.

Like most family reunions, the festivities consist of a potluck buffet, speeches, and updates on the clan news. One year, they even watched a show about their illustrious ancestors, the Burton Cohen play, The Wedding of the Siamese Twins, which had premiered on Broadway in March 1988. A field trip to the twins' original homestead, now retooled as Mayberry Campground to attract from all over the world diehard fans of Sheriff Andy and Deputy Fife (more on that later), is also on the program. Journalists from the local media, following a tradition that began with the twins' arrival in this area in 1839, are usually in attendance. Sometimes, researchers and historians are also present as honored guests. The Bunkers are a convivial, welcoming bunch.

At the family jamboree in 2003, however, something unexpected happened. An African American named Brenda Ethridge stepped up to the microphone. She introduced herself as a descendant of Aunt Grace, the first slave owned by Chang and Eng. Ethridge had learned of her connection to the famous twins through stories passed down in her own family but had never been able to verify the details. Nor did she know much about her distant ancestor, who is buried in the same cemetery as Chang and Eng, along with generations of their offspring. According to Cynthia Wu, a Chinese-American historian who was present at this reunion, the sudden appearance of an African American in their midst hit a nerve. While Ethridge was a welcome presence for most on that occasion, a flurry of exchanges ensued among several concerned Bunkers, museum curators, and DNA experts. Only six years had elapsed since the official confirmation that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings, and that subject was still hanging in the air. Across the state line, it seemed, the ghost of Monticello lingered in Mount Airy.1

To understand how we arrive at this juncture, or how the conjoined brothers could have spawned thousands of offspring, and why a black woman would challenge the veracity of their genealogy, we need to return to the mountain wedding in 1843, to the quiet house that today still stands in Traphill, where the Bunker clan, as a quintessentially American, multiracial family, was just getting started.

At the time of the twins' wedding, some local folks wagered over how long the marriage could last and whether such a "freakish union" would produce any offspring. In their mind, bestiality was godforsaken, unnatural, and surely doomed to infertility. They also wondered how long the Yates sisters could stand the ignominy of having to bed two swarthy Asian freaks. James Hale predicted that unless the twins were separated, the marriage would not stand a chance. "Depend upon it," he wrote to Charles Harris, "the result will be, a desire to attempt a surgical operation upon themselves."2

Those skeptics might have been surprised to know that the twins had indeed considered surgically untying themselves so that they could lead "normal" lives with their respective wives. It was their wives, however, who vehemently opposed such a move. According to some biographers, the twins, prior to their wedding, had consulted with physicians in Philadelphia and were ready to go under the knife. Aghast at the news, Sarah and Adelaide begged the men not to follow through with the dangerous procedure and reassured the men that they would be happy to marry them "as they were."

The skeptics must have been even more surprised when they heard, ten months after the wedding, that each couple had produced a "fine, fat, bouncing daughter." On February 10, 1844, Sarah and Eng became proud parents of a baby girl named Katherine; only six days later, Adelaide and Chang welcomed into the world a baby girl named Josephine. If there was any lingering doubt about the procreative aspect of the unions, there would be even more evidence to put the matter to rest: In their lifetime, the two couples would produce twenty-one children in total, with Eng and Sarah claiming eleven and Chang and Adelaide, ten. Out of these twelve daughters and nine sons, two would die at young ages from accidents, while two were deaf and mute. There were no twins, let alone conjoined twins or babies with any other discernible deformity.

Twenty-one children for two couples may seem extraordinary and could possibly feed into some of the prevailing stereotypes that portrayed primitive "Orientals" engaging in bestial sex and breeding like animals. Thomas de Quincey, if we remember, called the Asian continent the "workshop of men."Herman Melville, hardly conventional in his choice of bedfellows, imagined in Moby-Dick that those ghostly aboriginals "of earth's primal generations" in insulated Asia "engaged in mundane amours."3 In reality, however, it was not unusual for a couple living in the Appalachians during this era to have a score of children. Visiting the area in 1828, Dr. Elisha Mitchell, the geologist who had earlier given us the on-the-ground account of the lay of the land in Wilkes and neighboring counties, was struck by the "swarms" of children he encountered everywhere—a phenomenon confirmed by studies of demographics and birth rates. As Martin Crawford points out, "Families with ten or more offspring were common in this period." One couple from northwestern North Carolina produced eighteen children in the decades straddling the Civil War, while another couple had seventeen. One woman, Jane Richardson, "was reported in 1855 as possessing no less than 174 living children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren."4

A year after the birth of their first children, the twins and their wives celebrated the arrival of two more additions to the brood, born again only about a week apart: a baby girl named Julia for Eng and Sarah on March 31, 1845, and the first boy, named Christopher, for Chang and Adelaide on April 8. As the family grew, the house in Traphill became too small for them. In the spring of that year, Chang and Eng purchased a farm in nearby Surry County for $3,750. Straddling bubbling Stewart's Creek outside the village of Mount Airy, this 650-acre farmland would become their Xanadu—or, more pertinent and closer to home, their Monticello.

On this new land, Chang and Eng—two brothers formerly sold into indentured servitude and treated no better than slaves—began farming by using black slaves. Here our story takes a significant turn, entering what Primo Levi called "the gray zone" of humanity, a treacherously murky area where the persecuted becomes the persecutor, the victim turns victimizer.

The first slave Chang and Eng owned, as mentioned earlier, was Aunt Grace, the ancestor of Brenda Ethridge, who attended the 2003 Bunker reunion. Legally known as Grace Gates, and born a slave in Alabama around 1790, Aunt Grace was sold to North Carolina at a young age and became the property of David Yates. Chang and Eng received her as a "wedding gift," the same way that the nameless black servant standing behind Alabama circuit judge Sidney Posey, presiding over the assault case against the twins years earlier, had been a wedding present from the young judge's in-laws. Known for her exceptionally large feet, Grace would assume the slave–nanny role and exert a large influence in the twins' family, nursing all of the Bunker children as well as her own.

Soon after their relocation to Surry County, the twins began to purchase more slaves and even engage in slave trading. What is unquestionably clear is that the twins by this time had adopted the mindset, in all its permutations, of the oppressor class, the whites who owned slaves. In September 1845, they bought from Mount Airy planter Thomas F. Prather two black girls, aged seven and five, for $450, and from another neighbor a three-year-old boy for $175. Within just a few years, they had eighteen slaves. Out of these eighteen, according to the 1850 census, more than half were younger than eight years old. As Judge Graves admitted candidly, "Some few of their slaves were valuable to them for their present ability to labor; but much the greater number of them were an absolute burden but very valuable on account of the marketable price and prospective usefulness."5 According to the twins' descendant Melvin Miles, Chang and Eng would buy slaves younger than eight, keep them, and work them until they were in their early twenties, when they would be sold or traded for younger ones to carry on the work. With very few exceptions, they would not keep a male slave older than twenty-five, because "the twins thought that by then the male slaves were of the mindset of trying to escape or rebel against their owners."6 Perhaps the twins remembered the horror of the Nat Turner revolt in 1831. Female slaves, by contrast, would be kept for as long as needed, because they were less likely to run away or to rebel, and they would bring additional value when they had babies—the so-called increase. Aunt Grace, for instance, gave birth to nine children, three of whom—Jacob, Jack, and James—survived and became the property of her masters.7 In fact, Grace's three sons all assumed the Bunker name, according to the 1870 census.

Living in squalid cabins, the slaves were divided into "house slaves" and "field slaves." The former, including Aunt Grace, worked mostly around the houses, helping to cook, clean, sew, nurse babies, and do other domestic chores. The field slaves would rise before dawn and work in the field till sunset. How the twins treated their slaves was a contentious topic both during their lifetimes and after their deaths. There were accounts that portrayed them as humane and kind, while others described them as "severe taskmasters." According to Judge Graves, whenever the twins took long trips, they would always bring gifts for each member of the family, "not even forgetting the colored servants down to the youngest."8 In the field, they also patiently taught the slaves some of the new farming techniques they had learned from agricultural magazines. The twins were allegedly among the first farmers in North Carolina to produce "bright leaf" tobacco, and they taught the slaves how to use their newly acquired press to make "plug" chewing tobacco. Possum-hunting being one of their favorite sports, the twins would frequently take some of the slaves out with them on early mornings for expeditions, which were recreational to them but not necessarily to the slaves.

These descriptions of the so-called harmonious relationship between masters and slaves, suggesting that the twins "did not drive their slaves but supervised them," were complicated by allegations to the contrary.9 The first of these negative reports appeared in a newspaper article published in the Greensborough Patriot in 1852. The author of the article, who signed himself merely "D.," did a profile of the twins, describing them as shrewd and industrious businessmen with belligerent and fiery dispositions. He claimed that the twins had once split "a board into splinters over the head of a man who had insulted them" and were "fined fifteen dollars and costs...Woe to the unfortunate wight who dares to insult them." This prelude led to a more devastating revelation: "When they chop or fight, they do so double-handed; and in driving a horse or chastising their negroes, both of them use the lash without mercy. A gentleman who purchased a black man a short time ago from them, informed the writer that he was 'the worst whipped negro he ever saw.'"10

Such an unflattering depiction of them as cruel masters drew an immediate response from the twins, who were acutely aware of the importance of public image. They shot off a long letter to the newspaper, defending their own character and integrity and objecting vehemently to the article's claims:

The portion of said piece relating to the inhuman manner in which we had chastised a negro man which we afterwards sold, is a sheer fabrication and infamous falsehood. We have never sold to any man a negro as described, except to Mr. Thos. F. Prather, who denies the truth of said accusation, or of ever having told any person that which the author of said communication says he heard. We are well aware that to some who have not seen us, we are to some extent an object of curiosity, but that we were to be objects of such vile and infamous misrepresentation, we could not before believe.

Along with the letter, the twins attached an endorsement by thirteen local citizens and neighbors attesting to the truthfulness of their statement, signatories who included Thomas Prather, from whom the twins had made their first purchase of young slaves and to whom they had now sold an older one.11

Then there were other stories about often-poisoned relations between the twins and their slaves. One, reported years later, tells of a black slave who one day appeared at the front door of the twins' house and wanted to see them on business. While the Southern custom dictated that a "colored" man would have to use the back door of a white man's home, this black man might have thought the rule would not apply to two tawny Asians with slanting eyes. "When the Twins saw the negro standing in the front door," as the story goes, "they instantly made for him with a malignant air and the negro lost no time in taking himself away. After that he knew his place."12

Another story, reported in the Mount Airy News, is about a slave who had "developed into a desperado and was considered dangerous":

He usually was a pest, for the hand of every man was against him. There was no law to protect such slaves and it was considered the proper thing to do to kill him on sight. This bad negro, the property of Chang, was reported one night to be in the negro cabins of a slave owner near Mount Airy. The citizen went with his gun to investigate and the negro ran from the cabin and as he ran the citizen red his gun intending to shoot him in the legs. But as luck would have it he aimed too high and killed the negro.

There was no law to punish him for his deed; but he saw a big bill facing him in the way of pay for the value of the dead slave. At once he went to the home of the Twins hoping to make the best settlement possible. Imagine his surprise when the Twins refused to accept a cent and expressed their satisfaction that the negro was out of the way.13

In the antebellum South, such tragic events were certainly not rare occurrences. Nor would such conduct by a slave master raise any eyebrows. The twins themselves were said to be fond of bragging about how they had bet on slaves at card games, treating them as disposable property, no better than livestock:

One time, when they were traveling in Virginia with a neighbor, they were urged by some gamblers to join in a game of cards. They did not engage in gambling games, and so they refused. However, they agreed to back the neighbor, who was "handy with cards." The neighbor won royally, and the gamblers, in their desperation, bet "a negro." The twins won him, and then sold him back to the unlucky gamblers for $600.14

Stories like the above, both the positive and the disparaging portrayals of people treated as subhuman, starring two Asian freaks consorting with two white women and lording over a squad of black slaves, certainly had much traction in the antebellum South. They became perfect fodder for scandal-starved newspapers and readymade material for Southern Gothic, with its endless obsession with sexual peccadilloes, racial violence, deranged cravings, and morbid humor. The following profile, led in early 1850 by a curiosity-seeking journalist and featured in a publication aptly entitled The Southerner, would require very little touchup for it to fit into a plantation pastoral with decidedly racist undertones:

When we got off the stage at Mt. Airy we were told by the townspeople that the Twins were moody, sulky people and often refused to see anyone who called on them.

After a few glasses of ale and a meal at the Blue Ridge Inn in Mt. Airy we felt more in place in calling on the Twins. It was an extremely warm day and the driver gave the horses plenty of time, in addition to taking the long way around. After having arrived we drove up into a shade of a large cottonwood tree. Everything seemed quiet except a colored boy doing some metal work in a shop nearby. There was a large male peafowl strutting across the yard. Then the twins appeared in the doorway dressed in rough cotton. Each had a quid of tobacco in his mouth, each was barefooted. They stood in the doorway a minute or so, then waved good naturedly. They approached our carriage and asked how they could serve us. . .

They led us into the living room which contained a bed and other necessities. We found them to be extremely interested in farming as well as moderate conversationalists, often speaking in unbroken English. One would talk awhile then the other would take over and talk for a few minutes. A colored boy was instructed to bring in some fresh cider, which we really enjoyed.15

What might otherwise pass as a run-of-the-mill antebellum encounter, in which landed Southern gentry were being served by domestic slaves while hosting visitors, was complicated by the fact that the masters in question were, simultaneously, Asian and freakish. The journalistic preamble about the twins being moody and sulky, the gothic setting of an exotic bird milling around and a "colored boy" doing handiwork nearby, and finally the dramatic entry of the real exotic bird, the conjoined twins, in the doorway, clad in coarse cotton, chewing tobacco, like some ominous creature, barefoot no less—as if reprising a scene from 1001 Arabian Nights, the most popular contraband book in colonial America—busting out of a cage, all combined to suggest something bestial, crude, scandalous.

Nineteenth-century Americans were not new to the scandal or outrage of nonwhite men luxuriating in the privilege of the slaveholding class. Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, many Native American tribes had owned slaves, though none exploited slave labor on a large scale. With the introduction of African slavery, Indian nations also participated in the practice. At the time of Chang and Eng's settlement in North Carolina, the Cherokee Nation possessed a few thousand black slaves. The wealthy family of the Cherokee chief, James Vann, owned more than a hundred in 1835.16 What magnified the scandal of Chang and Eng as slave masters was their perceived monstrosity and miscegenation.

It would be hard to overestimate the enormous impact these perceptions had on the populace, both the wealthy and the poor, who lived in the vicinity of the twins' homestead and in the surrounding areas. The rich white unquestionably begrudged having to share class and status with two Asians; just consider the reaction of the twins' closest associates when Chang and Eng expressed their wishes to live the normal lives of country squires. The poor white was especially resentful and envious, his place on the social ladder suddenly at risk. Local rumor mills churned out endlessly salacious stories about the foursome that was going on by Stewart's Creek, on farmland owned by two "colored" men with slanting eyes, masters to a bunch of Negroes. The résumé of a local boy, who would later become a leading voice in explosive national issues such as abolitionism and the anti-Chinese campaign, might give us a rare glimpse into how the unusual lifestyle of the twins as slaveholding landed gentry had affected the American heart and soul.

Born the same year as Chang and Eng's arrival in America, Hinton Rowan Helper (1829–1909) was the son of a struggling North Carolina farmer who owned a small plot of land and a family of four slaves in Mocksville, about sixty miles south of Mount Airy. When Helper was less than a year old, his father died from mumps, leaving his widow and seven children near poverty. Living under his mother's care until he was a teenager, Helper graduated from Mocksville Academy in 1848 and went to California in 1851 to seek his fortune. He was utterly disappointed, because he had difficulty finding a job in a region flooded with non-Caucasian immigrants such as Mexicans and Chinese. Disillusioned with his California experience, he turned to writing to vent his resentment and to prescribe a cure for what he thought had afflicted the nation. Drawing upon his three years of drifting in the Wild West, Helper's first book, The Land of Gold(1855), exposed the California dream as a hoax perpetrated by greedy financiers and inept politicians. He was particularly alarmed by the state's estimated forty thousand Chinese, whose presence offended his strong Anglo-Saxon prejudice. In a sensational chapter titled "California Celestials," he waged an all-out war against the Chinese, mocking their appearances, dismissing their habits, and condemning their immorality. "I cannot perceive," he wrote, "what more right or business these semi-barbarians have in California than flocks of blackbirds have in a wheat field." But no worries, he reasoned, because fate was against the Chinese. "No inferior race of men can exist in these United States without becoming subordinate to the will of the Anglo-Saxons," as it had been with the Negroes in the South, whose enslavement stood as the central issue in his subsequent book, The Impending Crisis of the South(1857).17 Combining statistical charts and provocative prose, the new book attacked the evils of slavery and its devastating effects upon the people to whom the book was officially dedicated, "The Nonslaveholding Whites of the South." Enjoying popularity exceeded by no antebellum publication other than Uncle Tom's Cabin, this abolitionist tome argued that slavery ruined the South by preventing economic development and industrialization, and that it hurt the Southern whites of moderate means, who were oppressed by a small aristocracy of wealthy slaveholders.

Although there was no direct evidence linking Helper's animus toward both the Chinese and the slaveholding aristocracy to his in-person experience with the Siamese Twins, it is not inconceivable that, as Robert G. Lee suggests, "the young Hinton Helper, in addition to sharing the salacious but almost universal fascination with the imagined sexual practice of the twins and their wives, resented the fact that the Siamese twins were land owners of substance and slaveholders to boot, while Helper's own family found itself in reduced financial circumstances on its small farm as the result of his father's early death."18 When the twins gave one of their last performances in the summer of 1839 in Statesville, ten-year-old Helper was but a few miles away. Spending his formative years in Mocksville, Helper, if he did not live within a stone's throw of Chang and Eng's domicile, certainly came of age within the earshot of all those ribald rumors that rippled through the hills and hollows of western North Carolina.

There are at least two central motifs in Helper's writings that can assist us in detecting the invisible but discernible presence of the Siamese Twins in his racial imagination. First, he was obsessed with the Chinese in California"as a deterrent to the immigration of respectable white women and thus a barrier to 'normal' family development."19 To Helper, nothing would be more abnormal as a family unit, both racially and structurally, than the abominable union of the Asian twins and their white wives. Second, Helper's belittling descriptions of Chinese people made them seem like freaks, evoking the eerie monstrosity of the conjoined twins:

[John Chinaman's] feet enclosed in rude wooden shoes, his legs bare, his breeches loosely flapping against his knees, his skirtless, long-sleeved, big-bodied pea-jacket, hanging in large folds around his waist, his broad-brimmed chapeau rocking carelessly on his head, and his cue [sic] suspended and gently sweeping about his back! I can compare him to nothing so appropriately as to a tadpole walking upon stilts.20

What offended Helper's Anglo-Saxon sensibility was not just the freakish, exotic appearance of the Chinese but also the strange phenomenon that the Chinese all looked alike to him. "All their garments look as if they were made after the same pattern out of the same material and from the same piece of cloth. In short, one Chinaman looks almost exactly like another, but very unlike anybody else."21 We know for sure that in mid-nineteenth-century America, no two Chinese men looked more alike than Chang and Eng, who in fact always wore clothes "made after the same pattern out of the same material and from the same piece of cloth." As Helper wandered around the city square or walked down Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, where the Chinese thronged the "cow-pens" and "human stables," as he put it, his mind might have easily been tricked by the memories of the Siamese Twins, who had undoubtedly haunted his childhood.22

In the early 1850s, when Helper returned from the California nightmare to his humble homestead in North Carolina to nurse his injured sensibility while writing his first two books, the gentrified life of Chang and Eng in the next county was just getting more complicated. Since 1844, each twin and his wife had increased their brood at a steady pace of one child a year. The crowded house led to more tension. The two sisters squabbled, spurring the twins to set up two households within a mile of each other on their farm outside Mount Airy. Since they could not go separate ways as ordinary men would, they alternated three days at each home and each conjugal bed—a rigid routine they would follow religiously till their last breath. While the fear of miscegenation between black and white had remained the driving force behind Helper's abolitionist rhetoric, the union between Asian and white, let alone the abnormal kind, would only intensify racial anxiety. In fact, white supremacists like Helper rallied under the banner of abolitionism not with the purpose of saving blacks from the injustice of slavery but with the goal of protecting the purity of the white race from the menace of miscegenation. In this regard, Chang and Eng might have disturbed the racial paradise as imagined by the ilk of Helper not only through their marriage to two white women but also through their possible relations with their slave women.

Now—back to the Bunker reunion in 2003. It was a grand occasion of celebration, a gathering of people who were products of a union unthinkable to most. The Bunker descendants certainly proved how wrongheaded Helper and other nineteenth-century racial apologists were, or how unfounded their crackpot racial theories were. Contrary to the fear of racial contamination and degradation, the Bunker progeny were all respectable citizens. Many of them were highly educated, smart, savvy; some were army generals, presidents of major corporations, and elected government officials. In the midst of this multiracial harmony, however, the appearance of a black woman with a claim on the proud Bunker genealogy wreaked no small havoc. Subsequent steps taken by some of the Bunker descendants indicated how sensitive the matter was, or how unbearably haunting family history can be.

Even before the 2003 reunion, some Bunker descendants, perhaps motivated by the Jefferson/Hemings controversy, had made inquiries in May of 2002 to the staff at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, where the autopsy of Chang and Eng had been conducted in 1874 and where the fused liver of the twins is still preserved. These descendants had asked about "the possibility of testing hair trapped in the plaster of Chang and Eng's body cast to confirm anecdotes about hereditary lineages that issued from their slaves." Although there was no extant record or newspaper report on such a matter during or after the twins' lifetime, these descendants had grown up with family stories about how Patrick Bunker, Eng's son, "used to play with his half-sisters and half-brothers who were enslaved." Now that a descendant of a Bunker slave woman had surfaced, the issue took on added urgency and interest. Gretchen Worden, the curator of the Mütter Museum, who received the inquiry from the Bunker descendants, contacted a forensic scientist at George Washington University about the possibility of "obtaining DNA from either Chang and Eng's hair or liver." The expert replied and affirmed the feasibility of conducting such a test if nuclear DNA was available in the hair root, "if any part of it came away from the follicle when it was pulled away by the plaster."23

There was, however, no follow-up to this flurry of inquiries. There is no definitive conclusion. Unlike the Jefferson/Hemings situation, in which DNA results brought clarity to a past that many of Jefferson's white descendants had denied for centuries, most Bunker family secrets remain shrouded in the fog of time. However, even without scientific corroboration, family lore still endures, such as the following about the twins:

They attended the local shooting matches, where a turkey or beef was the reward for the best marksman, and Chang and Eng acquired reputations as crackshots with rifles or pistols. It was the object of much curious speculation on the neighbor's part how two men tied together could be so adept, often more adept than a single man.

The farmers in Surry County were frequently plagued by wolves, who wreaked havoc among their livestock. There existed one particularly notorious wolf, christened "Bob-Tail," because he had lost part of his tail in a trap. This wolf did not merely limit his dinings to sheep and cattle, but was believed to have eaten a negro baby who wandered into the woods. Bob-Tail made trouble for three years, and no one was able to trap him, until one night when Chang and Eng were awoken by noises coming from among their livestock. They ran out, taking with them a gun and a slave carrying a lantern. It was Bob-Tail, and the wolf breathed his last at the twins' hands. This coup gave Chang and Eng considerable prestige in the community, especially as no more negro babies were ever known to be stolen or eaten.24

This family vignette, passed down orally through generations, seems to be about the twins' remarkable marksmanship and heroic deed of ridding the community of a dangerous pest. But a more discerning and curious reader, mindful of the genealogical intricacy of a slave-owning household in the antebellum South like that of the twins, might rightly ask, "Negro babies? Whose Negro babies?"

About the Author

Yunte Huang is a poet and professor of English at the University of California–Santa Barbara. Huang is the author of many books and translations, including the bestselling Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), which won the Edgar Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His articles have been published in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Daily Beast, and others.

• 1. Cynthia Wu, Chang and Eng Reconnected: The Original Siamese Twins in American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 163–65.
• 2. James Hale, letter to Charles Harris, July 27, 1843, North Carolina State Archives.
• 3. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1988), 231.
• 4. Martin Crawford, Ashe County's Civil War: Community and Society in the Appalachian South (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 2.
• 5. Jesse Franklin Graves, "The Siamese Twins as Told by Judge Jesse Franklin Graves," unpublished manuscript, North Carolina State Archives, n.d., 22.
• 6. Melvin M. Miles, Eng and Chang: From Siam to Surry (self-published, CreateSpace, 2013), 65.
• 7. Evelyn Scales Thompson, Around Surry County (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2005), 14.
• 8. Graves, "The Siamese Twins," 23.
• 9. Joseph Andrew Orser, The Lives of Chang and Eng: Siam's Twins in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 127.
• 10.Greensborough Patriot, October 16, 1852.
• 11.Greensborough Patriot, October 30, 1852.
• 12. J. E. Johnson, "Siamese Twins," in Mount Airy News, January 3, 1956.
• 13. Ibid.
• 14. Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace, The Two: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 193.
• 15."The Siamese Twins at Home," in Southerner, reprinted in Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, November 2, 1850.
• 16. Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 87.
• 17. Hinton Rowan Helper, The Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction (Baltimore, H. Taylor, 1855), 75.
• 18. Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 42.
• 19. Ibid.
• 20. Helper, The Land of Gold, 71.
• 21. Ibid., 70.
• 22. Ibid., 70, 55–56.
• 23. Wu, Chang and Eng Reconnected, 165–66.
• 24. Quoted in Wallace and Wallace, The Two, 194–95.

Review

By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the cause of worldwide abolition was riding high. Nearly a half century had passed since revolutionary fervor put slavery on a gradual path to extinction in parts of the United States and on a more immediate one in Haiti. In the 1830s this international movement reached its apex as the British empire abolished slavery. It seemed to be an era of emancipation. Matthew Karp's This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy joins a chorus of scholarship urging us not to assume emancipation in some parts necessarily boded poorly for slavery in all parts of the Atlantic world. In fact, this so-called age of emancipation coincided with the tremendous growth and entrenchment of a second slavery as masters in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil profited enormously from the labor of enslaved peoples who produced the cotton, sugar, and coffee that fed the Atlantic economy.1 Just as abolitionists understood themselves within a worldwide network in opposition to bondage, slaveholders envisioned their struggle to maintain mastery as an international endeavor. Karp, assistant professor of history at Princeton, turns his attention to one of the most powerful tools slaveholders employed in this fight: the foreign and military policies of the United States.

Karp depicts US slaveholders as modern, confident, and self-assured—and in near complete control of the nation's foreign affairs and military. Resonating with much recent scholarship, Karp presents these men, their worldview, and their institutions not as an aberration in the development of the United States or departure from the emerging capitalist world order, but integral to both. They were ardent American nationalists who saw no difference between the vitality of the US South and of the nation writ large. Karp draws his title from a letter published in the Richmond Enquireramid national debate over the annexation of Texas in 1844. C. R. Fontaine, the letter's author and one of the paper's "particularly hot-tempered" correspondents from central Virginia, was decidedly pro-annexation and attacked his antislavery opponents as wanting nothing more than to hasten the destruction of "this vast Southern Empire" (7–8). For Fontaine and his cohort, that empire was not the South itself but the entire United States, a nation inextricably and fundamentally tied to slavery.

Abolitionists inveighed that southerners exercised a degree of influence on federal policies that outsized their demographic presence. Generations of historians have subsequently substantiated such claims.2 Nowhere was southern dominance more evident than at the highest levels of the nation's foreign policy and military apparatus. Karp goes beyond the numerical majority of men like John C. Calhoun, James K. Polk, Jefferson Davis, and Abel Upshur in deciding the United States' path beyond its shores; he explores what it meant for a nation's role abroad to be guided by men who based their identity in mastery at home. In scrutinizing presidents, cabinet secretaries, diplomats, members of congress, military leaders, and journalists, Karp draws upon such well-trodden sources as personal papers, political correspondence, congressional records, and newspapers and other periodicals. From this vantage he examines the slave power's influence on US foreign policy from Britain's abolition of slavery in 1833 through the secession crisis.

For proslavery policymakers, Great Britain represented the greatest existential threat. When the Atlantic's preeminent commercial and military power moved to abolish slavery in its empire, the battle lines were drawn in the international struggle between free and bound systems of labor. With news of emancipation in Britain's Caribbean colonies, so near the nation's shores, US slaveholders pressed a proactive defense of slavery at home and abroad as necessary for American prosperity and continued growth.

To combat the abolitionist threat, US slavers invested their energy and resources in an unlikely place: the navy. In what is perhaps Karp's most original contribution, he catalogues naval reforms around midcentury that were spearheaded by two Virginians: Secretary of the Navy Abel Upshur and Superintendent of the US Naval Observatory, Matthew Fontaine Maury. Embracing steam power, reorganizing the officer corps, and establishing the Naval Academy at Annapolis were initiatives championed by southerners, in addition to advocating expanded coastal defenses along the Gulf of Mexico and a greater naval presence in the South. The navy was central to the international perspective of slaveholders—to defend against British-led abolitionist incursions and to project power across the Caribbean basin. Karp argues that naval reform convinced many among the slaveholding elite who were leery of centralized power that it was necessary to embrace federal power to achieve their goals. For Karp, there is a consistency across these positions that is rooted in an overwhelming commitment to maintain slavery at home and abroad.

The navy was never the object of southerners' proslavery agenda, but a tool to achieve those ends. More fundamental to the slaver's world were the agricultural commodities that underpinned the Atlantic economy and the systems of bound labor that supported their cultivation. The slaveholding elite Karp studies embraced a vision of modernity at odds with their retrograde image. The slaveholders guiding federal policies adopted ideas that resonated with similar ideas that spread across the Atlantic. By lauding global free trade, imperialism, and scientific racism, while marshalling whatever proof they had of emancipation's failures in the Caribbean and in the North, the intellectual world of US slavers was not at odds with the developing capitalist order. "Racial hierarchy, coerced labor, and open commerce," writes Karp, "these, for the proslavery South, were the lineaments of global modernity in the mid-nineteenth century" (169–170). Amid the domestic crises of the 1840s and 1850s, slaveholders in Washington used foreign policy to support this worldview. Free trade with Great Britain, penetration of slave-grown commodities in markets across the globe, and significant changes in the size and structure of the US Army were all part of the foreign policy of slavery, and all relied on the ability of southern slaveholding elites to embrace the expansion of federal power.

But the crux of This Vast Southern Empire is not found in esoteric debates over tariffs or the particulars of military expansion and naval modernization. Central to Karp's narrative and the defining feature of slaveholder internationalism was how the makers of US foreign policy understood the nation's relationship with the other slave societies of the Americas. For Karp's proslavery diplomats, the success of slavery in any one place depended on the institution's preservation across all spaces. The overriding goal was to keep or make safe as much space as possible across the hemisphere for bonded labor, whether under the United States' direct control or not. Slaveholders in the South and in Washington sought to make common cause with their fellow masters in places such as Cuba and Brazil; the assault on slavery was international, and the defense needed to be likewise.

US overtures to the slaveholding polities of the Americas took various forms, but a fundamental imperative—the continuation of bound labor—emerged in dealings with Cuba, Brazil, and Texas. Across the 1840s and 1850s diplomacy with Cuba required a restrained touch. Despite constant fears of a servile uprising, slaveholding policymakers shunned direct intervention, not out of fear that the nation lacked the ability and prowess to control the island but that military action might inspire a Haiti-like revolution. Subsequently, many of Karp's actors were ambivalent about filibustering expeditions, never doubting their aims but their means. In Brazil, US diplomats took a more active role, not out of fear of rebellion like in Cuba, but out of concern that Brazil's continued participation in the international slave trade would draw British intervention that might imperil slavery in South America. Karp examines the efforts of yet another Virginian, Henry A. Wise, to curtail the African slave trade to Brazil. Certainly Texas required the heavy hand of intervention and annexation. From its beginnings, the movement for Texas independence depended upon and was lead by southerners who expanded slavery and the cotton frontier into Mexico’s northeastern flank. A decade of careful politicking in Congress finally made annexation a reality and was, in Karp’s words, "the quintessential achievement of the foreign policy of slavery" (100). Perhaps annexation's most tumultuous legacy, however, was the war with Mexico. Conquest in the Southwest and brinksmanship in the Northwest affirmed the Polk administration's commitment to the foreign policy of slavery. The making of a continental empire signaled the United States' global position, giving slaveholders in Washington greater strength and confidence to pursue their proslavery agenda abroad. Though tactics changed, the ends were the same—maintaining the proslavery spaces of the Americas.

This Vast Southern Empire culminates with an interpretation of secession as a foreign policy decision. The coming of the Lincoln administration seemed to portend the South's exclusion from the foreign affairs and military policy decision-making that the section had used so effectively to buttress chattel slavery at home and elsewhere. While exclusion from familiar channels of power inspired fear and unease among some southerners, others felt optimistic and confident of continuing the foreign policy of slavery as international actors under the Confederate banner. Likely, a Confederate foreign policy of slavery would have looked strikingly similar to its Union forebear.

As Karp describes the international vision of US slaveholders he insists that what defined proslavery foreign policy was not "a ravenous quest for fresh slave territory" and "a desperate search for possible new slave states," but "the need to protect systems of slave property across the hemisphere" (6). He contrasts this with what he sees as the fixation of much historiography on territorial acquisition and filibustering expeditions. Yet, while Karp’s emphasis on foreign policy as a manifestation of institutional power is welcomed, he may overplay his claims to originality. Karp’s observation that slaveholders were internationalists who imagined themselves as part of a network committed to bondage is not new. This Vast Southern Empire should be read alongside the work of Matthew Pratt Guterl and Gerald Horne, scholars who have done much to put southern slaveholders in their international contexts. Guterl’s description of the "habitus" that united slaveholders across the Americas and Horne's discussion of the complex relationship between the South and Brazil resonate with Karp’s formulations.

This Vast Southern Empire tells us something we already knew—that southern slaveholders exercised outsized influence on the federal government. But at its best this work goes beyond that oft-cited abolitionist charge and details how such influence manifested itself in the workings of US power. Karp synthesizes historiography to present an engaging and persuasive narrative of how an elite minority with a shared worldview and set of goals effectively steered federal power for three decades.

About the Author

Thomas Blake Earle is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. His scholarship examines the intersection of American foreign relations and the environment during the nineteenth century.

• 1. Recent work on the relationship between slavery and capitalism has emphasized the vitality of slavery during the nineteenth century; see Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014); and Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014). For the "second slavery" see Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003).
• 2. The fullest account of the control slaveholders had on the federal government can be found in Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Video

A Reflection by Craig Womack

A friend of mine tells a story about his high school days in the greater tri-city area (Wetumka, Weleetka, and Wewoka—Creek names for water that roars, runs, and barks—for those of you from parts other than rural eastern Oklahoma). One day in his Weleetka High School class, everyone stopped paying attention to the teacher and turned their eyes from the chalkboard, and United States history, to a Kafkaesque-sized cockroach making his (or her) way leisurely across the classroom floor, giant antennae twitching as it navigated its escape from secondary education.

As all of those in our noble profession know, even the most starry-eyed believer in the power of education sometimes loses control of the classroom, and this particular teacher, upon realizing her lecture had been hijacked by a very large insect, walked over to the uninvited intruder and ground it under the heel of her shoe. Given the size of the cockroach, some cleanup was in order, so she went down the hall to get paper towels from the restroom. On the way back, she heard all kinds of cheering coming from her class. While she had been out, the cockroach had reanimated and was making a second beeline, so to speak, for the door. If not for her puzzlement over all the commotion, the teacher might have nailed it again, but the cockroach reached safety, while all the Indian kids in the class cheered it on!

I don't care to judge the historical veracity of this wonderful tale, but it seems to me the Mvskoke Creek language might have about as much chance for survival as that cockroach, and I will leave it up to the reader, and the film viewer, to interpret whether or not I am suggesting that a miracle is needed or that miracles sometimes occur.1

For sure, the dominating force of English surrounds us. People in Creek country say there are five thousand Creek speakers left, but nobody seems to know where that number comes from, and many suggest there are only a few hundred speakers, some even far fewer. This documentary, Hearing the Call: The Cultural and Spiritual Journey of Rosemary McCombs Maxey, features a Creek community leader who is determined to speak the Creek language every day—to people, when possible, and to llamas, chickens, cats, and dogs, when not.

Four years ago, I was approached by Stefanie Pierce, at that time the administrative assistant in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Emory University, who said she was talking to people about making a documentary on Rosemary. The project immediately struck me as having merit, because women in the Creek Nation are seldom given public recognition for their knowledge and contributions, especially in the realm of language and culture where women have been both instrumental as well as often ignored. In Rosemary's case, as Hearing the Call attests, she possesses multi-generational knowledge about community genealogies predating Creek Removal from ancestral homelands in Alabama and Georgia in 1836 as well as a command of specific family histories in Oklahoma Creek churches that goes back to the 1840s, when her family first started becoming leaders in these places of worship. Add to this her history working in Indian Country outside the Creek Nation, among Lakota people in South Dakota, for example; as an advocate for Native Hawaiian prisoners incarcerated in Oklahoma and Arizona; as an interim pastor for a year at Community of Hope, Tulsa's GLBTQ church; as a pastor of various United Church of Christ congregations on the East Coast; and as a person in critical dialogue with leading feminist, race, and theological scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, and it becomes evident that the subject of our documentary has more stories than we could ever put up on the screen.

As I, along with Rosemary herself and a group of Creek language advocates, watched the story unfold when Hearing the Call premiered at Emory earlier this year, it felt like its own kind of coming out story, albeit in this case the story of a kid who, rather than announce to her parents she is gay, instead tells them she's called to be a preacher—even though no such role exists for women in the denomination she grew up in. What strikes me as an incredible act of the imagination seems like something else the way Rosemary tells it: being around preachers was the only thing she knew, so as far back as she can remember she practiced sermonizing on farm animals. I don't know if Rosemary would have ground the cockroach into oblivion, had it shown up during one of her childhood church services on back porches and in farm wagons, but, having known her for many years, I feel confident that it wouldn't have escaped without being addressed at length in the Creek language, and I don't hesitate to imagine it coming up to the altar to be saved.

What is the Creek language, anyway? Without getting too complicated, let's just say it is one of the original languages of the US Southeast, and since I am an Emory professor, I will add that it is the first and foremost language of the campus where I teach. Creek people lived at Emory's exact location prior to the 1820s, having been forced out of the area earlier before the removal of the main body of the tribe that occurred in 1836, the year of Emory's founding. When I am on campus, therefore, I simply have to look where I am stepping if I want to know where the Creek language originates.

The language was originally spoken throughout Alabama and Georgia, and in the late 1700s and into the early decades of the nineteenth century, it spread into Florida through Creek-speaking groups that migrated there and now live on the Seminole reservations and elsewhere in Florida. In 1836 when the tribe was forcibly removed from Alabama and Georgia to the present-day state of Oklahoma, the language moved into what was then known as Indian Territory, a sovereign entity set aside for the exiled tribes sent there. Today, the language is primarily spoken by Oklahoma Creeks, Oklahoma Seminoles, and Florida Seminoles.

The first university course in the Creek language took place at the University of Oklahoma in the fall of 1991. As fate would have it, I was in that course. A non-Indian graduate student in anthropology, Pam Innes, was the instructor of record, and she was working with the Creek ceremonialist Linda Alexander and her daughter, Bertha Tilkens, both active members of Greenleaf Ceremonial Ground. I remember three things very vividly from that first effort. First, a Creek/Comanche friend of mine, who sat next to me, would rail after every meeting: "How can we have this non-Indian, who doesn't speak the language, trying to teach us how to speak Creek?" I didn't feel inclined to disagree. Secondly, there was constant writing and erasing, the instructors' hands working at cross-purposes, as Pam would write down a verb she had Linda conjugate, then leave it on the board; the next time Linda conjugated the verb it would be totally different, due to the infinite contextual factors that change Creek verbs. Thirdly, though we had no cockroaches for entertainment, Linda had her own way of hijacking a classroom through hilarious and raunchy stories that I have never quite gotten over and hope I never will. I am happy to report that the collaboration between Pam, Linda, and Bertha evolved into a respectful and reciprocal alliance, a friendship I have always been grateful to have been caught up in.

Since these tenuous beginnings, when academics were speculating about how Creek language worked, often relying on the meticulous fieldwork of the linguist Mary Haas, who worked in Oklahoma in the 1930s, and basing their guesses on Mary Haas's guesses, the Creek language has come a long way in terms of formal analysis. A significant part of the progress has involved checking and analyzing this earlier linguistic work with a large cohort of contemporary Creek speakers.

Pam Innes's collaboration produced a Creek grammar—Beginning Creek: Mvskoke Emponvkv(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004)—which followed a Creek-English dictionary published in 2000 by the linguist Jack Martin, who worked collaboratively for a decade with Creek elder Margaret Mauldin. By the new millennium, classes had spread from the University of Oklahoma to Oklahoma State, campuses where significant numbers of Creek students are enrolled. Martin's own work would expand tremendously with grammars, Creek-to-English translations of stories, innovative interviews of Creek elders by other Creek elders in the Creek language, videos of Creek Christians singing hymns in Creek, and much more.

While all of this has gone on at the level of formal study, the community's ability to produce young Creek language speakers is a dire situation. The tribe faces two major challenges: getting long-term immersion programs started, and the even more daunting chore of creating environments where immersed kids have some place outside the immersion classroom to practice their language skills. It is simply a fact that young kids surrounded constantly by a second language will learn it, but how do you create people for them to speak with? Can this really be done? In comparison, the cockroach might have had it easy.

Questions abound. Numerous tribes no longer have any native language speakers. Does this mean the tribe no longer has an easily definable cultural identity, or can they find new ways to identify as Indian? What, exactly, is contained in language, and to what extent do non-linguistic factors also carry culture? To what degree can English, a language spoken by almost every Indian in the United States and English-speaking Canada, also be considered an Indian language at this point? What does the Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan mean when she writes, "[b]lessed are those who listen / when no one is left to speak"?2

Rosemary McCombs Maxey still has people to talk with in Creek, farm animals who get dinner and a language lesson at the same time, Skype meetings with Creek academics in which we work together on bringing increasing levels of Creek language into our writings, and many other ongoing conversations throughout Creek country. We listen, and, since we come from a culture that prizes call and response, we hope to echo back some of what she has taught us. As for our cockroach, I don't know if it had anything akin to a language, but it did have witnesses who wanted it to survive, and we hope Hearing the Call bears witness to the power of resistance and continuance.

About the Directors

Craig Womack is an Oklahoma Creek-Cherokee Native American literary scholar, writer, and teacher, and an associate professor of English at Emory University. He is the author of Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (1999), Drowning in Fire (2001), and Art as Performance, Story as Criticism: Reflections on Native Literary Aesthetics (2009). He is co-author of American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006) and Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (2008). He is currently working on a novel about a young musician in Northern Minnesota and his obsession with the Oklahoma folk singer Woody Guthrie. Steve Bransford is a Senior Video Producer at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship.

• 1. The official name of the tribe located in present-day Oklahoma is the Muscogee Creek Nation. The word, in the language, for what Creek people speak is "Mvskoke," pronounced the same as the word for the tribe. Some Creeks prefer the name "Mvskoke" since "Creek" is a name given to the tribe by the English in the Colonial era.
• 2. Linda Hogan, "Blessing," in Calling Myself Home (New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1978), 27.

Call for Submissions

Series title: Queer Intersections / Southern Spaces
Series editor: Eric Solomon, PhD
Submission deadline: July 30, 2018
Submission requirements: 350–500 word proposals OR full projects
Send submissions and direct all inquiries to: Series editor Eric Solomon (seditor@emory.edu)

Southern Spaces, a peer-reviewed, multimedia, open access journal, invites scholars, critics, writers, artists, and activists to submit essays, photo essays, original documentaries, and digital projects for a new series: "Queer Intersections / Southern Spaces."

In a 2013 short manifesto, "Stomp for the Shadows," filmmaker Pratibha Parmar defines the word QUEER via an acronym: Queer, Unspoken, Embolden, Erased, Reclaimed.1 In Parmar's radical formulation of the category "queer," the term becomes less a concrete noun denoting states of being, in which gathered under the umbrella of "queer" are LGBTQ+, and more a verb of doing: speaking or not speaking, emboldening or not emboldening, erasing or making visible, reclaiming or failing to claim, and finally queering or not queering. In this way, to queer is to exist as subjects in the transitive space of choice between doing and not doing. The question shifts from identifying queer subjects as intelligible, fixed beings to asking the critical questions: Toqueer what? Where?When?What do, or should, we queer and why?

With the series "Queer Intersections / Southern Spaces,"Southern Spaces welcomes submissions from scholars, activists, and artists who stand in this intersectional space and raise these critical questions. Southern Spaces asks contributors to consider what ways of being and doing (real and imagined) exist at the intersections of LGBTQ+ identity within locations across southern spaces and the Global South. We invite contributions from writers and creators of any orientation whose work addresses the lives of LGBTQ+ persons and/or applies queer and feminist theory to various topics. We encourage a diversity of methods and theoretical approaches.

All submissions must be original work. Although we expect submissions to consider space, place, and LGBTQ+ subjects critically in relation to the series, the list of possible topics to consider includes (but is not limited to):

• Spaces and Identities​
  • Intersectionality, hybridity, identity: race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, regional identity, and class
  • Migration narratives, globalization, queer diaspora, and spaces of sexuality
  • Public and private spheres and the development of queer subcultures
  • Urban/rural and digital: gentrification, shifts in LGBTQ+ enclaves, and the importance of digital apps/dating in queer space and practice
  • Lesbian, Transgender, and Bisexual southern experiences
  • Gender identity and performance
• Canons and Questions
  • Histories of sexuality in critical and popular thought
  • Identity politics in site-specific contexts
  • Pedagogy and the academy's responsibility to LGBTQ+ subjects
  • Queer theory and feminist theory (pasts, presents, futures)
  • Reconsidering the queer theory canon (Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick, and other foundational theorists)
• Social Justice and Public Policy
  • Violence, vulnerability, and precarity, perhaps with a particular emphasis on Trans women of color in southern spaces
  • Hate crimes and legal protections
  • Incarceration, institutionalization, and sexual violence
  • Pulse and its aftermath
  • Employment, discrimination, and the law
  • Movement reflections: after "Don't ask, don't tell" (DADT), after marriage legalization, etc., what next?
• Health, Affect, Memory
  • Biopolitics and public health
  • HIV/AIDS, seropositivity, stigma, PreP and TasP
  • Disability
  • Safer sex, sex positivity, and radicalism
  • Intimacy, love, and affect
  • Memory, loss, mourning, and memorial practices
• Queer Activism
  • Development, evolution, and futures of gay rights movements
  • Resistance and queer counter-narratives
  • Queer(ing) ethics and morality
  • Faith, religion, and spirituality
• Media and Genre Analyses​
  • Film and video (Queer Cinema)
  • Literary studies
  • Art, visual rhetoric, and representation
  • Archives: reclamations and erasures

Examples

The following pieces and our "Queer Souths" educational resource provide examples of the critical, interdisciplinary, and multimedia engagement with LGBTQ+ subjects that this series seeks to expand:

• Bibler, Michael. "Same-Sex Intimacy in Fiction about Southern Plantations."Southern Spaces, July 8, 2009. https://southernspaces.org/2009/same-sex-intimacy-fiction-about-southern-plantations.
• Chenault, Wesley, Andy Ditzler, and Joey Orr. "Discursive Memorials: Queer Histories in Atlanta's Public Spaces."Southern Spaces, February 26, 2010. https://southernspaces.org/2010/discursive-memorials-queer-histories-atlantas-public-spaces.
• Chesnut, Saralyn, Amanda C. Gable, and Elizabeth Rose Anderson. "Atlanta's Charis Books and More: Histories of a Feminist Space."Southern Spaces, November 3, 2009. https://southernspaces.org/2009/atlantas-charis-books-and-more-histories-feminist-space.
• Solomon, Eric. "Queer Memory: Loss, Martyrs, and Memorialization in Southern Florida."Southern Spaces, August 11, 2016. https://southernspaces.org/2016/queer-memory-loss-martyrs-and-memorialization-southern-florida.

Please submit proposals (350–500 words) or full projects to series editor Eric Solomon (seditor@emory.edu) on or before July 30th, 2018. There is no submission fee or article processing charge. Visit our submissions page for more information.

• 1. Pratibha Parmar, "Stomp for the Shadows,"GLQ 19, no. 4 (2013): 567.

Video and Essay

Ryan Gainey (1944–2016) grew up in the Sandhills of South Carolina in the small town of Middendorf, twelve miles north of Hartsville. Born to a working-class family, Gainey picked cotton at an early age with his brothers, sister, and cousins. Through relatives and neighbors, he developed an early love for propagating plants, rooting camellias in Mason jars underneath the eave of a barn (where they could catch the rain), and learning to grow old-fashioned varieties of petunias and roses. In the 1960s, Gainey studied horticulture at Clemson University, served in the Navy, and eventually settled in Atlanta. He opened a series of garden shops in the affluent Buckhead neighborhood that were successful in part because there were few other boutique garden shops in the area at the time. Gainey sourced many of his plants from the Holcombe Nursery in Decatur, five miles east of Atlanta. When he learned that the Holcombe family wanted to sell their property in 1980, he jumped at the chance.

Gainey envisioned a beautiful new garden in the informal cottage style, using the aged brick walls of the old Holcombe greenhouses as the boundaries for a series of "garden rooms." As his creations garnered attention, he received commissions around the city. Although not formally trained in landscape design, Gainey, through self-study and experimentation, developed a distinctive style that combined cottage garden aesthetics and classical English design with a strong reliance on native plants. By the 1990s he'd become internationally renowned, forming friendships with such English gardening notables as Rosemary Verey and Penelope Hobhouse.

Chad Stogner, founder of the garden accessory company Elegant Earth, worked with Gainey in the 1990s and noted that the designer had a way of "making things look spontaneous. . .that were planned." Most gardeners work to eliminate weeds, but Gainey would allow them to pop up in certain areas. To visitors, these would appear as happy accidents, but they were deliberate, as Gainey explained in his 1993 book The Well-Placed Weed from which our documentary takes its title. Gainey's gardens feature a fascinating give-and-take between the structured and the free-flowing.

Gainey chose many of the plants in his garden for their personal and historical connections, such as the chinaberry tree (Melia azedarach), which was a prominent feature in his childhood yard and also was, as he liked to point out, one of Thomas Jefferson's favorite plants. He discouraged gardeners from mimicking the plant choices of classical English gardens and instead championed the use of native southeastern US plants along with plants from similar latitudes in China and Japan.

In March 2016, a 140-year-old white oak tree that had served as the shady anchor of Gainey's Decatur garden fell on his house. At home at the time and miraculously uninjured, Gainey was forced to relocate to Lexington, Georgia, seventeen miles east of Athens where, in July, he died in a fire trying to save his beloved Jack Russell terriers.

We did our first video shoot with Gainey in the spring of 2010. At the outset, we didn't know what we were doing and were content to let him unspool lectures on gardening topics of his choosing: the history of tea olives or figs, blending purple and gold plant colors, and how to maintain fragrance year-round. He thought we were producing a gardening masterclass. None of us thought we were making a documentary.

We became fascinated with the funny moments just before or just after he delivered his monologues—such as when he'd yell at his dogs or tell a dirty joke or make some ridiculous boast. We were drawn to the tangents that floated above and below the persona: his humor, narcissism, and personal connections to plants.

We eventually found structure for the project by developing a series of overlapping threads: Gainey's childhood, his rise as an entrepreneur and social figure in Atlanta, and his wider reputation as garden designer. We were also drawn to his idiosyncratic personality. We witnessed him being prickly and self-absorbed, as well as generous and thoughtful.

There remain gaps in our story. Gainey acknowledged a couple of times on camera that he was gay but never discussed any of his longtime partners in any detail. We tried to steer him to fill in the biographical narrative, but became resigned that there was no directing Ryan Gainey. He served up a vast body of knowledge via his commanding and often contradictory persona. In the end, we did our best to wrangle an honest character study.

We thought we were winding down the project in early 2016 before the tree fell on his house. That event set in motion a string of calamities that culminated in his tragic death. We worked for another year and a half to tidy up the edit and flow before premiering The Well-Placed Weed: The Bountiful Life of Ryan Gainey at a festival in South Carolina in April 2018.

Ryan Gainey made and collected beautiful things. We are grateful that he shared some of these with us and that, through our documentary, we now share this with others.

The Well-Placed Weed: The Bountiful Life of Ryan Gainey is playing at the Ciné Theater in Athens, Georgia, on June 14, 2018, and will be available for digital purchase later this year. Running time is seventy-eight minutes. Visit the film's website for more information.

About the Directors

Steve Bransford is the senior video producer at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship and the founder of Terminus Films. Cooper Sanchez is an artist and garden designer focused on the restoration of historic southern gardens. For ten years, Cooper has been working to rejuvenate the gardens at Historic Oakland Cemetery as well to build his own garden in Clarkston, Georgia.

Review

On June 19, 1911, the quiet evening descending on Thorndale, Texas, shattered suddenly when a group of men exiting a saloon attacked a youth they found whittling wood. Eyewitnesses reported that the saloon's owner grabbed fourteen-year-old Antonio Gómez and tossed him to the street. As a crowd closed in around Gómez, he defended himself and fatally stabbed the man striking him. Enraged that Gómez's age made his legal execution impossible, a mob decided to lynch him after first dragging him through the streets by a chain fastened around the boy's neck.

Nicholas Villanueva, Jr. contributes to the emerging scholarship on Anglo mob violence against ethnic Mexicans in the United States in this concise, well-written book. While in Forgotten Dead, William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb show the breadth of anti-Mexican violence in the US West between 1848 and 1928, Villanueva details what this meant for targeted individuals.1 In particular, he examines Anglo attacks against Mexicans in the 1910s, the decade of the Mexican Revolution. Not limiting his account to civilian attacks, Villanueva contends that "law officers acting as jury, judge, and executioner acted beyond their authority," thereby lynching for the state (6).

If mobs lynched African Americans for alleged offenses that challenged white supremacy, Villanueva argues that Anglos lynched Mexicans to police "citizenship and sovereignty" (5). Although Mexican Americans were "white by law" since 1848 when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo granted citizenship to the Mexican inhabitants of the newly acquired territory, Anglo immigrants to Texas viewed Mexicans as "greaser[s]," undeserving of equal rights (11). Unable to impose Jim Crow policies on Mexican Americans legally, a less formal "Juan Crow" pattern of prejudice emerged (33). In 1893 and 1905, Texas passed a series of English-only laws that paved the way for the segregation of Mexicans in public schools. Outraged over the unequal treatment of their children, Mexican Americans in San Angelo protested, asserting their rights as US citizens. In an early example of non-violent protest that would characterize later civil rights efforts to desegregate the classroom, Mexican families withheld the names of their school-age children from federal census takers to deny money to a system that discriminated against them. Rather than accept Juan Crow, Mexican Americans advocated for their civil rights and boycotted separate and unequal schooling (37). Their protests made headlines across the state, but international events derailed the effort and plunged the borderlands into the deadliest decade in the state's history.

In a series of case studies Villanueva makes clear that violence against Mexicans in Texas must be understood in a borderlands context, with events in one country affecting race relations in the other. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 played out transnationally, with leaders hiding in exile in Texas, and sedicioso raiders striking US settlements along the border. News reports of attacks on Anglos in Mexico fueled anti-Mexican sentiment in the United States. In November 1910, an Anglo mob in Rocksprings, Texas, stormed the jail and seized Antonio Rodríguez. Claiming that the young migrant worker had raped a white woman, the mob doused him in oil and burned him alive. Anti-American riots broke out across Mexico following news of the lynching and further fueled anti-Mexican sentiment in the borderlands. Anglo Texans viewed refugees of the Mexican Revolution—mostly poor, dark-skinned, working class people—as potential enemies whom they felt free to attack. These changing demographics occurring in the midst of international tensions exacerbated racist fears and help to explain why approximately 20 percent of the documented lynchings of Mexicans in the United States occurred between 1910 and 1920 (6).

Villanueva's boldest argument is his consideration of state-level forces in Texas as lynchers. In 1911, an Anglo mob surrounded the west Texas jail holding Leon Martínez, Jr. Believing him guilty of murdering a young white school teacher, the local sheriff demanded the fifteen-year-old confess or be turned over to the mob outside. Martínez confessed, but asserted his innocence after the mob dispersed. Despite efforts by Mexican American advocates and the Spanish language press, the Texas justice system refused to consider the circumstances which led to the confession and executed the young man in 1914. Villanueva makes a compelling argument for Martínez's coerced confession as a state complicit "legal lynching" (80). In examining another incident—a murderous village assault—Villanueva stretches this argument.

On January 28, 1918, an armed group of Texas Rangers and Anglo ranchers entered El Porvenir, a community of approximately 140 ethnic Mexicans deep in the Big Bend. Accusing the inhabitants of sheltering raiders who had attacked an Anglo ranch, the strike force searched the village. Upon the discovery of two firearms and a pair of boots similar to ones reported stolen, officers led fifteen of the villagers, Mexican Americans, and Mexican refugees away and shot them. The men killed that night ranged in age from sixteen to seventy-two.

In labeling state attacks as lynching, Villanueva goes further than his predecessors. Chicana/o and borderlands historians have well-documented the institutional racism of the Texas Rangers and their role as state enforcers of white supremacy.2 Other historians have considered this police force's attacks as state-sanctioned violence.3 Villanueva classifies the Texas Rangers as part of a posse of "jingo bandits," whom he defines as "persons who attack a community or a group of people without a warrant, and who punish their victims through extralegal measures" (123). These "bandits," however, wore badges which shielded them of their crimes. Disavowing Texas's sanction of the attack, the state's adjutant general James Harley asked for the resignation of the Ranger captain responsible for the massacre and discharged all officers involved. Although an investigation exonerated the victims of any crimes, no law enforcement officer or member of the posse who took part in the atrocity faced charges for the murders.

In detailing the suffering that individuals and communities endured, Villanueva treats his subjects with care, ensuring that readers regard the victims as human beings rather than statistics. Scholars of lynching looking for a comparative analysis of racial violence against ethnic Mexicans with other groups should look elsewhere. Villanueva's work fills a gap in unapologetically Mexican American and borderlands scholarship. Although high school and college history textbooks mention mob attacks against African Americans, US textbooks fail to admit similar assaults against Latinx people. In providing a substantive and unflinching examination of mob violence a century ago, The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands gives much needed context to the contemporary demonization of ethnic Mexicans implicit in current cries for "border security."4

About the Author

George T. Díaz is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley where he teaches courses on United States, Mexican-American, and borderlands history. His first book, Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande, was published by the University of Texas Press in 2015.

• 1. William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
• 2. Miguel Antonio Levario, Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012), 17; and Américo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad & Its Hero(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958), 24.
• 3. Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), 7; and Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 168.
• 4. Matthew Haag, "Border Patrol Agent Killed in Texas in What Senator Calls an Attack,"New York Times, November 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/us/border-patrol-killed-texas.html.

Review

The yeoman farmer is a central figure in debates over the historical dispossessions that created the place we now call Appalachia. For historians like Ron Eller, these self-sufficient small landholders dominated the agrarian past, and first became exploited as residents of company towns when coal, timber, and other corporate interests began in the late nineteenth century to appropriate the land and wealth of the mountains for their own profit.1 During the 1960s and 1970s, activists promoted a related golden-age vision of egalitarian pastoralism in pre-industrial Appalachia, which they contrasted with the ugliness of strip mining, black lung disease, and other contemporary depredations to amplify their calls to "save the land and people." Then, in 1996, Wilma Dunaway swept aside romantic visions of the Appalachian past with prodigious quantitative research, an earlier historical timeline (back to 1700), and the perspective of world systems theory. "On the eve of the Civil War," she concluded, "Appalachians were much more likely than other Americans to be impoverished, illiterate, and landless."2

Steven Stoll's Ramp Hollow intervenes in these and related debates by recasting the nature of agriculture and the meaning of land ownership among the European colonialists and their descendants who settled the Appalachian frontier. Stoll likens Appalachia's early settlers to peasants all over the world, who depend on access to a common "ecological base." In the Appalachian instance, this "base" is the forest: "This is a vast renewable fund of resources that provides spaces for fields, food for gathering, fodder for cattle, and habitat for wild game. The base gives everything but costs nothing" (33). Through the practice of swidden, sometimes pejoratively called slash-and-burn agriculture, settlers cleared portions of the forest and cultivated crops, but their clearings were limited; more importantly, they utilized the forest as a source of wild plants, game, and mast for their free-ranging livestock. Although their economy was "makeshift," without extensive surplus or accumulation, these early settlers rarely starved, Stoll asserts, and they should not be considered poor.

As the western edge of European settlement, the mountainous backcountry of eighteenth-century Appalachia briefly represented a space of relative freedom from state enforcement of property rights. Although elites gained formal title to millions of mountainous acres through grant or purchase, they tended to view the land as "wilderness" and unworthy of investment or even much attention, according to Stoll. A chaos of competing land claims emerged, as well as, in effect, the practice of "land to the tiller." Use-rights prevailed. Squatters and small landholders utilized the vast forest without regard to absentee elites and their abstract legal instruments, which went unenforced, thereby irrelevant, and they engaged in a vigorous barter economy with one another.

Although historians and activists have focused largely on the land-grabbing actions of coal companies in the late nineteenth century as the definitive dispossession of Appalachia, Stoll takes us back to the federalism of Alexander Hamilton in the early republic. Taxation—an obligation that could only be fulfilled in legal currency—was the means to force subsistence agrarians toward a cash economy and extend the administrative reach of centralized government into the recesses of the mountains. "Taxation does not merely fund the state," Stoll observes, echoing the arguments of James C. Scott and other anti-statist anarchist scholars. "It creates its territorial and financial power" (122).3 Armed resistance to Hamilton's tax on distilled spirits, which did not distinguish between commercial and household production, arose from the high value of whiskey in barter exchanges and the onerous compulsion to send money from a cash-poor economy to a distant central government—all on the heels of a war for "independence." Although the Whiskey Rebellion succeeded in discontinuing the excise tax, the coercive extension of a sovereign state—with a unified system of land ownership, property rights, law, currency, taxation, and administrative regularity—would eventually facilitate destruction of the ecological base and subsistence practices of Appalachian agrarians.

Stoll's tale of rural industrialization in the second half of the nineteenth century focuses on what became West Virginia, and is familiar to scholars and many residents of central Appalachia: extension of the railroads into southern West Virginia, corporate acquisition of mineral rights and vast landholdings, opening of the "billion dollar coalfields," growth of company towns and the exploitative trap of scrip (non-legal tender in which miners received wages), company stores, occupational death, the mine guard system of private security thugs. True to his emphasis on subsistence agrarians, however, Stoll builds on work by Ron Lewis to emphasize the wholesale timbering of the mountains, which accompanied coal mining and devoured the ecological base of the forest.4 Combined with the contradiction of a growing population seeking sustenance from a shrinking base of land (analyzed in detail by Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee), these multiple dispossessions spelled an end to the makeshift agrarian economy.5

Stoll directs special attention—and some of his most blistering critique—to the ideologues of capitalist modernity, those self-interested promoters of the benefits of wage labor, efficiency, discipline, and "productive" (i.e., profitable for them and their kind) use of the land. Declaring makeshift agricultural practices a miserable, impoverished throwback that impeded the self-evidently desirable processes of modernization, "Atlantic elites" gradually appropriated the means of subsistence of mountain farmers, then pronounced them miserable and poor. This critique of dominant ideology forms an important bridge toward Stoll's larger purpose in Ramp Hollow, which is to defend the integrity of peasants and the viability of their agricultural practices—when not disrupted by various "development" schemes—all over the world. Indeed, the book begins in West Virginia and ends in West Africa, where Stoll decries the contemporary enclosure movement whereby governments are dispossessing entire peasant villages by transferring "idle" common lands to corporations that produce agricultural commodities for global markets.

Reviewers typically feel an obligation to register a complaint or two about a book, and I am no exception. I was disappointed by Stoll's lack of attention to gender relations and the gendered division of labor, especially in view of his definition of the makeshift agricultural economy as a household mode of production. Although he acknowledges that the agrarian household was a "coercive institution" (216), what he means by that is the authority of patriarchs over their children, who "owed their families a certain term of labor before gaining the right to strike out for themselves" (216). Neither patriarchal authority over wives nor the fact that daughters never gained "the right to strike out for themselves" seems to occur to him. Consistent with his Marxist analytic (and neglect of Marxist-feminism), Stoll focuses exclusively on class relations; in the context of coal camps, this includes analyzing the contradictory role of the household garden as a means to lower the cost of miners' and their families' social reproduction (and thus wages) as well as potentially sustain them during strikes. The labor in those gardens, as in social reproduction more generally, remains unexplored.

To its great credit as a work of history, Ramp Hollow is unusual in its direct relevance to contemporary politics. This is true for not only areas of the world where land grabs and enclosures proceed apace, but also central Appalachia, where the struggle to envision and create post-coal—and potentially "post-capitalist"—futures is ongoing. In his final chapter, Stoll offers a "thought experiment" in the form of "The Commons Communities Act" (272–274), which proposes publicly-owned commons, complete with a variety of incentives and protections for those who live there, each with an ecological base sufficient to sustain residents through "hunting and gathering, cattle grazing, timber harvesting, vegetable gardening, and farming" (272). Although his proposal is understandably crafted for rural contexts, given Stoll's concerns throughout the book, the commons is not necessarily so. Indeed, the argument that different forms of public commons may be key to the reinvigoration of civic life and the prospects for democratic, place-based economies seems to be spreading.6 Regardless of the specifics of such proposals, they reinforce Stoll's overarching argument: capitalist hegemony is not inevitable, and collective access to land is key to the future of Appalachia.

About the Author

Barbara Ellen Smith is professor emerita at Virginia Tech and a member of the editorial board of Southern Spaces. She has long studied and participated in economic justice movements in Appalachia.

• 1. See Ronald D. Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982).
• 2. Wilma A. Dunaway, The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 21.
• 3. See James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
• 4. See Ronald L. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
• 5. See Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee, The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• 6. See Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor, Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Kathryn Newfont, Blue Ridge Commons: Environmental Activism and Forest History in Western North Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); and George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (New York: Verso, 2017).

Introduction

The catfish didn't miss the current. They'd never known it. They lapped the pond all day like pace cars. At feeding time, they thrashed for their share of pellets. The farmers bred them for size and taste and texture and profit. They swam around in that little man-made lake and waited for the chopping block and the flash-frozen package. Their bodies were bullion. There were others of them, wild ones, who lived in the open waters of the river to the west. They sometimes got caught on the trotlines of grizzled river rats. Mostly they grew big as they pleased and swam deep into the crevices of the underwater earth. Fisherman told stories. "Whiskers big as bullwhips." They saw fleeting visions of this barnacled ghost ship. If you caught and ate it, they said, you'd gain all the wisdom of a century. It was part whale. Too big for the line. You could tell by the waves it made breaching the surface.

A white plantation owner in Money, Mississippi, pointed a shotgun at his father's head and threatened to blow it off, Ed Scott Jr. told me in 2013. This happened in the 1920s, when Scott was a boy. Three decades before the murder of Emmett Till put Money on all the wrong maps. The death threat was because Scott's father—who had brought his wife and children to the Delta in 1919—dreamed of being a black landowner instead of a sharecropper.

Ed Scott Jr. and I sat together in the cool-dark A/C. I sat on a stool, he reclined in an electric wheelchair. It was my first visit with him. He recounted more to me, of his tours in World War II ducking Nazi sniper fire with General Patton. How his return home to racism in Mississippi was, as James Baldwin wrote, like "a certain hope had died."1

"[The people back home] didn't care about us no way," Scott said, speaking of whites' reception of black veterans. "They didn't want to see you with that uniform on back then. I was proud of that uniform, but I wasn't proud of Mississippi. Wasn't proud of Mississippi at all."

On the plight of the black soldier, Baldwin writes that he was "almost always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do."2 After the war, Ed Scott stayed on the farm to help his father, who had then amassed hundreds of acres of Delta farmland. Scott's dream was not that the work wouldn't be ugly, or hard, or even menial. But that it would be his own work. That he would be his own master.

Scott made miracles in the cotton field, not far from Fannie Lou Hamer's visionary Freedom Farm. He carried food, prepared by his wife Edna and their children, to civil rights marchers and followed Dr. King to Selma and across the storied Edmund Pettus Bridge. He cleared a million dollars in rice in 1978. In 1983, at the height of his climb, Scott became the first ever non-white owner and operator of a catfish plant in the nation's history. It was a dream fulfilled. It was an act of necessary resistance against an industry, a government, and a society whose very identities seemed predicated on the subservience of black laborers.

"My motto is don't stop chasing your dream," Scott liked to say. "And that was my dream. To grow these catfish. Which I did."

From that first meeting with Ed Scott in 2013, I knew I wanted to write a book about his life. Over the course of the next several years, I would interview Scott, his family, his contemporaries, his lawyer. The Scott odyssey is now told in the pages of Catfish Dream: Ed Scott's Fight for His Family Farm and Racial Justice in the Mississippi Delta (University of Georgia Press, Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place series).

Ed Scott was not alone on the journey. He modeled himself after his father, Edward Scott Sr., a sharecropper-turned-landowner who brought the family from Alabama to Mississippi in 1919. (When Scott's mother, Juanita, pleaded to Edward Senior for a return home, away from Mississippi meanness, Edward Senior replied, resolutely, "I believe I could stay in Hell one year if I knew I could move out the next.") Ed Scott took the reins of the farm and joined forces with his wife, Edna Ruth Scott, whose own father was a community organizer and prodigious farmer in nearby Mound Bayou. He partnered with his siblings and children and extended family and neighbors—including the group of black women nicknamed "the Dependables" who served as his catfish special forces. The Scotts' roots run deep. They believe in legacy and namesake.

"You never know why God let that last child be named Edward," said Rose Marie Scott-Pegues, Ed Scott's eldest daughter. "He was more like his father than any of [the other] children. [His] thing is, 'I don't want you to sell any of my land. Ever.' And I'm looking at this a million years from now. . . . This land will still be Scotts' land.

I exited the Scott home after my first visit with the Scotts, into the Delta heat as if from a sheltered cave. The orator's cadence had slowed and warped time. It had felt like days, or decades, or all time. As I drove away, these are the things I was thinking about.

1990

Worms ain't got no feets. A page in a handmade book. A caption to a hand-scrawled illustration. An earthworm with four legs and Converse. Drawn by Annette, my afternoon babysitter, a high school senior, a young black woman who chewed her gum only until the sugar ran out. This in blink-and-you'll-miss-it Shaw, Mississippi, not far from where I would later sit with Ed Scott and hear him unfurl his tale. Out of the dirt and onto the page, through the dreamy veil of imagination, the worm with feets came. My first acknowledgement of mythmaking.

What does the Delta grow? Cotton, yes, the empire of it. The stalks like phalanxed soldiers and the bolls their thorny white heads. Propagated in postcards and genre paintings as widely as it was ginned and shipped. That is to say, all over the globe. Then rice, which Comet and Uncle Ben's came down to bid on. It, mostly white, too. Soybeans came. And corn. More than you could haul. Then catfish; out of the muddy river and into the aerated pond. But Mississippi's fertile crescent grows more than its commodities. It spawns paradox and polemic. Starkness and cacophony. Plenty and need. And of course, black and white.

My childhood home backed up to the Shaw High School practice field. For most of the hours of the day, it was quiet, until the band marched out to play. They stomped the earth and cut divots in the grass with their heels and rattled my existence. To me, their appearance was alchemy. Like rolling thunder shaped into flesh and bone. Fulfilling the latent potential of the field.

Other things the Delta grew then and still does. One-of-a-kind stores, forever "un-chained," with esoteric signs. Autocrats, plutocrats, democrats. Ramblers and gamblers. Day laborers, night laborers, nightcrawlers. Cottonmouths. Plantation houses on Indian Mounds. Jukes. Blues. Open roads. Dark and lonely cells. Government assistance. Government neglect. Lots not yet vacant but long past occupied. Ribs, bibs, bibles. Sunday dinner. Roadside eats. Potato logs on a hot tray under a heat lamp. Lessons. Teachers. Strong women—mothers and daughters, activists and administrators—who hold it all together. It spawns proximity, to the sinful roots of the nation and to graveyards and to ghosts. And also distance, an elusive recalcitrance to ever being pinned down or fully made sense of or tied neatly together. Undone shoelaces swinging on a tuba player in a marching band stampede. The notion that worms ain't got no feets coupled with the inkling that in the Delta, they probably do.

I was thinking about these things on the day after I first spoke with Ed Scott. Because in 1990, when my eyes were opening to the whole wide world, the Scotts were fighting it just a few counties away. Using a catfish as a club and barely hanging on. And I'd had no idea.

2013

Ed Scott's grandson, Daniel Scott, took me through the ruins of the catfish plant. It had opened in 1983 to fanfare with a ribbon cutting and music and a contest to see which of the workers could hand-filet fish the fastest. Commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce Jim Buck Ross looked on in his cowboy hat. He later said in a press release that "an operation with this early success is certainly a credit to our people, creating new employment at a time it is most needed."3

This plant shouldn't have existed. It had been an old tractor shed, and Scott built his crowning achievement atop the bones after the local white processor refused to sell him stock so that he could process his crop like all the other farmers. When he found this out, he set up a tour of that Indianola, Mississippi plant. On the way through, the tour guide asked Scott whether he had stock in the plant or a relationship with any live haulers who would take his fish. "Nope," Scott said.

"Well, what the hell you going to do with your fish, eat 'em?!"

"Something like that," Scott told the man. "I'm down here now seeing what you're doing. I'm going to clean my own fish."

To tour the plant was to be forced to imagine what was and what might have been. Paint had faded, beams had fallen. An old television sat on the floor beneath a ceiling that was no more. Handwashing and "employees only" signs refused to budge, even while the rest of the building slowly reverted back to Delta wild. The plant closed around 1990, surviving even after the government foreclosed on the land and snatched the fish from the ponds. And in tandem with the white-dominated industry, the government constricted the flow of catfish that Scott had been buying, cash, to process and take to market himself. The plant closed at a time when national chains like McDonald's and Church's Chicken were experimenting with catfish on the menu. There was great promise for the Scotts nationally, coupled with great resistance against them locally. Under the pressure, the Scotts lasted for as long, and longer, than anyone could have imagined.

"And it was real sad because people was trying to get him out of business," said plant worker Lillie Watson-Price. "Oftentime he didn't get the finances that he need to continue to grow his own fish. . . . So what he started doing is buying the fish. Or getting it on credit. And that only lasts for so long. And they would come, and bring the fish and bring the fish and bring the fish. It was good, for a while. . . ."

"Watch your step, too," Daniel Scott told me on the way through the plant site. "That was like a storage room. That was the break room. They would change clothes, the workers."

Daniel recalled his time at the plant as a teenager. He was working the skinning line and lost a fingernail. Snatched right off. Another time, he nearly cut off his finger on the bandsaw. If I could have gone back to 1990, in the plant's final days, I would have seen the Dependables processing tens of thousands of pounds of fish a day. I would have heard them laughing, seen them grinning, felt their pride at working a dignified job, however odious and blood-soaked it may have been. The workers were almost exclusively African American, as they were at the other processing plants. There, carpal tunnel and sexual assault was rampant. But here, Scott's workers prospered. I could have peeked around a corner and seen them joshing between shifts, throwing cubes of ice, concealed in their pockets, at each other's backsides. At lunchtime, I would have walked a hundred feet across the gravel parking lot to the Scotts' home to eat, where Edna Scott had opened her own kitchen and cafeteria to feed the workers and surrounding farmers with fried fish and the bounty from her garden patch.

James Baldwin, reluctant optimist, spoke about the gap between dreams and reality. "Until the moment comes, when we, the Americans, we, the American people, are able to accept the fact . . . that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity, that we need each other, that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country—until this moment comes there is scarcely any hope for the American dream."4

When I was small, I heard much about problematic patriarchs. They littered my history books and struck smart poses. In civics class, we studied rhetorical structure and theoretical justice. I heard tell of trickle-down economics and bootstraps. There was an absence. All the people left out of this scheme.

Within the unfair system, there are outliers like the Scotts who make strides against the odds. Their summits are worth celebrating, even as they remind us that such climbs are precarious. They illustrate what the American dream should mean. A parcel of land, hard won, that endures across the generations. An enterprise, built through collaboration, with wealth that flows outward and downstream. A system made not solely by patriarchs but by extended families who share in the labors and define their collective futures.

"Those bees are back," said Daniel Scott, pointing to the rafters of the disintegrating processing plant. "You hear them. I thought they was gone. It's crazy, ain't it? How time will do shit?"

Ed and Edna Scott's children—especially Isaac Scott and Willena Scott-White—have restored the lost acreage, gone for thirty years to unjust foreclosure. The overgrown fields have been disked and re-planted with rice and soybeans, steadfast crops of twenty-first century Mississippi. Isaac Scott, who learned to farm from his father, now employs GPS on his combine. Willena Scott-White has plans for the Delta Farmers Museum and Cultural Learning Center in Mound Bayou to keep the stories of black farmers alive. The Scotts taught me that America's story is still being written, and all are authors of it.

Though many of the Scotts have passed on, the land remains. Near the ruins of the plant, a handful of gravestones occupy a shaded plot, in various degrees of wear. Edward Senior is buried here. He died in 1957 but looked on as his son made history. Ed Scott and Edna Scott, who passed in 2015 and 2016, are buried here too. The family cemetery is well-manicured and regularly visited. The pioneers who rest in the earth are rooted still. On Scott family land. Always, Scott family land.

About the Author

Julian Rankin is the founding director of the Center for Art & Public Exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the recipient of the Southern Foodways Alliance's first annual residency at Rivendell Writers' Colony.

• 1. James Baldwin, "Letter from a Region in My Mind,"New Yorker, November 17, 1962, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17/letter-from-a-region-in-my-mind.
• 2. Baldwin, "Letter from a Region."
• 3."Mississippi Boasts First Black-owned Catfish Plant in U.S.," Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce press release, March 3, 1983.
• 4. James Baldwin, Debate: Baldwin vs. Buckley, the Cambridge Union Society, Cambridge, UK, February 18, 1965, broadcast by the National Educational Television Network, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOCZOHQ7fCE.

Southern Spaces announces Educational Resources, a new feature of our website developed for educators, students, and researchers. Southern Spaces educational resources collect the journal's publications into several fields of knowledge across multiple disciplines. Presenting well-crafted articles, videos, reviews, interviews, and digital projects, these collections of open access materials offer valuable resources for teaching, learning, and research, and reinforce our ongoing commitment to open access.

Open Educational Resource (OER) is the name given by proponents of open access to educational material—including course content, assignments, syllabi, and more—freely available to copy and distribute. Increasing the availability of high-quality educational content through OERs is part of a broader movement of open access that disseminates research and critical analysis, reduces barriers to the discovery of scholarship, and enhances education and research initiatives.1

A spirit of accessibility and collaboration underpins the creation of OERs. Southern Spaces joins several resources available online for instructors and students interested in incorporating OERs into their teaching and learning, or creating and disseminating their own classroom materials. Open Washington has created a self-paced online workshop that "cover[s] the fundamental aspects of OER including open licensing and public domain" and "provid[es] practical guidance in locating and applying openly available resources."2 The website features OER collections that include videos, images, course materials, and textbooks. Other popular OER repositories include OER Commons, an online public library of OERs, and MIT OpenCourseWare, a "web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content."3 We hope our own OERs will be useful to Southern Spaces readers as they create syllabi, study guides, and assignments for courses, as well as engage in research projects and conversations about real and imagined spaces.

The Educational Resources section of our website—navigable by clicking "Browse" on the Southern Spaces navigation bar, selecting "Educational Resource" in the menu that appears at the left, then clicking "More"—currently features eight curated educational resources, with more collections forthcoming as the journal continues to innovate in critical regional studies, digital scholarship, and open access publishing.

Educational resources currently available include:

• African American Art and Aesthetic Experiences
• Environments and Ecologies
• Indigenous Souths
• Queer Souths
• Reading and Writing Souths
• Religion
• Social Memory and Memorialization
• Southern Screens

Southern Spaces will update our educational resources as we publish new scholarship, and we will continue to expand the range of subjects our educational materials cover. Upcoming resources will feature collections on music and sound cultures and the Atlanta Metro and Appalachian regions. To offer suggestions for future educational resources, please contact us with ideas and recommendations here.

Using Southern Spaces Educational Resources

Southern Spaces seeks to make scholarship accessible and available to a wide audience of researchers and teachers, students in and out of classrooms, library patrons, and general readers. Accordingly, we have created these educational resources for use at multiple educational levels and in various learning situations.

Southern Spaces educational resources are especially suited for discussions of the history of the shifting idea of the American South as well as the emergence of distinct southern regions with their political, social, economic, and cultural expressions. Our long-form interpretive and critical pieces result from extended scholarly engagement with a topic, frequently breaking new ground in critical regional studies, African American, Native, and American Studies, women's and gender studies, public health, and digital humanities. The publications collected in the "Indigenous Souths" educational resource—for example, Sarah H. Hill's expansive studies of Native Removal in Rome and Ellijay, Georgia—stand at the forefront of scholarship on the historical, political, and social dimensions of Cherokee Removal. Similarly, the "Social Memory and Memorialization" educational resource collects innovative Southern Spaces scholarship on such topics as the history of slave labor in the construction of American universities and the Smithsonian; a review of artist Kara Walker's "Blood Sugar" installation; and a video presentation about how Confederate monuments participate in historical erasure.

Our educational resources also emphasize interdisciplinary approaches in the study of southern regions and their global connections. "Reading and Writing Souths," for instance, adapts spatial theory and cultural geography to the study of written expression and literature. Our scholarship on canonical author Flannery O'Connor embodies this approach. Students can examine a photo essay of Andalusia (the farm near Milledgeville, Georgia, where O'Connor spent the last thirteen years of her life), an article that traces the landscapes and characters of her life as they emerge in her letters, a discussion of her importance to novelist Alice Walker in a reconsideration of the "Southern Renaissance," and a visit by poet Sean Hill to the segregated cemetery where she is buried. These sources explore Andalusia and Milledgeville as lived spaces alongside the imagined geographies that O'Connor created. A 2014 blog post, too, presents the many afterlives of the author as they emerge in "Scale Highly Eccentric: A Zine of Portraits of Flannery O'Connor."

We encourage the use of Southern Spaces educational resources in composition and writing classrooms. Our curated collections feature publications that approach a similar theme or subject across multiple genres, creating ways to examine constraints and opportunities unique to each. Studying the rhetorical situation of writing about memory and place collected in "Social Memory and Memorialization," for example, uncovers compelling differences in audience, purpose, tone, style, register, claims, structures, and arguments across the genres we publish. What does poetry offer for Natasha Trethewey's meditations on geography and place compared to a recorded interview or public address? Similarly, studying reviews of films, monographs, photography and art installations, and digital projects create opportunities for teaching the types of analyses, evidence, and organization that scholars use to make critical assessments. The "Southern Screens" and "African American Art and Aesthetic Experiences" educational resources offer robust collections of reviews well-suited for studying composition.

Southern Spaces educational resources also create possibilities for investigating intersections between images and texts. As a digital journal, Southern Spaces delivers audio, video, images, text, and data to facilitate new ways of presenting and interpreting content. "African American Art and Aesthetic Experiences" organizes examples of how visual materials—photographs of homes in Atlanta's Collier Heights neighborhood, the epic quilts of Gwendolyn Ann Magee, or portraits of Low Country Traveler car club members—convey moving narratives and incisive scholarship, as well as examples of how students might integrate media into their own multimodal projects.

Southern Spaces considers the creation and distribution of our educational resources an important part of our mission to make valuable knowledge and insightful critique openly and freely available. We hope these materials generate constructive opportunities for Southern Spaces readers to enhance teaching, learning, and research while reducing costs and barriers.

About the Author

Sophia Leonard is the assistant managing editor of Southern Spaces and a PhD student in English at Emory University.

• 1."Benefits of Open Access Journals," Public Library of Science, accessed November 17, 2017, https://www.plos.org/open-access/.
• 2."How to Use Open Educational Resources," Open Washington, last modified March 3, 2016, http://www.openwa.org/module-1/.
• 3."About OCW," MIT OpenCourseWare, accessed November 17, 2017, https://ocw.mit.edu/about/.

Blog Post

I can remember the first time I understood death. Growing up in the Mississippi Delta, early in the mornings, my mother would visit one of her home care patients, an elderly man ("Mr. S") who lived alone around the corner from us. My mother runs a home health and hospice department with the local hospital, and for as long as I can recall, she has woven in and out of the lives of others, helping them heal in the comfort of their homes or easing their suffering as they died. Down in the Delta, the alluvial floodplain between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers in northwest Mississippi, perennially listed as the poorest and most unhealthy region in the country, the need for healthcare providers like my mother remains unbounded. Chronic sickness and death saturate the landscape.

My mother would leave each morning to visit Mr. S. Usually she would wake my two siblings and me at 6:45, leave around 7:00 with makeup done but hot curlers still in her hair, return around 7:45, remove the curlers, mist her hair with her "Big Sexy Hair" spray, and drive us five minutes to school before heading to the office and further patients to visit and administrative duties to complete. While she was gone, we kids would take turns showering in our house's one shower, make our sack lunches (usually peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and some version of potato chips), and be ready to leave when she got back home. On this particular morning, my mother did not come back home at 7:45. As an eleven-year-old, I first thought, "We're going to be late for school."

Only when my mother called home around 8:00 and told us we better walk that day did I understand that something had happened at Mr. S's house. I grabbed my little brother's hand as my older sister grabbed mine and we headed out.

When my mother got home that evening, I knew she had been crying. Mr. S was a special patient, one she had seen every morning for several years. That morning he had died. Slowly, the narrative unfolded: she had not been able to get him to come to his front door; she could see through the window into his living room where he lay on the floor; my mother broke a window and called the police once she entered the house; Mr. S had been dead for a while by the time she arrived. My mother called the coroner, filed the reports, notified the family; she did what end-of-life caretakers do. Absent from this narrative of events was the bond my mother had formed with this man of no relation who had shared his home with her each morning as she cared for him, who had given her youngest son a baby doll as a gift, who had shared with her in his old age the wisdom only time can teach. The ethic of care and mutual respect between them was a kind of love that had been ripped from my mother that morning, as quickly as it typically took her to remove the pins from her curlers before shuffling us off to school.

I first understood then that this is what death felt like: a sudden realization of the loss of love. Later, I would understand that no matter the type of love, no matter how each individual identified or how each relationship was defined, loss was always loss, though the grief that followed could take many forms. Loss and grief irrevocably altered the makeup of one's days. Furthermore, they affected everyone. My mother never returned to Mr. S's house, and the composition of our early mornings entered a new phase.

Sometimes I think we Mississippians have a special relationship with death because the ghosts of history haunt us, inform every decision we make, good or bad, and necessarily bring shame upon us again when we inevitably fail to do the right thing. Sometimes I think that on the national stage, Mississippi was, is, and perhaps always will be a failing, floundering actor. However, as one of its LGBTQ sons, I too have seen my state's goodness, personified most concretely in the pillar of my mother's selfless actions over the years—a woman who was born, raised, and perhaps will die in Mississippi—and in thinking about her from time to time in light of all that Mississippi has done and continues to do wrong, I have faith we can do better by all our citizens. There are things we can do right, changes Mississippians can make, changes which would make me more comfortable going home to see my mother without fear of being denied any form of service each of my straight siblings enjoys freely and takes for granted.

In January 2018, the US Supreme Court decided not to hear arguments against Mississippi's draconian 2016 Religious Liberty Accommodations Act, HB 1523, which allows businesses and providers to refuse service to LGBTQ individuals should such service violate "sincerely held religious beliefs." In refusing to hear the cases of Barber v. Bryant and Campaign for Southern Equality v. Bryant, the Court allowed the law to go into effect (legally in force) and ensured that Jim Crow by another name again be the law of a state that, to paraphrase Nina Simone, everyone already knows about anyways.

On June 4, 2018, when the Court decided in favor of Colorado bakery Masterpiece Cakeshop, it set a dangerous precedent: LGBTQ discrimination and bigotry can be legislated and upheld, allowing laws like Mississippi's HB 1523 to remain on the books. At least for now. Given the shifted balance of the Supreme Court, it is my hope that in time my Mississippi will overturn HB 1523 on its own. The state's history offers little to support such hope.

The language of HB 1523 is clear, identifying three specific "religious beliefs or moral convictions" that merit special protection and codification by law:

• Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman;
• Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and
• Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual's immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.

Setting aside my own objections to such "beliefs," the language of the act violates federal law and enshrines into Mississippi law discriminatory practices with far reaching everyday implications. For example, medical and funeral providers have the legal right to deny care and service to LGBTQ individuals even as such a denial violates the Hippocratic Oath and similar ethical codes of conduct—likely resulting in civil litigation. In Mississippi, second-class citizenship remains under the aegis of special "religious liberty" measures for a bigoted few.

HB 1523 is an attack on LGBTQ individuals, and despite numerous legal challenges and actions by states and cities banning official publicly funded travel to Mississippi, the law remains in effect.1

One ongoing test of HB 1523 continues to receive attention: Zawadski v. Brewer Funeral Services. In May 2017, Jack Zawadski (of Picayune, MS) sued Picayune Funeral Home for damages relating to breach of contract, negligent misrepresentation, and the intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress. The lawsuit narrative is as follows: in May 2016, Jack lost his beloved partner of fifty-two years, Robert "Bob" Huskey. The couple met in California in 1965, chose to retire in 1997 in Mississippi, and when the Supreme Court ruled on marriage equality in 2015, married. By 2016, knowing that Huskey was dying from a heart condition, husband Zawadski and nephew John Gaspari organized funeral preparations. They selected Picayune Funeral Home largely because it was the only suitable cremation service within a ninety-mile radius of where the couple lived. Under the contract, the funeral home agreed to transport Huskey's body from the nursing home for cremation. The couple made plans for the transition from fifty-plus years of love and companionship. Upon Huskey's death, allegedly upon learning that Huskey's next-of-kin and husband was Zawadski, the funeral home reneged on its contractual obligations.

Unable to sue the funeral home for discrimination (Mississippi law does not protect LGBTQ subjects), and as HB 1523 actually now makes it easier to be discriminated against, Zawadski instead sued for breach of contract. HB 1523 will favorably factor into the funeral home's defense.

The Zawadski litigation is listed under the category "Other Lambda Legal Case-Related Materials" in a brief both the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and Family Equality Council presented to the US Supreme Court in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. In it, the attorneys write:

Across America, LGBT people are subjected to pervasive discrimination. This discrimination often blindsides its targets, hitting without warning during the myriad transactions that make up daily life. As a result, many LGBT people live defensively, always on guard against the next humiliating, ostracizing incident. From casual shaming to harassment to outright refusals of service, the treatment visited upon this minority effectively subordinates to others' biases their freedom to live with equal dignity.

It's difficult to argue with this sketch of LGBTQ life, but in light of the Zawadski case in my home state, I cannot help but ponder "to live with equal dignity." What is at stake in overturning "religious freedom" laws is more than the "freedom" of LGBTQ individuals "to live with equal dignity," although few would deny the necessity of that fight. The right of LGBTQ individuals to die with equal dignity and receive equal medical access, treatment, and service in that process has also long motivated the activist movement especially during and since the height of the AIDS crisis. Zawadski v. Brewer Funeral Services brings to the fore the legal impulse and ethical imperative to protect our loved ones as they die, and to continue to do right by them after they have died even as we mourn their loss. A Mississippi law that protects a funeral home's decision not only to deny a gay man mortuary service for his late husband but also to renege on the contract already established once they learned of the couple's intimate status is shameful, unethical, and arguably unconstitutional.

I cannot imagine the humiliation Zawadski felt upon hearing this refusal and disavowal. While Brewer Funeral Services deny that they reversed the Zawadski contract for reasons of "sexual orientation," to my knowledge, they have not provided any other justification for their actions. The questions remain: how far can "religious freedom" be stretched, in Colorado, in Mississippi, and beyond? At what point does a person's legal protection to believe what he or she believes in the name of faith or religion become a legal sanction of bigotry?

When I think about Jack and Bob, about Bob's death and the humiliation Jack suffered in attempting to cremate his dead lover, I think about Mr. S. and what would have become of him had my mother not shown up that morning, had she decided not to continue caring for him for whatever reason, "religious,""moral," or otherwise. It was my mother's job, but more than that, it was her goodness that motivated her to care for a man she would grow to love and later mourn following his death for which she served as first responder.

It is with my first memory of death and with my reflections on Zawadski that I have come to understand how HB 1523 fails all Mississippians. I have always been proud to be from Mississippi, to have learned the lessons I learned growing up there, ones I sometimes wonder if I would have learned growing up elsewhere. But I also know that Mississippi, to invoke poet Natasha Trethewey, is a state that again makes "a crime of me" and others like me in its repudiation of our full equality before the law. "Religious liberty" laws are not really about religious liberty.

Regardless of what the judicial system decides in Zawadski and regardless of the fate of Mississippi's HB 1523, sixty percent of Americans believe religious-based denials of service are wrong. Case closed. In the lead up to the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, the ACLU passed out canvassing signs that read, "It's not about the Cake." Similarly, the Zawadski case is not about the cremation. These are matters of love and death by which all citizens have the right to be equally protected.

In his 1967 pulp novel, A Lover Mourned, gay Mississippian Carl Corley writes, "It has been said that lovers can see forward as well as backward, can see into the past and into the future, wherever their lover is concerned."2 In January 2018, the same month the Supreme Court chose not to hear arguments against Mississippi's HB 1523, Jack Zawadski passed away, reuniting with husband Bob Huskey, the man he first met in 1965. Zawadski did not live to know the result of his case against the humiliating treatment he received following his lover's death less than one-year prior. Yet, in his brief period of mourning, Zawadski never stopped fighting for the dignity and freedom the couple deserved. What was denied in life, we should grant in death. Lambda Legal continues the fight on behalf of Zawadski.

While it may be true that everyone knows about Mississippi and that we Mississippians live daily with our ghosts, it is also true that in our daily living and haunting, we should do right by our dead. All of them.

About the Author

Eric Solomon earned his doctorate in English from Emory University and is a visiting assistant professor at Oxford College, Emory University. He is currently revising his first manuscript.

• 1. The states banning publicly funded travel to Mississippi include California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington. Additionally, both Washington, DC, and select counties in Wisconsin, Ohio, Maryland, and Oregon issued travel bans. Cities including Baltimore, MD; Berkeley, CA; Cincinnati, OH; Dayton, OH; Honolulu, HI; Long Beach, CA; Los Angeles, CA; Miami Beach, FL; New York City, NY; Oakland, CA; Philadelphia, PA; Portland, ME; Providence, RI; Salt Lake City, UT; San Francisco, CA; San Jose, CA; Santa Fe, NM; Seattle, WA; Tampa, FL; West Palm Beach, FL; and Wilton Manors, FL, have issued bans. Finally, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the European Union also issued warnings to travelers to both Mississippi and North Carolina (in the wake of North Carolina's similarly draconian Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act).
• 2. Carl Corley, A Lover Mourned (San Diego, CA: Publishers Export Co., 1967), 117.

Introduction

In the five years since August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc along the entire Gulf Coast and the subsequent failure of New Orleans’ levee system altered the history and the face of the city, thousands of professional and amateur photographers have sought to corral their memories and impressions of Katrina and its aftermath. Torrents of still and moving images speak to the immensity of the event that poet and New Orleans resident Andrei Codrescu refers to as “the most photogenic disaster in American history since the Civil War.”1

The virtual exhibition presented here revolves around one iconic form in the visual landscape of Katrina in New Orleans—variants of the X-code left by searchers as they systematically covered the city, critically pertinent markings applied to visited houses and buildings. “Paint fades, archives endure,” reads a promotional poster from the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank.2 Displaying three progressively fainter versions of the ubiquitous spray-painted signs that greeted residents returning to the city, the poster solicits electronic recollections for the Memory Bank as it features the X-code graphic that became an indelible symbol on the streets of New Orleans after Katrina. Although outdoors the codes are fading and disappearing, the X-code photographs, recorded by anyone in the vicinity during the last five years with a camera, constitute a documentary archive with tales to tell.

The enigmatic X-code messages could appear threatening in their mystery, especially upon structures of personal significance to the viewer, while the cumulative power of thousands of these markings communicated the enormous scale of what had occurred. In addition to wind and water damage, infrastructure destruction, uncertainty about the fate of family, neighbors, and friends, and a complete disruption of familiar life, the appearance of the codes added another unknown—a mysterious graphic with alphanumeric markings spray-painted on homes, schools, businesses, and places of worship. Some residents immediately deciphered their meanings. There were also interpretations available such as a New OrleansTimes-Picayune's September 17, 2005, front-page article.3 Too often, though, the message sent was not the message received. Finding an X-code on his home, University of New Orleans professor Frederick Barton spoke for many when he commented, "That first day and for many thereafter, we did not understand what the mark meant. In fact, I am not sure that I do yet."4

Artist Elyse Defoor described her first visit back to the city in early 2006: “Instead of being macabre symbols X-ing out all presence, the Xs were in fact a coding system used by the search and rescue teams. . . . The discovery that what I had perceived to be marks of annihilation were in fact useful tools did not diminish the visceral experience of seeing those Xs scrawled across my beloved city. For me, they will always be stigmata of immense loss and unexpected death."5

How did others interpret the X-code?

". . . there was something almost biblical about those markings on all the front doors around here. . ."6

“. . . conjuring a cross between the Vévé signs of voudun and a kind of military coroner's occupation.”7

“Now each house bore runic signs in orange spray paint. . .”8

“Ah, the X—truly the most powerful symbol, for better or worse, that we have, I think.”9

“For Tales of Life and Death, the Writing’s on the Walls”10

“. . . end-of-the-world eerie.”11

“. . .alarming . . . invasive . . .a violation . . .lawless graffiti . . . disrespectful . . .”12

The images gathered in this virtual exhibition entertain all these interpretations and more. Those recorded in 2005 and 2006 were most often found on grievously damaged properties. Some stakeholders returning were disturbed by the memories and symbolism, and quickly painted over, scrubbed and scraped off the codes, or discarded the offending graphics as they replaced doors, windows, or siding. Others were later removed as a concession to appearances for insurance purposes. Some residents made a conscious decision to retain the codes as part of the provenance of that structure or a memorial to the event. Shrine-like tableaux incorporate some X-code markings. Still others remain as unwitting testimonials on neglected, deteriorating structures barely touched since 2005, default memorials and commentaries.

The repetition of the X-code on house after house after house on mile after mile after mile of streets composed a powerful architectural narrative during the weeks following the storm as they appeared on structures spanning the socioeconomic mix of the city. “This [official graffiti] was the now-famous ‘X’ in a fluorescent orange or yellow that on the Caribbean-style color schemes of the homes in New Orleans made for some startling graphics,” recalls New Orleans artist Thomas Mann. “I began documenting these signs immediately and continue to do so. I found these markings to be visually interesting and full of import."13

New Orleans, Louisiana, 2005. Photographs by Thomas Mann. © Thomas Mann.

Codes Decoded

Mann was on vacation when the storm struck on August 29, 2005, so, like viewers all over the world, he watched television coverage of the unfolding tragedy in his city. He captured a screen image of a reporter sketching the official code in a notebook while explaining the search process.

Cynthia Scott's photo provides a clear illustration of the code in Faubourg Marigny in 2005. In addition to its adherence to the manual’s instructions, it stands out because, as the artist observes, “It appears the search team made an effort to coordinate their markings with the color scheme already in place.”

Although there is an official code system outlined in the Urban Search & Rescue team manuals used since the early 1990s, the code was not familiar to most citizens. With some 80% of New Orleans’ structures marked, the code commanded unprecedented attention.14

Single slash drawn upon entry to a structure or area indicates search operations are currently in progress. The time and TF identifier are posted as indicated.

Crossing slash drawn upon personnel exit from the structure or area.

Distinct markings will be made inside the four quadrants of the X to clearly denote the search status and findings at the time of this assessment.

The marks will be made with carpenter chalk, lumber crayon, or duct tape and black magic marker.

LEFT QUADRANT — US&R TF identifier

TOP QUADRANT — Time and date that the TF personnel left the structure.

RIGHT QUADRANT — Personal hazards.

BOTTOM QUADRANT — Number of live and dead victims still inside the structure.
["0" = no victims]

National Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) Response System, Washington, DC, September 25, 2003. Field Operations Guide by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The most striking portion of the code is the lower quadrant of the X, denoting the number of survivors or bodies.

Urban Search & Rescue (US&R) task forces, certified by FEMA, are highly trained first responders, who specialize in response to structural collapse, and who may be deployed in disasters either by FEMA or by sponsoring states. There are twenty-eight US&R task forces throughout the United States. While the codes are specified as their communication tool, in the chaos following the storm, first responders from other agencies often used a variant of the code, improvised their own, or may not have marked at all.

Another frequently encountered graphic is the X (or slash) in a square. This code is also an official US&R marking warning of structural instability and is diagrammed in the FEMA manual.15

National Urban Search and Rescue Response System

Structure is accessible and safe for search and rescue operations. Damage is minor with little danger of further collapse.

Structure is significantly damaged. Some areas are relatively safe, but other areas may need shoring, bracing, or removal of falling and collapse hazards. The structure may be completely pancaked.

Structure is not safe for search and rescue operations and may be subject to sudden additional collapse. Remote search operations may proceed at significant risk. If rescue operations are undertaken, safe haven areas and rapid evacuation routes should be created.

Arrow located next to a marking box indicates the direction to the safe entrance to the structure, should the marking box need to be made remote from the indicated entrance.

Indicates that a HAZMAT condition exists in or adjacent to the structure. Personnel may be in jeopardy. Consideration for operations should be made in conjunction with the Hazardous Materials Specialist. Type of hazard may also be noted.

National Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) Response System, Washington, DC, September 25, 2003. Field Operations Guide by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The mysterious TFW Code

A different form of code seen frequently in the Upper Ninth Ward, is the mysterious TFW code. There continues to be much speculation about the identity of the search team who left these markings. There are two forms of this code—one is a simple spray-painted lettering of TFW with the date, as seen in Andrea Booher's image above of guardsmen, taken on September 20.

Thomas Mann's photographs shows another more elaborate TFW iteration, a circular format with a date and information, plus a version of the TFW expanded into TFWldcts.

Jane Fulton Alt’s photograph shows a similar circular configuration, but without the expansion to Wldct.

How is this code interpreted? The exact meaning is a source of great speculation among residents and visitors, and after five years this speculation is taking on the dimensions of an urban legend. Here are a few guesses:

Toxic Flood Water

Totally Full of Water

Texas Fish & Wildlife

Tennessee Fish & Wildlife

Totally (x-rated)

Team Forth Worth

Task Force Wyoming

Task Force Wildcat

Fire department personnel told Bob Thomas, director of the Center for Environmental Communication at Loyola University, that this code stands for Task Force Wildcat.16 But not everyone agrees with this interpretation. “Amazing how hard it is to find info,” said Thomas four-and-a-half years later. “But—while they were doing the S&R, no one was even thinking of keeping records.” Jackson Barracks historian Thomas M. Ryan, LTC (ret) of the Louisiana National Guard (LNG), reports, “My source indicates that TFW was the mark used by Task Force Wyoming which coincides with my post-K memory bank. Hope that this helps.”17 Another LNG source confirms this interpretation. However, an online publication dated September 19, 2005, identifies the elusive group as a combination of the West Virginia and Oregon National Guards, signing themselves as TFW (Task Force Wildcat).18

KEN

Structures marked with KEN were specifically searched for bodies by Kenyon International Emergency Services, a Texas company that provided mobile morgue services. The codes indicate that two bodies were removed from this structure on October 2, 2005. The date confirms that the morgue service was still operating thirty-four days after the storm.

Other markings

“Cans of DayGlo spray paint were handed out by FEMA to second and third responders,” reports historian Douglas Brinkley. "The primary goal was to mark in bright red or orange which buildings had been searched and whether bodies were found."19 When these self-deployed teams and individuals marked, the meaning of the resulting spontaneous codes usually left town with the painters.

Frederick Barton describes encountering a unique interpretation of the code: “At the time of our first return to the city, we assumed the mark on our exterior wall was planned—the tail indicated hurricane damage and distinguished itself from other marks that FEMA used to indicate earthquakes or fire or other kinds of disasters. Now, however, I suspect the tail had no meaning whatsoever and was just the product of a guardsman standing on uneven ground and trying to make a circle that he didn't do correctly.”20

Probable interpretations of other commonly seen markings:

NE – the structure was Not Entered

SELA – Southeast Louisiana (a search unit)

F/W – seen most often with animal rescue markings and is believed to indicate that Food and Water were left for pets.

0 A, 0 D – no one was found, alive or dead

3 LV, or 3 L – 3 live persons found

HSUS—Humane Society of the United States

SPCA—Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

Codes Elsewhere

X-codes have been used in responding to disasters across the country through the years. Informal speculation is that they were developed after the California earthquakes in the early 1990s. My first awareness of these markings was in 1999 in Greenville, North Carolina, after devastating floods from Hurricane Floyd’s torrential rains had inundated the eastern half of that state destroying many properties near creeks and rivers. More documentation of the codes used elsewhere followed a March 15, 2008 tornado in Atlanta, Georgia, when a variant of the spray-painted code was used sparingly in the affected Cabbagetown neighborhood,and in 2008 when Hurricane Ike hit the Texas Gulf coast.

First Responders

Photographers contracted by FEMA in August, September, and October of 2005 took the images in the following slide show. They accompanied the Urban Search & Rescue teams searching the city, often in boats.21

The earliest dated codes and photographs are August 30, 2005, by Marvin Nauman and Jocelyn Augustino, documentation that the Urban Search and Rescue teams were at work in some parts of the city the day after the storm had passed.

FEMA-contracted photographers with their authorized access captured images of codes applied to rooftops when these would have been the only visible portions of a home. They captured images of personnel painting the codes, leaving notices explaining the search in mailboxes, entering to search, of codes on structures that had floated to the middle of streets or landed atop vehicles, of boats on roofs and pieces of houses jumbled together, of successive lines marking where the water had settled, and the wreckage left behind when the water had receded. Their archives are remarkable for their on-the-scene immediacy. This slide show proceeds in chronological order, according to FEMA dating.

Maps of New Orleans

Two maps from the Community Data Center illustrate how New Orleanians think spatially about their city. The New Orleans Planning Districts map roughly corresponds to popular designations of city geography. The titles for these planning districts are used for the organization of the images that follow.

The second map, Neighborhoods in Orleans Parish, indicates the familiar neighborhood names included within each planning district. For example, the Bywater Planning District includes the Bywater, St. Claude, Florida Avenue, Desire, St. Roch, and Marigny neighborhoods.

In considering New Orleans map directions, the local cardinal points, rather than North-South-East-West, are usually described as Riverside-Lakeside-Upriver-Downriver, although sometimes Uptown-Downtown are substituted. It is a local convention that simplifies directions that defy logic—for example, Algiers on the West Bank, is actually southeast of the French Quarter.

Campanella’s map of flood depths uses approximately the same neighborhood designations as those above and helps to interpret the variations in the flood’s effects between neighborhoods.

Lower Ninth Ward, 2005–2006

The hurricane's and flood's catastrophic effects on the Lower Ninth Ward were chronicled extensively by the media. This neighborhood of generational families and homeowners is bordered by both the Industrial Canal and the Mississippi River. A breach in the Industrial Canal levee near the Claiborne Avenue bridge was responsible for a tidal wave of rushing water destroying all in its path. The word "Lower" in Lower Ninth Ward does not refer to elevation, but designates that the area is below, or downriver from the Industrial Canal (the Upper Ninth is above, or upriver from the Canal).

FEMA-contracted photographers and a few others with special access worked in the area in the early post-storm days. Photographer Jane Fulton Alt recorded her impressions in November during time off while she served as a counselor in the Look and Leave program. She accompanied homeowners on their first—and sometimes only—emotional trips back into the neighborhood to inspect their properties. Her off-time pilgrimages through the same territory documented what she had seen.

Hurricane Rita followed close on the heels of Katrina and the city felt the effects of the edge of that storm on September 22, 2005. Portions of the Lower Ninth reflooded and there followed a second round of searching and marking. Some buildings bear several sets of markings, layers of dates and data. In these photographs, as well as those from Lakeview and St. Bernard, the positions of houses, cars, boats, trees, and other objects testify to the furor of the water's force.

One house, three photographers

Before it was demolished and removed, at least three photographers documented this home swept from its foundations by the Industrial Canal levee breach: FEMA's Andrea Booher in October, Jane Fulton Alt in November, and Lauren Tilton in January.

Each photographed the house from a different angle, but with the prominent coding of several searches recorded. Booher's close-up of a memorial message and a mourning wreath illustrates a spontaneous breaking of the code with a personal message from friends and relatives, clarifying the layered information to emphasize that some of the occupants did not survive.

Street Scene: Lizardi and Dauphine Streets, Holy Cross

Ian J. Cohn photgraphed three residences clustered around the intersection of Lizardi and Dauphine Streets in the Holy Cross neighborhood, a microcosm of the Lower Ninth Ward.

718 Lizardi @ Dauphine, Holy Cross, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 4, 2005. Photograph by Ian J. Cohn. © Ian J. Cohn.

Hard Rain, 725Lizardi @ Dauphine, Holy Cross, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 4, 2005. Photograph by Ian J. Cohn. © Ian J. Cohn.

726 Lizardi @ Dauphine, Holy Cross, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 4, 2005. Photograph by Ian J. Cohn. © Ian J. Cohn.

Street Scene: North Rampart Street and Jourdan Avenue, Holy Cross

Also in Holy Cross, Cohn recorded these houses near the North Rampart Street and Jourdan Avenue intersection.

Top left, Tree in house near N. Rampart Street. Top center, 4812 N. Rampart Street near Jourdan Avenue. Top right, 1005–1007 Jourdan Avenue. Bottom left, 1009 Jourdan Avenue near N. Rampart Street. Bottom right, 715 Jourdan Avenue near Royal. Holy Cross, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 4, 2005. Photographs by Ian J. Cohn. © Ian J. Cohn.

Street Scene: Forstall Street, Holy Cross to Lower Ninth Ward

Following Forstall Street from near the Mississippi River in Holy Cross into the northern end of the Lower Ninth Ward, Ian Cohn provides a view of moving down a street paralleling the Industrial Canal.

Top left, 625 Forstall Street, Holy Cross, January 24, 2006. Top center, 629 Forstall Street, Holy Cross, January 24, 2006. Top right, 722 Forstall Street, Holy Cross, September 26, 2006. Bottom left and bottom center, 1608 Forstall Street, Lower Ninth Ward, September 26, 2006. Bottom right, 1618 Forstall Street, Lower Ninth Ward, September 26, 2006. New Orleans, Louisiana. Photographs by Ian J. Cohn. © Ian J. Cohn.

By early 2006 access to the Lower Ninth was less restrictive and photographers recorded structures that appeared untouched since the code painters had left their marks. Cohn photographed the same home in September of 2006 that Brian Gauvin had captured the preceding October, still canted against the trees and utility poles. Still untouched buildings that had floated from their foundations were scattered across the landscape. Vehicles lay atop and beneath wandering houses. Refrigerators hung suspended on power lines. Random items were strewn and abandoned before ruined houses. There were grim and hopeful animal rescue markings, defiant messages of identity, and always the code.

Lakeview, 2005–2006

The force of the storm surge traveled through Lake Ponchartrain, breached the 17th Street Canal, and devastated the upper middle class neighborhood of Lakeview. Developed in the twentieth century on drained and filled-in swamp and marshland, Lakeview is one of the city’s younger neighborhoods as well as one of the lowest points in the entire metro area. Less visible in the media reporting of the storm than the Lower Ninth Ward, Lakeview’s homes and residents were no less drastically affected by the levee failures. As in other neighborhoods, homes were built within yards of the levee walls (the rise visible behind the homes in the top left and bottom right images.)

Street Scene: Near the 17th Street Canal Levee breach

Top left, Pratt Drive and Robert E. Lee Avenue at the breach in the 17th Street Canal Levee. Top right, Along 17th Street Canal. Bottom left, Along 17th Street Canal. Bottom right, Pratt Drive and Robert E. Lee Avenue at the breach in the 17th Street Canal Levee. Lakeview, New Orleans, Louisiana, October 27, 2005. Photographs by Brian Gauvin. © Brian Gauvin.

Street Scene: Near West End and Veterans Boulevards

Moving through a section of Lakeview, Brian Gauvin photographed several structures near the intersection of West End and Veterans Boulevards.

Scenes of devastation here are similar to those of other neighborhoods, except that the architecture is more recent, many structures are larger, and the water lines are much more visible.

Street Scene: West End Boulevard, Lakeview

Moving down West End Boulevard, Ian J. Cohn photographed several residences.

Left, 6001 West End Boulevard. Center, 6017 West End Boulevard. Right, Louisiana Demolition Inc., 6125 West End Boulevard. Lakeview, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 4, 2005. Photographs by Ian J. Cohn. © Ian J. Cohn.

Street Scene: West End and Harrison Boulevards

Brian Gauvin and Ian J. Cohn photographed the same house near West End and Harrison Boulevards approximately six weeks apart.

Left and center, Near West End and Harrison Boulevards, Lakeview, New Orleans, Louisiana, September 19, 2005. Photographs by Brian Gauvin. © Brian Gauvin. Right, Near West End and Harrison Boulevards, Lakeview, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 4, 2005. Photograph by Ian J. Cohn. © Ian J. Cohn.

Probably applied from a boat, the X-code between the windows dated September 8 is high above the water lines. Cohn’s image shows a later-dated code on the front door, indicating a second crew visited on September 24, after Gauvin's photograph, perhaps to check areas that were inaccessible earlier. The November 4 photo shows the mud line clearly delineated.

Gentilly

Gentilly’s flooding came from all sides—the Industrial Canal on the east, but primarily from the London Avenue Canal that runs through the center of the area, with failed levees on both east and west banks. Like Lakeview, this is one of the more recently developed parts of the metro area, with most structures dating from the twentieth century. The flood here was more than ten feet deep and covered many of the ranch-style homes. When slowly receding waters drained away, catastrophic mold and mildew proved as damaging as moving water.

In this neighborhood there is a photograph (slide 12) by Collette Fournier showing a code not recorded elsewhere—a factory wall shows a slash with a circle. The X was not completed and the circle indicates that a team left the building without completely searching it.

Before and After in Gentilly

In 2005 Lauren Tilton photographed a church with a toppled steeple and a code marked from boat height. She returned to the same location in 2010 to record a repaired steeple base and a fading code.

Left and center, November 23, 2005. Right, March 20, 2010. Edgewater Baptist Church, 5900 Paris Avenue, Gentilly, New Orleans, Louisiana. Photographs by Lauren Tilton. © Lauren Tilton.

Bywater, 2005–2006

The Bywater district, known alternately as the Upper Ninth Ward, encompasses six diverse neighborhoods. The riverside neighborhoods on higher ground, Bywater and Faubourg Marigny, with their vivid architectural palettes (and a contrasting spectrum of markings), were not as drastically affected by floodwaters as neighborhoods such as St. Roch and St. Claude in the lakeside direction. Standard codes and unusual notes ("Bunny gone" and "1 chicken rescued") are interspersed with official notices from FEMA threatening impossible-to-meet deadlines. Search notations continued into October.

Richard Campanella wrote of discovering the code on his Bywater home, and his attachment to the graphic: “I first saw our X upon returning to our house on September 14, twelve days after my wife and I fled the flooded city. The sight startled me: blood red, perfectly centered, on the pastel pink facade of a 112-year-old house. A professional graphics designer could not have created a more perfect icon of the Katrina catastrophe: striking, well proportioned, loaded with relevant information without being noisy, hectic yet methodical. It was so ugly, it was nearly beautiful.

“I conserved my X for over two years as a historical relict (much to the consternation of my wife), but finally painted it over in December 2007 when rumors circulated that insurance companies were passing actuarial judgments on houses based on visual evidence of their occupancy . . . It pained me to paint it over, but honestly I haven't missed it since. Perhaps I over read its symbolic importance; perhaps I let the pragmatic trump the abstract . . . or perhaps time is softening the searing memories of that time.”22

Voudou references

Observers have compared the codes to voudou23 markings, and specifically to vévés (linear symbols used to summon spirits in voudou’s religious ceremonies).24 Cynthia Scott contrasts a structural instability code to both a hieroglyph and a voudou pictograph. Paul Conlan has photographed what is probably an authentic vévé next to a Marigny home’s X-code.

Left, Boxed X, Faubourg Marigny, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2005. Photograph by Cynthia Scott. This was a unique form of the hieroglyphic X, resembling pictographs of the voudou entities. © Cynthia Scott. Right, X-Codes 5, Faubourg Marigny, New Orleans, Louisiana, March 23, 2006. Photograph by Paul Conlan. Marigny home located near Holy Trinity Catholic Church (closed). © Paul Conlan.

New Orleans East

New Orleans East (or Eastern New Orleans) was developed near the lakefront on large swaths of low-lying reclaimed wetlands in the second half of the twentieth century. During Katrina the area was inundated from several sources, including the notorious MR GO canal (Mississippi River Gulf Outlet) on its southern border. New Orleans East straddles the I-10 entrances to the city approaching from the east. The devastation on both sides of the freeway, of see-through apartment complexes, deserted shopping centers, and blue-tarped homes greeted motorists entering the metro area for several years following the storm.

The photographers working in New Orleans East captured images of devastated churches, abandoned apartments, and returning residents. American Studies scholar Lynnell Thomas (slide 6) links a photograph of her own home’s X-code to her neighborhood homeowners’ association website in Kingswood Subdivision, chronicling the mutual support of a recovering community.

Mid-City

Mid-City's name describes its location. Bayou St. John, a natural stream without levees is the only waterway in Mid-City. It overflowed with storm surge entering from Lake Ponchartrain. Much of the area's flooding, however, resulted from influx from the Industrial Canal and the levee breaks affecting Lakeview and Gentilly.

Famed Canal Street and its businesses, schools, places of worship, and surrounding residential areas suffered varying depths of flooding. Geological features running through the area such as the slightly higher Metairie and Esplanade ridges took on much lower water levels.

Street Scenes: Moss Street, Faubourg St. John

In 2010 Cynthia Scott recorded several residences on Moss Street bordering Bayou St. John, providing a microcosm of Faubourg St. John, a neighborhood recovering, but with gaps.

Left, Step Up, Moss Street. Even well-groomed houses have kept the X, almost as a badge of courage. Right, Scrubbed, 1932 Moss Street. Some residents tried eradicating the telltale X. Faubourg St. John, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2010. Photographs by Cynthia Scott. © Cynthia Scott.

Left, Horticulturist, 1240 Moss Street. Right, Porch Swing, 1232 Moss Street. Faubourg St. John, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2010. Photographs by Cynthia Scott. © Cynthia Scott.

Left, Blue Cottage. Right, Blue Cottage Detail. 916 Moss Street, Faubourg St. John, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2010. Photographs by Cynthia Scott. © Cynthia Scott.

Uptown

The neighborhoods encompassed by the Uptown Planning District were diversely affected—the farther away from the river the more likely the flood damage. The natural levee of the Mississippi River provides a geological advantage, and the higher ground in the crescent that follows the river's curve is often referred to as the Sliver by the River or the Isle of Denial.

Late in the year many New Orleanians celebrated Christmas 2005 away from home, but a few residents constructed X-codes from Christmas lights (slide 4). Broadmoor is an Uptown area that did flood. In 2007 historic preservation students from University of North Carolina at Greensboro worked with the Broadmoor Community Center to document several affected historic buildings.

St. Bernard Parish

Just downriver from the Lower Ninth Ward, St. Bernard Parish is subject to the same types of natural and unnatural hazards. The MR GO and Intracoastal Waterway are just north of the parish's residential areas and these waterways funneled storm surge at such a rate that there were levee breaks as well as severe overtopping. Walls of water descended on the small-town and suburban landscape, resulting in devastating damage.

Two photographs in this slide show display a different X-code—a brilliant yellow placard with a red X, indicative of a St. Bernard Notice and Order of Involuntary Demolition. A photograph of a two-story home (slide 17) by Christina Bray shows the standard code next to the placard. A 2010 photograph (slide 22) by Dorothy Moye shows the placard as the only marking on a house scheduled for demolition. The owners of the home in Bray's photograph successfully appealed their notice.25

French Quarter

The French Quarter occupies the high ground of the city, with the natural levee of the Mississippi the obvious choice for the eighteenth century European settlers.

X-Code and Padlock, French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana, March 21, 2006. Photograph by Paul Conlan. © Paul Conlan.

Iberville Projects, French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 23, 2005. Photograph by Lauren Tilton. © Lauren Tilton.

Under constant debate is the fate of the Iberville Projects, public housing adjacent to the French Quarter and the Central Business District.

Lower Ninth Ward, 2007–2010

By 2007 very little rebuilding had happened in the section of the Lower Ninth Ward most devastated by the levee break. Clearing of debris left vacant lots and front steps that led nowhere, while hundreds of deteriorating structures remained untouched. Handmade street signs were the norm, although floated houses blocking streets had been removed. Photographers visiting for the first time were shocked to see how much remained to be done. Those who had visited before could detect small differences, with activities of nonprofit and community groups the most visible.

In 2008 renovations were under way and changes were apparent in the Holy Cross section of the Lower Ninth. The flooding there had not been as devastating and more houses remained standing, though waiting for attention. X-code markings were fading, but still evident. Also in the fall of 2008 and early 2009 a major art invitational, Prospect.1, brought art installations and accompanying traffic into the Lower Ninth Ward. A conceptual installation by Berlin artist Katharina Grosse used an abandoned Holy Cross home as a canvas to depict an inferno with the house’s code untouched (slides 12 and 13).

In 2010, approaching the fifth anniversary of the storm, the Holy Cross neighborhood has benefitted more visibly from renovation and rebuilding than the other areas of the Lower Ninth. Clear signs of life contend with still significant numbers of slowly deteriorating structures. There are clusters of new homes near the largest levee break, including several spectacular structures from Brad Pitt's Make It Right project.

Lakeview, 2007–2010

From the bulldozed remains of old houses in Lakeview new ones have arisen, renovated homes have been elevated to meet insurance demands, and new levee walls are in place in one of the lowest spots in the New Orleans area. There are still gaps in the façade, with vacant lots as well as derelict and see-through buildings, but by the end of 2008 there were few X-codes to be found.

Before and After in Lakeview

Lauren Tilton illustrates the before and after of two 40th Street locations. The first photo, taken in November of 2005 shows houses whose float paths were blocked by a tree and a utility pole. The same location, shot in March, 2010, is a vacant lot.

Left, November 23, 2005. Right, March 20, 2010. 40th Street, next door to 345 40th street, Lakeview, New Orleans, Louisiana. Photographs by Lauren Tilton. © Lauren Tilton.

Tilton also recorded the changes at 446 Spencer Avenue from 2006 to 2010.

Left, August 8, 2006. Right, March 20, 2010. 446 Spencer Avenue, Lakeview, New Orleans, Louisiana. Photographs by Lauren Tilton. © Lauren Tilton.

Bywater, 2007–2010

The Bywater and Marigny neighborhoods are among the city’s most rapidly gentrifying. They also seem to be the locations that have preserved their codes most carefully. The codes are fading but, as noted by Chris Rose in a 2007 column, they are often displayed as “. . . badges of honor.”26

Rose describes an art work by Erica Larkin who created a permanent provenance in wrought iron: “Farther down the block, at the corner of Montegut and Chartres, the glass sculptor Mitchell Gaudet's home is adorned with an iron replica of the existing glyph, superimposed over the original painted marking, a bold statement of intent to never let the memory fade away.”27“One of the better examples of embracing the X for its symbolic meaning,” adds Richard Campanella.28

Larkin created the duplicate code for Gaudet as a Christmas gift in 2005. She was shocked by the reaction of some neighbors who resented the reminder, but has since received commissions to replicate X-codes for other survivors.29

Joel Lowy, of Washington, DC, recalls his 2008 photographs of the Bywater: “All photos were taken on a beautiful spring Sunday morning in May. . . Many of the marks were not painted over, despite both time and obvious new repairs. Each is a badge of courage to the emergency workers and residents. Reminiscent, for me, of the NY and DC response to 9/11.”

Before and After in Bywater

Two residents of the St. Roch neighborhood in front of a gutted house in 2006. The second image in 2010 shows the house now boarded up.

Left, August 3, 2006. Right, March 20, 2010. 181–182 Mazant Street, next door to Musician's Village, Upper Ninth Ward, New Orleans, Louisiana. Photographs by Lauren Tilton. © Lauren Tilton.

Joel Lowy and Dorothy Moye photographed the same location in Bywater almost two years apart. By 2010, it appears from the debris pile that restoration has begun.

Left, All creatures great and small, Bywater, New Orleans, Louisiana, May 24, 2008. Photograph by R. Joel Lowy. © R. Joel Lowy. Right, Rebuilding, Bywater, New Orleans, Louisiana, February 2010. Photograph by Dorothy Moye. © Dorothy Moye.

Three Spaces Over Time

Repeat visits to three locations by several photographers reveal the progressions of three sites over the five years since Katrina.

The Mount Carmel Missionary Ministries at the corner of Forstall and Galvez Streets in the Lower Ninth Ward has attracted photographers since early post-Katrina. Stewart Harvey showed the sturdy brick building as a backdrop to demolished houses looking north on Forstall Street in February 2006 (slide 1). The Mount Carmel Missionary Ministries sign is visible still hanging above the front door. In March, Paul Conlan recorded the church’s hand-lettered sign asking, “Can these bones rise again?” next to the X-coded window (a stained glass Jesus).30 He remarked on the chaotic interior, with jumbled furnishings attesting to the force of the water that swept through the building.

By January 2007 light filtered through colored glass windows on a starkly beautiful interior that had been gutted and cleaned. In 2008 the windows were boarded over and the X-code disappeared. The exterior signs remained, although their locations changed occasionally.

In June 2009 it was startling to see a new white paint job, with volunteers’ colorful handprints on windows and the door. The Jesus window now bore a smiley face. A year later the new paint job was beginning to weather, and the deteriorating sign still asked its question. The Mount Carmel Missionary Ministries sign had disappeared.

Board and Battered

Ian J. Cohn, a New Orleans native, has returned to the city repeatedly to assist in his family's recovery, each time photographing a house at 726 Lizardi Street in Holy Cross.

Canal Boulevard, Lakeview

A classic Art Deco-style home on Canal Boulevard in Lakeview demonstrates a progression toward renewal.

The front door displayed a textbook X-code, completely contained on the period door and marked with successive water lines. Christina Bray's photograph of the door in 2007 is such a good example that it has been licensed for use by HBO for the montage of images in the opening credit of the TV series Treme. The house sat untouched for almost another year, before being gutted, with the coded door in place. By February 2009, the sparkling white restoration was for sale with a new front door; the original door had disappeared. In June 2010 the house was a home, occupied and again a part of the street’s life.

Conclusion

The X-code has become by default a visual icon of post-Katrina New Orleans. Loved or hated, threatening or comforting, a source of survival pride or a negative mark to be obliterated, easily interpreted or enigmatic, a striking graphic or disrespectful graffiti, a major issue or a minor annoyance—all of these reactions persist. In 2010 the remaining markings, even those deliberately preserved, are severely fading and sometimes eroding into “ghost codes.”

These "ghost code" examples, with their distinctive fading pattern the result of some unknown chemistry, leave only a shadow of their original marks. This process of disappearance, as with the other gradually disappearing codes, is comparable to ways that pieces of the past slide into history and memory.

This online exhibition has noted varied reactions to the painted codes, as well as the unprecedented volume of the marks across the city. For more than ten years, search-and-rescue personnel have used the X-code system in many situations nationally, but never to the extent deployed in New Orleans. More recently, in response to complaints of after-effect damage of spray-painted messages on the housing stock, search-and-rescue workers have developed a new tool for marking—a fluorescent sticker to be applied to a door or window, conveying the same information as the painted X-code.31 In future disasters, search and rescue personnel will abandon the painted graphics used after Katrina, and proceed stocked with stacks of low-residue stickers and felt-tipped markers, their progress through the streets marked by a trail of fluorescent rectangles applied to the least damageable surfaces they can find. This practical and more manageable protocol for communication will no doubt have fewer side effects, but from a visual point of view, can never achieve the apocalyptic graphic impact seen in post-Katrina New Orleans.

The documentation of the X-code in New Orleans tells one small piece of the Katrina story. A straightforward reaction to the visual power of the coding has morphed into other stories yet to be fully developed—an examination of the impact of repetition on the visual experience, and the principles of expression underlying coded messages, to name only two. Photographs record the visual impact of repetition and the visceral power of the X, but they do not explain it. We are left to react, ponder, and interpret. The body of documentation leads us to consider the meaning of coding in everyday life. It demonstrates how in tragic circumstances markings that are inadvertently interpreted as symbols can haunt our memory, or how an official graphic repeated endlessly tells a story or morphs in our perception into found art. On one level, it celebrates heroism and memorializes lives. On other levels, the code continues to invite further investigation. On many levels, the X-code leaves us haunted and New Orleans unique.

About the Curator

Dorothy Moye is a Decatur art consultant and a former resident of New Orleans who has retained ties to and an ongoing fascination with the city. Her current project on post-Katrina search-and-rescue building markings is a response to the haunting visual impact of the thousands of these markings after the storm, many of which remain even five years later. Despite years of organizing exhibitions and other large-scale arts projects, Katrina + 5: An X-code Exhibition is Moye’s first virtual exhibition. A preliminary article on the project is at http://www.southernspaces.org/2009/x-codes-post-katrina-postscript. Moye holds membership in numerous arts organizations, both local and national. She graduated from UNC–Greensboro and North Carolina State University in Raleigh with degrees in sociology.

About the Photographers

Jane Fulton Alt, Evanston, Illinois. Fine art photographer and clinical social worker. Alt participated as a counselor with the Look and Leave program November 2005, accompanying Lower Ninth Ward residents on their first limited visits back to their homes. Her book, in which many of these photographs first appeared, is Look and Leave: Photographs and Stories From New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward (Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2009). http://janefultonalt.com

Ellen Luckett Baker, Atlanta, Georgia. Author and owner of The Long Thread. Baker visited New Orleans for the first time in early 2008 and found the x-codes “end-of-the-world eerie.” http://thelongthread.com/

Christina Bray, Decatur, Georgia. Artist and youth minister. Bray has been traveling regularly to New Orleans since Katrina participating in the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana’s Rebuild program in the city. http://christinabray.com/home.html

Richard Campanella, New Orleans, Louisiana. Geographer and author, assistant research professor, Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences, Tulane University. Campanella’s two most recent books, Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabric Before the Storm and Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans, illuminate the geographical and social difficulties as well as the rewards of life in a precariously sited urban area. http://tulane.edu/sse/eens/richard-campanella.cfm

Ian J. Cohn, New York, New York. Photographer, designer, and architect. Cohn is a native of New Orleans and states, “My intent in taking the pictures was both documentary as well as ‘artistic,’ but the documentary part is based on the concept that I was there to bear witness.” His blogs on returning visits to the city are insightful journals of days immediately post-Katrina. http://www.diversity-nyc.com/

Paul Conlan, Newnan, Georgia. Photographer, member of New Orleans Photo Alliance, Atlanta Photography Group, and and the Roswell Photographic Society. Conlan specializes in southern subjects. http://www.fstopblues.com/-/fstopblues/about.asp

Elyse Defoor, Atlanta, Georgia. Studio artist. Defoor has emotional ties to New Orleans and has responded to the post-Katrina experience with a multi-media exhibition titled X.U.ME. http://elysedefoor.com/

FEMA photographers: Jocelyn Augustino, Andrea Booher, Patricia Brach, Win Henderson, Patsy Lynch, Bob McMillan, Marvin Nauman, Alberto Pillot, and Liz Roll.

Collette Fournier, Spring Valley, New York. Photographer and member of Kaimonge Photography Collective. Fournier’s work is the result of a Kaimonge grant to cover post-Katrina events. http://www.kamoinge.com/collettevfournier.htm

Brian Gauvin, New Orleans, Louisiana. Photographer. Gauvin’s first post-Katrina images are among the earliest included in the exhibition and convey an on-the-scene immediacy.

Stewart Harvey, Portland, Oregon. Photographer. Harvey had begun a photography series on New Orleans in 2003, and on his first post-Katrina return he struggled to make sense of the visual chaos and devastation. His focus eventually became the character of the people who had survived this experience. http://www.stewartharveyphoto.com

Herbert H. Hill, Pullman, Washington. Chemistry professor, Washington State University. Hill reunited with old friends to work on a Rebuild project in New Orleans in 2009. http://analytical.chem.wsu.edu/faculty/hillh.

Constance Lewis, Atlanta, Georgia. Fine art photographer and gallery owner, independent curator. Lewis’s curatorial projects include the founding of Opal Gallery, an Atlanta based artist collective: and, exhibitions in Paris, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Her most recent book project, Oraien Catledge: Photographs (University Press of Mississippi) will be released this year.

R. Joel Lowy, Silver Spring, Maryland. Lowy is a biomedical researcher who knows what it’s like to miss New Orleans and enjoys calas, BBQ oysters, and funk.

Thomas Mann, New Orleans, Louisiana. Artist and gallery owner. Mann was able to gain early access to the city in order to stabilize his Magazine Street gallery. His exhibition Storm Cycle: An Artist Responds to Hurricane Katrina was created as an immediate response to the storm and has been traveling since 2005. http://www.thomasmann.com/

Gigi O’Shea, Decatur, Georgia. Elementary school teacher and New Orleans co-adventurer.

Liza Politi, New York, New York. Producer, actor, teacher and photographer. Politi photographed a series centering on the first anniversary of the storm. http://www.lizapoliti.com/

Megan Privett, Siler City, North Carolina. Privett was a graduate student in historic preservation at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2007 and participated in a class project of digital documentation of four historic buildings in New Orleans. She now works as a historic preservation specialist.

Shari Seltzer, Westfield, New Jersey. Artist. Seltzer and her son visited New Orleans for the first time in early 2010 with a rebuilding group. They worked in the Lower Ninth Ward and the codes they saw as they traveled through reminded them of the Biblical story of Passover. http://web.archive.org/web/20100910022812/http://blogservices.net/ss/index.php

Cynthia Scott, New Orleans, Louisiana. Artist. Scott has photographed extensively in her Faubourg St. John neighborhood, and produced numerous installations and sculptures from post-Katrina debris. http://Cynthiascott2000.com

Kathy Shorr, New York, New York. Photographer. Shorr founded the Summer in the City Project, which brings adolescent girls from disadvantaged communities in New Orleans to New York for an experience in art, culture, and fun. http://www.kathyshorr.com/

Lynnell Thomas, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Boston, Massachusetts. Assistant Professor of American Studies at University of Massachusetts-Boston. Thomas identifies herself as part of the Katrina Diaspora, and her recent research focus is on the racial components of Louisiana tourism. Her New Orleans East subdivision website is http://web.archive.org/web/20100904030649/http://thekingswoodassociation.com/id4.html

Lauren Tilton, New Orleans, Louisiana and New Haven, Connecticut. Tilton has recently completed an assignment as Virtual Classroom Coordinator at the World War II Museum in New Orleans, and is a PhD student in American Studies at Yale University.

Tyler and Lane Turkle, Tallahassee, Florida. Artists. The father and daughter Turkles have been photographing in New Orleans since 2007. They see their collaborative work as useful in the recovery of the neighborhoods they document, and have returned several times to continue their series. Collectors of their New Orleans images purchase by way of a donation to the rebuilding program of their choice. http://www.tylerturkle.com/

Acknowledgments

The curator would like to thank those who have helped to bring this project to this stage. Special thanks to Allen Tullos, Frances Abbott, and the staff of Southern Spaces who have continued to believe in the value of this project; my family, especially Todd, Rachel, Will, and Sarah Moye who have always had the resources I needed at any given moment; Agnes Scott College intern Leslie Burhenn who assisted in organizing more than five hundred images; friends and colleagues who helped to visualize how to tell this story, including Tom Mann, Amy Landesberg, Rob Amberg, Judith Schonbak, and the twenty-five photographers who are a part of this exhibition; Elaine and John Clements who have never failed to say, “Welcome Home,” when I arrived in the city to enjoy their unfailing hospitality; and the amazing and inspiring people of New Orleans who have been showing me how to keep it real for most of my life.

Publication Update

In the spring and summer of 2018, Southern Spaces updated this publication as part of the journal's redesign and migration to Drupal 7. Updates include image, slideshow, and text link adjustments, as well as revised recommended resources and related publications. For access to the original layout, paste this publication's url into the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine and view any version of the piece that predates March 2018.

• 1. Codrescu, Andrei, cover blurb for Jane Fulton Alt, Look and Leave: Photographs and Stories from New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2009.
• 2.http://hurricanearchive.org/. The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media and the University of New Orleans, in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History and other partners, organized this project.
• 3. Perlstein, Michael, “For Tales of Life and Death, the Writing’s on the Walls,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 17, 2005, p.1.
• 4. Barton, Frederick. E-mail correspondence, November 24–25, 2008.
• 5. Defoor, Elyse. E-mail correspondence, May 8, 2008.
• 6. Rose, Chris. "Badges of honor: Part historic preservation, part act of defiance, the spray-painted markings of Katrina rescue workers remain prominently displayed on many reoccupied New Orleans homes."New Orleans Times-Picayune, July 24, 2007.
• 7. Spitzer, Nick. E-mail correspondence, June 16, 2009.
• 8. Piazza, Tom. Why New Orleans Matters, New York: Regan Books, 2005, 125.
• 9. Smith, Barbara Lee. E-mail correspondence, September 15, 2009.
• 10. Perlstein, loc.cit.
• 11. Baker, Ellen. E-mail correspondence, August 27, 2009.
• 12. These are words and phrases that cropped up repeatedly in varied conversations.
• 13. Mann, Thomas. Storm Cycle: An Artist Responds to Hurricane Katrina. Bellevue, Washington: Bellevue Art Museum, 2006, 7.
• 14.http://www.fema.gov/, Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) Response System Field Operations Guide, FEMA, September 2003 (US&R-2-FG), p. 56.
• 15. Ibid., p. 54
• 16. Thomas, Robert A. E-mail correspondence, June 22, 2010.
• 17. Ryan, Thomas M. LTC (ret). E-mail correspondence, June 27, 2010.
• 18. Sydenstricker, Capt. L. Paula, 153rd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment, "West Virginia National Guard Plays Vital Role in the Infantry Mission," Defense Video & Imagery Distribution System (dvids), http://www.dvidshub.net/news/3054/west-virginia-national-guard-plays-vital-role-infantry-mission, September 19, 2005
• 19. Brinkley, Douglas, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007. (First published 2006, William Morrow.)
• 20. Barton, loc. cit.
• 21.All images marked "FEMA News Photo" are works of a Federal Emergency Management Agency employee, taken or made during the course of an employee's official duties. As works of the US federal government, all FEMA images are in the public domain.
• 22. Campanella, Richard. E-mail correspondence, February 2, 2010.
• 23. Louisiana French spelling. Alternates forms: voudun, vodou, voodoo.
• 24. Saint-Lot, Marie-Jose Alcide. Vodou, a Sacred Theatre: The African Heritage in Haiti. Coconut Creek, Florida: Educa Vision, 2003, 105.
• 25. Text of Involuntary Demolition notice: NOTICE & ORDER of INVOLUNTARY DEMOLITION Address: (handwritten) No repair, rehabilitation, reconstruction, or maintenance activity is apparent at this address. This Property appears to be abandoned! This structure has been identified as and declared by the St. Bernard Parish Government to be a public health and safety hazard and INVOLUNTARY DEMOLITION ORDERED. To object to INVOLUNTARY DEMOLITION the owner, or another person with proper legal interest in this property, must file a written appeal with the St. Bernard Parish Department of Community Development, #261 Judge Perez Drive, Chalmette, La. The written appeal must provide a plan for the start of or proof of actual repair, rehabilitation, or maintenance of this structure. Involuntary Demolition will be delayed only when an appeal is being considered and stopped only if appeal is granted. Date Posted: (Handwritten) Posted by: (handwritten) Other: (handwritten)
• 26. Rose, op. cit.
• 27. Ibid.
• 28. Campanella, Richard. E-mail communication August 31, 2009.
• 29. Larkin, personal conversation, June 15, 2010.
• 30. Full text of the sign in front of Mount Carmel Missionary Ministries building: Restoration: Can these bones live? O ye dry bones hear the word of the Lord! Can these bones live? These bones shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord! So I prophesied. (Side) Lower 9th Ward. Ezekiel 37:1–7, Apostle Arthal Thomas
• 31. Crawford, Capt. Mike, Maryland Task Force One. E-mail correspondence and telephone conversation, April 20–21, 2009.

Review

In 1931, an all-white jury in Birmingham, Alabama, sentenced Willie Peterson to death for a mysterious attack that left two white women dead and a third critically injured. The lone survivor identified Peterson, a black ex-miner crippled by tuberculosis, as the assailant, but many in Birmingham—black and white—doubted that Peterson could have committed the crime. Just months after launching a national campaign to save the Scottsboro Boys from a similar fate, a loose coalition of southern radicals, civil rights activists, and white liberals fought to save Peterson from the electric chair.

In Murder on Shades Mountain, Melanie S. Morrison recovers the Peterson case from the shadow of Scottsboro—arguably the most significant and certainly the most chronicled miscarriage of justice in the Jim Crow South. A social justice educator with a doctorate in theology, Morrison reveals her family connection to the case. Her father, a progressive minister born into Birmingham's upper crust, was courting Genevieve Williams when her two sisters—Nell and Augusta—were attacked on Shades Mountain, approximately nine miles south of downtown Birmingham. Augusta, along with her friend Jennie Wood, died on the mountain, while Nell survived. Truman Morrison sat on the grieving family's porch and listened to Dent Williams, the girls' brother, brag about visiting the jail after Peterson's arrest and shooting the suspect at point-blank range. Peterson barely survived to face trial, but Dent Williams dodged conviction "by reason of temporary insanity" (118).

Another form of insanity—the racial pathologies laid bare by the Peterson case—compelled Truman Morrison to break off the courtship and break rank with his wealthy family. Inspired by her father's life of activism, Melanie Morrison seeks to make sense of the stories he told her and to reconstruct the social and political world of Depression-era Birmingham. This is not an unfamiliar world for historians, as Alabama has provided the setting for a number of influential studies on race, labor, and radicalism in the Jim Crow South. Yet in shifting attention from Scottsboro's sleepy courthouse square to Birmingham's industrialized and highly stratified terrain, Morrison offers fresh perspective on the structural violence that undergirded white supremacy.

Place matters in Murder on Shades Mountain, and Morrison vividly reconstructs the social geography of Jim Crow Birmingham in the book's opening sections. Founded after the Civil War by investors intent on creating a southern industrial mecca, Birmingham was a city "rooted in racial apartheid" (26). Its barons resigned black workers to the lowest rungs of the labor ladder and confined the city's booming black population to racially zoned neighborhoods that lacked basic services. Meanwhile, whites with means moved upward and outward from the city's industrial core. The higher ground surrounding Birmingham also provided space for white leisure, including the overlook on Shades Mountain where the 1931 attack occurred. As Morrison points out, the rigidly segregated geography of Jim Crow Birmingham fueled doubts about the nature of the attack and the identity of the attacker. The notion that a black man would roam around this white enclave, in broad daylight and armed with a loaded gun, defied the spatial logic of segregation. Yet Jim Crow fueled an illogical counterpoint, where the threat of lust-crazed black men lying in wait demanded constant vigilance and swift vengeance.

The imperative that a black man must pay for the crimes committed on Shades Mountain underscores just how much Jim Crow blurred the line between legal and extralegal punishment. Angelo Herndon, a black communist and labor organizer later imprisoned in Georgia for his political activity, recounted his brutal detainment in the wake of the Shades Mountain attack. Birmingham police, he wrote in his 1937 autobiography Let Me Live, chained him to a tree and beat him with a rubber hose before charging him with vagrancy when he refused to confess to the crime. He estimated that lawmen and vigilantes killed as many as seventy black men and women in the "reign of terror" that swept him up (41–43).

For Herndon and his comrades, the arrest and prosecution of Willie Peterson marked the culmination of this broader campaign of violence and intimidation. The leftist activists who rushed to Peterson's defense blasted his conviction as a "legal lynching"—a term that Morrison embraces but which begs further interrogation given the complex and contentious history of "legal lynching" as a conceptual and rhetorical product of anti-lynching activism. Depression-era radicals were not the first to draw the connection between Jim Crow justice and extrajudicial violence, although they made these arguments vividly and forcefully. Although Morrison does not plumb this history, she rightly notes the role of US communists and allied labor radicals in promoting the argument, as the Southern Workercontended, that "the police, the courts, and the 'law enforcing' machinery are preparing to stage a legal lynching of [Peterson] as part of their campaign of terror against the entire Negro working class population of Birmingham" (84).

The rhetoric deployed in defense of Peterson echoed arguments popularized in the Scottsboro Case, through pamphlets with titles like Lynching Negro Children in Southern Courts. Published by the International Labor Defense (ILD), the communist legal aid organization that defended the Scottsboro Boys and later attempted to represent Peterson, the pamphlet typified a structural critique of Jim Crow as irredeemably violent and repressive. The ILD fought legal lynchings in the courts; its supporters—numbering several thousand in Alabama alone by the early 1930s—argued that the real fight was in the streets. Only "mass protest" would save those convicted, pamphlet author Joseph North argued, and moderates who counseled "faith in the lynch loving courts in Alabama and the South" were complicit in "hand[ing] them over to the executioner."1

The ILD aimed these barbs at its primary rival, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had attempted unsuccessfully to wrest control of the Scottsboro Boys' legal defense from the radicals. That "wake-up call," Morrison notes, compelled the NAACP to intervene more quickly on Peterson's behalf (88). She characterizes the case as a moment of truth for the organization, which had struggled to regain its footing and credibility as more radical groups mobilized in response to economic crisis and white supremacist repression. The NAACP's new leader, Walter Francis White, had completed dozens of daring undercover lynching investigations, but he balked at any cooperation or association with communists on "legal lynching" cases. Nevertheless, Morrison emphasizes the NAACP's strategic flexibility and increasing emphasis on legal advocacy. Charles Hamilton Houston, the Howard University Law School dean who would become the NAACP's first special counsel in 1935, traveled to Birmingham to interview Peterson's wife, Henrietta (his notes from that encounter provided the source base for one of Morrison's most gripping passages), and advocated for the NAACP to expand its legal defense work.

Murder on Shades Mountain illuminates how the paths of some of the most significant figures and organizations in the black freedom struggle ran through Birmingham in the weeks and months after Peterson's arrest. Of course, the connections between mob violence and "legal" lynching run deeper than this slim volume conveys. While the antipathy between the NAACP and ILD infused both the Scottsboro and Peterson campaigns, the notion that racial violence represented only the most brutal expression of an oppressive system was not limited to radical organizations. "Lynching and mob violence are only methods of economic repression," the NAACP's William Pickens argued in 1921. "To attack lynching without attacking this system is like trying to be rid of the phenomena of smoke and heat without disturbing the basic fire."2 While the NAACP attempted to cooperate with southern white officials willing to speak out against lynching, including Alabama ex-governor Emmet O'Neal, they understood that such officials frequently talked down mob violence by doubling down on state-sanctioned execution. For these "law and order" officials, capital punishment offered reassurance to anxious whites that the state would dispose of black aggressors—real or imagined—without inviting negative publicity or outside scrutiny.

Peterson's death sentence offered no panacea to the Depression-era mob mentality. From the manhunt, roundups, and brutal interrogations that preceded Peterson's arrest to Dent Williams's assassination attempt on his sisters' accused attacker, the lynching spirit hovered over the case. While Peterson languished in prison, police in nearby Tuscaloosa handed over black teenagers to a lynch mob in the summer of 1933. Morrison's account reminds us that whatever divisions separated black activists, the campaign against lynching and related abuses remained a tactical and legal imperative. White reformers and civil rights activists argued over the criminal definition of lynching and the liability of local and state officials who failed to prevent it, while largely eschewing the language of "legal lynching." Even as the number of documented cases declined during the 1930s, the NAACP reported in 1940 that lynching had not disappeared but gone "underground," and warned that these secretive killings relied more than ever on the collusion of local officials.3

The same year that the NAACP warned that lynching had entered "a new and altogether dangerous phase," the legal lynching of Peterson ran its course.4 Six years after Alabama's governor commuted his death sentence, Peterson died in the state prison infirmary from complications related to tuberculosis. Morrison describes the Peterson case as an "incomplete victory"—both in its attempt to save the man's life and in its broader challenge to white supremacy (192). Murder on Shades Mountain does not expend many pages tracing the links between this case and the more familiar Birmingham stories of the civil rights era, sparing readers of metaphors about the roots and seeds of movements to come. However, Morrison makes a point worth repeating—that "the 1930s are rife with historical antecedents to the uprisings, protests, and campaigns manifest in the 1950s and 1960s, which continues today." Despite the autobiographical bookends, in which Morrison reveals her personal connection to Birmingham's white liberal community, she emphasizes that the local movement was "led by black people" (194). Because of the historians Morrison acknowledges, and a few more she does not, we know many of these activists' names. We will never know them all, but thanks to Morrison's vivid rendering of Willie Peterson's life and witness, we know more.

About the Author

Jason Morgan Ward is acting professor of History at Emory University, where he teaches modern United States history. He is the author of Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America's Civil Rights Century(New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) and Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

• 1. Joseph North, Lynching Negro Children in Southern Courts(New York: International Labor Defense, 1931).
• 2. William Pickens, Lynching and Debt Slavery (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1921).
• 3.Lynching Goes Underground: A Report on a New Technique (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1940), 7.
• 4.Lynching Goes Underground: A Report on a New Technique, 7.

Residual Objects at the Border and Immigrant Trajectories

Material leftovers and abject residue are signs of the peculiar transformations . . . perversely, they show us that meaning has been made.

–Sophie Gee, Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth Century Imagination, p. 17

The photographs are a means of making “real” (or “more real”) matters that the privileged or the merely safe might prefer to ignore.

–Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 7

Susan Harbage Page photographs objects found at the international border (objects trouvés), in the Rio Grande Valley, near Brownsville (USA) and Matamoros (Mexico). The photographs, part of her Border Project, depict no immigrants, only the dried out clothes that they left behind after making it across the river. The photographs do not depict guards either, but they show bullet casings and detention gloves that remain.

Harbage Page’s photographs concentrate on the beginning that the border represents and are suggestive of the trajectories that immigrants followed afterwards. The residues depicted in these photographs speak tentatively of a successful journey into the United States but also reflect the fate of those for whom the crossing meant imprisonment and deportation. Photographs taken at the border hint at the lives that migrants started in the United States, or suggest journeys truncated by border enforcement violence.1

This essay offers an interpretation of the Border Project’s intervention on the immigration public debate. By photographing the border area and the physical remnants of crossings that are not sanctioned by the law, the photographer highlights the institutions of coercion that characterize border control. The photographs offer a critical account of the danger and potential violence involved in the border crossing and, through that critique, suggest the need to come up with new imagined geographies of the border. By concentrating on the border, the photographer illuminates dimensions of this space that are hardly ever considered in a conversation that revolves around fortification, fencing, and security. The objects depicted can be identified as residues of border coercion—evidence that even tightly fenced borders offer, on closer inspection, unrounded edges, gaps, and traces. I suggest that the highlighting of these residues acts as a powerful sign of the unfinished status of even the most secured border, and by extension the possibility of changing the existing terms of the debate and ultimately the shape of the border and the options offered to migrants upon arrival.

Engaging with the space of the border through its openings and the residues of crossing and policing it disrupts the narrative of security that justifies an unending fencing. The fortification of the border is predicated on the dangers of the outside, justifying the extension of immigration policing within border spaces and into domestic areas.

The photographs do not portray the migrants; instead, they show objects such as single shoes that stayed behind, self-fashioned flotation devices, and identity cards. They do not impose identities on the migrants, but suggest their journeys and arrivals into the United States. They do not show encounters between Border Patrol officers and migrants, but they depict the rubber gloves and bullet casings. They do not follow immigrants into detention, but register the residue—detention bracelets and boxes with Department of Homeland Security tags. The objects are suggestive of the men and women who passed through the border; those who were detained, on the run, or abused in the United States; and those who sometimes returned across the border. Some of the items speak of the violence their owners went through, and their sight tells of pain and suffering produced by fortified borders.

The clothing and personal belongings are muddy, and sometimes need to be unearthed from layers of mud and dirt. This layering and the different stages of shredding and decomposition of the clothing suggest chronologies.

The photographs portray wet clothing left behind only a few hours before, as well as worn out pieces of clothing. The ground of the border is partly constitutedthrough the accumulation of leftover clothes and personal objects and the repeated transit through the “safest”pathways. Immigrants who cross the river must change into dry clothes once they arrive on the northern side, to conceal the marks of their crossing. They carry a dry set of clothes in a sealed plastic bag, sometimes found empty and tied to the tires used as flotation devices. The actions of thousands of immigrants crossing the border are not inimical to the border but, through their passage, leave behind worn out paths and newly layered border geographies. Just as a fenced border constructs immigrants as dangerous trespassers, Harbage Page’s depiction of a layered and complex border space humanizes them.

Objects found and photographed are often private and reveal the identity of border crossers. Some have actual identifying potential, as they contain the border crossers’ DNA.

The portrayal of everyday objects makes migrants present. In contrast to prevalent images of immigrants as outlaws, the recognition of their journeys through the border and the difficulties involved are suggestive of their pain and open the possibility of a different kind of welcoming. The photographs change the framing of the border away from a security-maximizing stance and towards a depiction of immigrants as subjects. The conventional focus on the material strength of the fence and the inviolability of the border excludes immigrants as subjects of concern and of violence, preventing sympathy from those on the inside towards border crossers’ journeys. The security obsession of the immigration debate makes immigrants’ lives not grievable, not valuable. The photographed objects and the image of the border as a populated space and port of entry evoke humanity.2

The populated border conveyed by the photographs contrasts with images and acts of humiliation.The law SB1070 in Arizona and, before that, the procession of immigrants dressed in prisoner outfits paraded by Sheriff Arpaio on the streets of Phoenix, offer photo opportunities for the news media.3 The quantification of the “success” of enforcement in number of immigrants deported and the imposition of detention quotas on immigration police also dehumanizes immigrants.4 The tires dragged by Border Patrol vehicles shown in the next photograph are used to erase tracks and identify fresh footprints. The erasure of the traces of border crossing maintains the image of fortification while marking immigrants as trespassers.

The photographs of tagged Department of Homeland Security boxes represent the end of the immigrant journey. They single out the detritus of detention and deportation—traces of immigrants who have been denied spaces to live in the United States.

Personal belongings boxes labeled by the Department of Homeland Security still contain the information and pictures of the detainees and appear piled as trash in the street near the southern side of the Matamoros-Brownsville international bridge.5

Instead of focusing on immigrants detained, policed, fenced, and deported, Harbage Page shows the border as a populated space, whose shape is indebted to the people who pass through. The photographs suggest welcoming, represented in the small Guía del Migrante (Migrant Guide) prepared by Grupos de Protección al Migrante (Migrant’s Protection Groups) and distributed in border towns, whose back cover can be seen below. The leaflet, found on the Mexican side, tells a story of hope for safe passage.

Clothes and objects left behind are as much traces of the identities of migrants as ID cards that non-Mexicans are keen to dropat the border to avoid being returned to more distant countries. This is the transition to a life of invisibility that the existing immigration regulations impose upon migrants without documents. Clothes left behind remind what the inauguration of immigrants’ presence in this country involves. Wet clothes are discarded as immigrants mix with the overwhelmingly Mexican-American population of border towns. The items in the photographs represent first actions taken by border crossers to hide their identity, practices that will continue to characterize their lives as undocumented immigrants in the United States.

The violence involved in border control is narrated through its residues, bullet casings, and detention gloves. Department of Homeland security boxes grant new identities to migrants who were detained—preventing their legal entry for years to come, expediting their deportation if they were to enter again.

The photographic evidence of official coercion—bullet casings, gloves, and detention bracelets—disrupt the impressions of fortitude, inviolability, and certainty that the border fence presents.

The photographs question the assertion of territorial borders. Picturing these objects, tying them to narratives of the travelers who left them behind, and opposing them to the certainty of sovereign borders challenges the rules that seek to hide hesitancy, space for contestation, or room for debate.

The addition of a map produced by an immigrant that traces her family’s trajectory adds to the welcoming stance of this project by incorporating immigrants as narrating subjects and by recognizing their journeys.6According to the latest census data, among the top ten states in terms of growth in immigrant population between 2000 and 2009, eight were southern states.7 Even in terms of the absolute increase in foreign-born population, three out of the top ten states, excluding traditional destinations Texas and Florida, are southern: Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina.8 The increase in the immigrant and—in particular—Latino population adds a new dimension to the troubled racial history of the South. These individuals fill the ranks of agricultural and construction workers and face discrimination, vulnerability in the workplace, and racially-targeted immigration enforcement.9

Museums and the Upsetting of the Narrative of the "Nation of Immigrants"

If we were to rely on museum collections, we might get an impression of a much richer level of material wealth than truly was the case. This is because most museums save the unusual and the valuable object, and individuals now and in the past consign commonplace objects to the dump.

–James Deetz, Small Things Forgotten: An Archeology of Early American Life

When the objects found at the border are re-photographed in the artist’s studio their narratives are complicated by a new frame suggesting that the items now form parts of an exhibition. The stories they tell are neither confined to the past nor officially sanctioned. The objects contest the invisibility on which border coercion relies and challenge the discourse of fortification. In these images, Harbage Page chose background colors for their similarity to the palette that she encountered in her excursions in the Rio Grande Valley.

At the start of a decade that became characterized by anti-immigrant legislation, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum opened in 1990. Even as the museum celebrated the twelve million immigrants who went through its doors between 1892 and 1954, the US Congress passed restrictive immigration legislation and attached anti-immigrant provisions to crime, welfare, and anti-narcotics legislation.10 Ellis Island, as a space of memory, resulted from a complex interaction of actors and perspectives, including the Immigration History Society, the National Park Service, the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, as well as corporate actors in charge of the architecture, oral history recollection, and the catering and gift shop concession.11 In spite of the diverse interpretations of the narratives that the Ellis Island Immigration Museum puts forward, the immigration experience of Western Hemisphere migrants and, in particular, of Mexicans is only marginally acknowledged. Moreover, the identification of 1965 as the definitive end of unjust immigration regulation (through the abandonment of the national origin quotas) obscures the fact that the Hart-Celler Act is the same law that for the first time has limited immigration from Mexico and Latin America.12

Museums, and their inclusions and exclusions of artifacts, play a central role in the “production and legitimation of historical knowledges and social identities” and in the United States’ narrative as a “nation of immigrants."13

Setting aside the question of whether the Ellis Island Immigration Museum is able to critically tackle issues of politically-motivated detention and deportation, or even the racism of popular culture in the early twentieth century, it fails to make explicit connections to the role of race, detention, and deportation in contemporary America. Its narrative carves in stone a “good immigrant” story, while evading critical awareness about the management of current immigration flows.14

Invoking the Ellis Island Immigration Museum vis-à-vis Harbage Page’s photographs of the “residues of border control” highlights the connections between nostalgic narratives of a nation of immigrants and the disavowal of contemporary stories of immigration taking shape at the US–Mexico border. The re-staging of the objects picked up in the border interpelates museums and exhibitions that omit these stories. The bullet casings and detention bracelets tagged and photographed in the studio defy (and make retrospective) the inclusionary bent of the “nation of immigrants” narrative. The staging of these objects as if they belonged to an archive or a museum collection plays with the fact that these items would not be granted entry to these realms.15

In putting together the archive, the photographer asserts the importance of a marginal area and of seemingly marginal objects. The Border Project’s mundane objects do not passively back up a rehearsed story but convey the continuous flow of individuals, the encounter between border crossers and Border Patrol officers, and the deployment of state power over this liminal space. The photographs and the physical archive prompt conversation that is about the present and imagined futures.

The Border Project insists that immigrant identity is continuously transformed through successful and truncated journeys, newcomers, and settlement. Resisted by the mechanisms of border coercion and fortification, immigrant identity is remade by the individuals who leave their traces along the border.

Susan Harbage Page’s photographs are welcoming not only of the individuals who are evoked through personal objects, but also of new narratives of migration and newly acquired identities. Because these photographs are too closely intertwined with the present and convey urgency, they refuse to memorialize a tightly packaged story of immigration and nationalism. By showing the residues of border crossing and the traces of coercion, these photographs invite a rethinking of the ways immigration is discussed.

About the Authors

Susan Harbage Page is an instructor in the Department of Art and an affiliated faculty member in Women's Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2004, she received her M.F.A. in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been displayed in over one hundred exhibitions, at venues including the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington DC and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado. Susan's research has been supported in part by a faculty research grant from the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina (2007) and a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship Grant (2010).

Inés Valdez will receive her PhD in Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the summer of 2011. She has been awarded a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellowship at the European University Institute in Italy. Her research, forthcoming in the journal Political Studies, examines questions of sovereignty, immigration and democratic theory.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the editorial staff at Southern Spaces and anonymous reviewers for helpful criticism and guidance.

• 1. All photographs: Susan Harbage Page, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Copyright © 2009 and 2010. All rights reserved.
• 2. Judith Butler, Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable (London: Verso, 2009), 25.
• 3. Arizona Senate Bill 1070, signed into law on April 23, 2010, controversially makes it a misdemeanor to be an alien in Arizona without carrying registration documents and requires law enforcement officials to determine a person's immigration status if there is "reasonable suspicion" that the person is an "illegal alien." It also establishes penalties for harboring or transporting an undocumented immigrant and allows law enforcement to arrest any individual without warrant if they believe this person is “removable from the United States."
• 4. Spencer S. Hsu and Andrew Becker, "ICE Officials Set Quotas to Deport More Illegal Immigrants,"The Washington Post, March 27, 2010.
• 5. The practice of formally detaining border crossers (as opposed to simply returning them across the border) has become more prevalent since the implementation of Operation Streamline in 2005. See ACLU and National Immigration Forum, "Operation Streamline Fact Sheet," (Washington, DC: National Immigration Forum, 2009).
• 6. The map traces the journeys into the United States of members of an adult ESL course Harbage Page taught with Lauren McGrail and Dani Moore called Project Focus. It was a collaboration between Voices and Casa Multicultural and was funded by the North Carolina Community College System and the Durham Arts Council, 2000. The image is a page from an alphabet book produced in class. The maps are Polaroid images of a large map in the classroom where each student marked their journey from their home country to Durham, North Carolina with string. The writing was done by Guillermina Flores Godinez.
• 7. Migration Policy Institute, “States Ranked by Percentage Change in the Foreign Born Population” Migration Policy Institute Data Hub (Migration Policy Institute, 2011). These figures explain why the South has been identified as one of the “new” immigration destinations, areas that, unlike California, Florida, New York, and Texas, were not traditional “immigrant states” until the last two decades. Jamie Winders refers to the US South as one of the “nontraditional” destinations for the Latino immigrant population, whose rates of growth have reached up to 500% in certain cities between 1990 and 2005. Jamie Winders, "Changing Politics of Race and Region: Latino Migration to the U.S. South,"Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 6 (2005): 683-4. The 2010 census reflects this phenomenon, showing that those “areas that had been home to the most immigrants” show a flat growth in “foreign born population” while some rural and suburban areas with less than 5% of immigrant population in 2000 show increases of more than 60%. Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff, "Immigrants Make Paths to Suburbia, Not Cities," in The New York Times (New York: 2010).
• 8. Migration Policy Institute, “States Ranked by Numeric Difference in the Foreign Born Population” Migration Policy Institute Data Hub (Migration Policy Institute, 2011). The Pew Hispanic Center 2010 census tabulations of growth in Hispanic population (i.e., not necessarily foreign born) show that South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Mississippi figure among the top ten states. Immigrants from Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and South America constitute approximately 53% of the total foreign born population. In Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina they make up 54.5%, 36.1%, and 57.3%, respectively. See Tables 3 and 13 in Pew Hispanic Center “Statistical Portrait of the Foreign Born Population in the United States, 2009” in Pew Hispanic Center February 17 (Pew Research Center, 2011).
• 9. Nicholas De Genova, "The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant "Illegality","Latino Studies 2, no. 2 (2004), Guillermina Gina Núñez and Josiah McC. Heyman, "Entrapment Processes and Immigrant Communities in a Time of Heightened Border Vigilance,"Human Organization 66, no. 4 (2007); Inés Valdez, "Sovereignty and the City: Raiding, Detaining, and Domestic Immigration Policing" (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, San Francisco, April 3-5 2010); Mathew Coleman, "The "Local" Migration State: The Site Specific Devolution of Immigration Enforcement in the US South,"Law & Policy forthcoming (2011).
• 10. Desmond King and Inés Valdez, "From Workers to Enemies. National Security, State Building and America’s War on Illegal Immigrants," in Narrating Peoplehood in Plural Societies: The United States, Canada and Denmark in Historical Experience and Theoretical Perspective, ed. Michael Bøss (Aarhus: Aarhus Academic Press, 2011).
• 11. President Reagan launched the project of the museum on occasion of the centennial of the Statue of Liberty in 1986. He moved Ellis Island to the purview of the National Park Service, merged it with the Statue of Liberty and created a public-private partnership that was led by Lee Iacocca, himself the son of an immigrant and the American dream come true. Luke Desforges, "Front Doors to Freedom, Portal to the Past: History at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, New York,"Social & Cultural Geography 5, no. 3 (2004).
• 12. De Genova, "The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant 'Illegality.'", Judith Smith, "Celebrating Immigration History at Ellis Island,"American Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1992): 85.
• 13. Desforges, "Front Doors to Freedom, Portal to the Past: History at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, New York," 437.
• 14. A wall with over 700,000 names (at the time of writing) exists in Ellis Island. Individuals or families can add their names for a fee of $150. Entries are received for all ports of entry and years of arrival, with the common element being the “celebration of American migration” (see the museum’s site for the wall of honor). The opening of the “wall” to all immigrants is significant and worthy of praise, yet the story that is portrayed by the museum is still devoted to the earlier migratory wave, one restricted in time and not predominantly originating in the Western Hemisphere.
• 15. The photographs in fact represent the physical archive that is being created and kept by Harbage Page.

Introduction

In August of 1920, Dr. Oscar Dowling, president of the Louisiana State Board of Health, alerted Governor John M. Parker about the increasing availability of a "powerful narcotic, causing exhilaration, intoxication, [and] delirious hallucinations." Dowling, later chairman of the American Medical Association's board of trustees, also wrote the US Public Health Service urging action to prohibit the spread of this drug throughout the country. Surgeon General Hugh S. Cummings replied to express his "complete agreement" with Dowling's concerns. Governor Parker, surprised to learn there was no federal law curbing the drug, wrote John F. Kremer, prohibition commissioner, and alleged, "two people were killed a few days ago by the smoking of this drug, which seems to make them go crazy wild."1 The drug was marijuana.2

Dowling and Parker's letters marked the early stages of the "marijuana menace"—a panic that coalesced around the alleged spread of marijuana use among criminals and school-age children in New Orleans between 1920 and 1930. In response, both the city and the state of Louisiana passed laws criminalizing the drug's use, sale, and possession. In the weeks that followed the passage of the city ordinance in 1923, police raided houses, restaurants, and soft drink stands to arrest suspected peddlers and users. Police and the press quickly dubbed users as "muggleheads," drawing on the street term for marijuana. A year later, following unanimous passage by the legislature, Governor Henry L. Fuqua signed a statewide law prohibiting marijuana. In the months and years that followed, civic groups and law enforcement officials in New Orleans launched more than one "muggles drive" and declared "war on dealers in marijuana."3

Previous studies of marijuana prohibition in the United States have given relatively little attention to city- and state-level events such as these, emphasizing instead developments that led to federal marijuana legislation in 1937.4 The most influential and widely cited, Richard J. Bonnie and Charles H. Whitebread's The Marihuana Conviction (1974), acknowledges the importance of earlier state laws but offers a limited exploration of their origins or municipal counterparts.5 For instance, although Bonnie and Whitebread note New Orleans's influential role in fostering marijuana menace ideology, they provide only brief analysis on developments in the city and generally ignore passage of the city ordinance in 1923 and state law in 1924. Rather, they argue that until 1926, "very little . . . was done about the marihuana issue until the press seized upon it."6 Likewise, in assessing the city's marijuana users, Bonnie and Whitebread write that "use among black and lower-class white elements of New Orleans emerged along with the propensity toward use by youth."7 Moreover, younger users were "drawn from the same socioeconomic classes as the adult users."8 They offered little evidence for these claims, and believed New Orleans's officials responded to a general spike in crime during the 1920s by using marijuana as a "convenient scapegoat"—dismissing newspaper and law enforcement claims about the dangers of marijuana and its growing user population in the city as "propaganda."9 Bonnie and Whitebread's belief that the city's marijuana users came from fringe and minority groups served to bolster their broader argument that racism and xenophobia played a central role in driving marijuana prohibition nationwide. Despite its limited engagement with evidence drawn from the state and local level, this general interpretation has remained largely unchallenged.10

In contrast, this essay utilizes contemporary coverage from the Times-Picayune newspaper to analyze the impetus for marijuana prohibition and enforcement in New Orleans as well as the spatial and demographic characteristics of the marijuana users arrested. As one of the earliest urban markets for illicit marijuana use, New Orleans offers an excellent case study for testing prominent aspects of the existing historiography. Given what we now know about marijuana's effects, there is certainly much to critique about the often-hyperbolic commentary on its dangers during the 1920s. Nevertheless, contemporary newspaper coverage sheds light on the origins of those claims as well as the hundreds of marijuana arrests that took place in the city. Many of these reports provided information about the suspects, including their names and arrest locations, the quantity of marijuana seized, home addresses, race, and age. What follows is an examination of the sharp rise in commentary on the dangers of marijuana use alongside an analysis of 225 documented arrests during the first seven years of citywide prohibition. These arrests represent only incidents covered in some detail by the Times-Picayune and provide a valuable database for suggesting patterns and trends among the city's users.11 When combined with an analysis of the simultaneous rise in commentary on marijuana's dangers, this essay and accompanying interactive digital map challenge previous interpretations, revealing both a rapid association between marijuana and crime as well as evidence for a predominately young, white user population that helped drive local concern and provided the impetus for legal prohibitions in New Orleans and beyond.

Youth, Crime, and "Marijuana War"

On February 18, 1922, the New Orleans Times-Picayune announced that a new drug habit was growing rapidly in the city. Citing Dr. Oscar Dowling, who first raised the alarm on marijuana some two years earlier, the newspaper reported the "passage of a drastic law to curb the constantly growing practice of selling and smoking marijuana, also known as muggles, will be sought at the next session of the Legislature." Federal assistance also appeared to be on the way. G. W. Cunningham, chief federal narcotic officer for Louisiana, asserted that, "a measure is to be introduced into Congress which would put marijuana in the same class with morphine, cocaine and opium." Cunningham also "rapped the popular impression that marijuana is not harmful"—suggesting its use may have already reached a critical mass in New Orleans. He believed marijuana"was as habit forming as morphine or cocaine" and that "constant smoking will ruin the health."12

How much the public knew about marijuana is difficult to assess. In October 1921, a Times-Picayune reader wrote about the paper's recent "allusion to the narcotic preparation of a plant called 'marijuana.'" The reader hoped to learn "where it is grown; its effect on the human system and if it is injurious or otherwise." Such questions suggest a general lack of awareness surrounding marijuana in the early 1920s, but that appeared to be rapidly changing. The newspaper's editorial reply included a range of speculation and confusion alongside information on the effects of cannabis drawn from medical journals. It noted correctly that marijuana "consists chiefly of the flowering tops and tender leaves and stalks of the Indian hemp (Cannabis indica)." Yet, it speculated, "the name 'marijuana' is probably a corruption of the 'majoon' of Calcutta, the name given to the hashish made in that city."13 Furthermore, the editorial connected the word hashish with the etymology of the term "assassin"—an oft-cited legend stretching back to Marco Polo and the Crusades.14 The Times-Picayune also included an assessment of the drug summarized from existing medical literature:

The effects differ according to the dose and the idiosyncrasy of the individual. One of the first appreciable effects of the drug is the gradual weakening of the powers of controlling and directing the thoughts. This is followed by dreams accompanied by errors of sense, false convertions [sic], and the predominance of one or more extravagant ideas. A minute may seem a year and an hour only an instant; sounds may be exaggerated, and the sense of duration of time and extent of space and the appreciation of personality are lost. Some individuals become pugnacious, while others fall into a state of reverie. After small doses there is a great tendency to causeless merriment. Although less certain in its action than opium, it is said to possess certain advantages over that drug—that it does not induce torpidity of the liver, create nausea or check the secretions, and it is less likely to occasion headache.15

In short, the Times-Picayune editorial tied marijuana to more familiar forms of cannabis, namely eastern hashish, while ably summarizing some of the existing medical information of the drug.16 It was not a difficult leap to more frightful effects characterized by exhilaration, intoxication, and aggressiveness.

As marijuana moved into the public consciousness of New Orleans in the early 1920s, characterizations of its potentially dangerous effects took hold.17 In May 1922, the Times-Picayune proclaimed "'Muggles' Incites Orleans Youths to Crime" and cited Police Detective Paul R. Maureau who blamed the "Mexican drug" for rash of "outbreaks by boy addicts." Maureau claimed one fourteen-year-old automobile thief was a "member of a gang that was accustomed to smoke 'mirauana' or 'muggles' cigarettes, which are supposed to produce recklessness unrivaled by other 'dope.'" Likewise, a juvenile court judge declared that "several boys have admitted using 'mirauana' to 'get up their nerve' for theft and other offenses." One of the boys testified the drug was available as dried leaves or ready-made cigarettes, purchased for twenty-five cents each. Just one cigarette, claimed Detective Maureau, could "contain criminal inspiration for four or five youths." To solidify the link between marijuana use and crime, Maureau affirmed that a man "arrested recently for the murder of a woman was found to be under the influence of 'mirauana.'"18

Stories of marijuana use bolstered fear of its spread, prompting a swift response by the city's commission council. On May 18, 1923, the Times-Picayune highlighted the hospitalization of Randall Sharp—"another victim of the Mexican dope, 'Marijuana.'" Physicians at Charity Hospital"declared there is an epidemic of smoking the contraband in New Orleans and that scarcely a day passes without two or three persons being sent there for treatment." The news story further noted an increase of marijuana "in the city within the last few months."19 Two days later, at the request of District Attorney Marr and a number of medical professionals, City Commissioner Maloney introduced an ordinance "to make illegal the sale of 'cannabis indica,' better known as 'Mari Juana' or the 'Mexican happy smoke.'"20 On May 29, the council officially prohibited possession and sale of marijuana in New Orleans, with violations punishable by a fine of up to $25 and thirty days of imprisonment.21

A number of factors contributed to the city's efforts to curb marijuana. The drug was frequently among those sold by street peddlers. Its presence alongside other drugs and alcohol seized during police raids bolstered its prominence.22 Early reports on marijuana occasionally noted that it arrived in New Orleans via the city's many shipping docks, often tying the drug to Mexican seamen and foreign vessels.23 There was also a quick and clear characterization of marijuana's apparent dangers together with dire warnings about its growing use. Prominent physicians and government officials fostered and reinforced these characterizations, and the purported connections between marijuana use and criminal activity.

Nevertheless, the alleged use of marijuana by schoolchildren appears to have been the primary factor in driving city's prohibitory action. A Times-Picayune exposé entitled "The Victim" chronicled what many believed was happening to an alarming number of youthful users. In the parlor of a former mansion turned tenement, reporter Lyle Saxon sat with the mother of a young boy who wept as she said, "To think that this has happened to my little boy, only twelve years old, and a victim of drugs." Her son Seth and his fourteen-year-old brother had sold newspapers after school. All was well until she "began to notice that something was wrong" with Seth: he "would come home with his eyes wide open, staring, but he seemed half asleep. He would say strange things."24 Seth would "sleep like a log" and in the morning, his mother would be unable to wake him up for school. He began missing school entirely and bringing home less and less money from the newspaper sales that helped support the family. When asked, "he couldn't account for where it had gone."25 Seth also began to "stay out all night," until one day he simply did not come home. Missing for three days, his father went in search of him, eventually "coming home with the boy in his arms, his little head hanging down like he was dead." When Seth's parents called the police, they said he "had been smoking marihuana," or "Muggles."26

Social workers, physicians, and local police often confirmed the spread of marijuana smoking among school-age children. The findings of Mrs. Emma B. Stanton, who conducted "an investigation among the small boys and youths of the city," escalated the belief that marijuana was widely available. Stanton claimed that she provided a seven-year-old boy with some money and sent him into a saloon. The boy emerged "a few moments later with a little packet of marihuana, rolled in a bit of newspaper—and with the information that a man inside had offered to roll the cigarettes for him because he was too little to roll them himself."27 An investigation by Lazu Block, chief attendance officer of parish schools, also found evidence of marijuana use among school-age children. At this news, a collective of more than sixty-three affiliated parent-led education clubs (the President's Cooperative Club) met with the district superintendent and adopted "resolutions approving the efforts of the commission council and the chief of police to stop the sale of marihuana or 'muggles' cigarettes."28

In July 1923, the Times-Picayune described "Muggles" as the "boon of newsboys and school children who haven't the means to purchase a more expensive drug."29 Reporter Lyle Saxon characterized the situation as especially dire: "to curb the smoking of marihuana is an arduous task—as so many boys and men have acquired the habit, and they will brave almost anything in order to get their daily 'shot.'" Saxon believed "the tragedy of the situation is that this drug is striking at the very roots of society in attacking the children." Marijuana use was quickly "making them slaves, not only to the drug, but to those unscrupulous boys and men who find it to their advantages to 'dope' the children, taking from them their hard-earned pennies, gained by selling papers, shining shoes and so on, leaving the children sleeping in alleys, in gutters and in the streets."30

Professional medical opinions urged immediate social intervention and police enforcement, stressing the potential dangers of marijuana. "There is little difference in the effects of marihuana and hashish," said Dr. E. J. DeBergue, assistant city coroner. "When first used it produces a form of mild exhilaration. With constant use this exhilaration passes and one uses the drug simply to feel normal." When compared to "more powerful drugs," DeBergue added, "marihuana gives its addicts an appearance of listlessness, numbness, and a general lack of energy. . . . It produces protracted insomnia and may lead to temporary insanity." In short, marijuana was "intensely harmful."31 Dr. John M. Fletcher, professor of psychology at Tulane University, president of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and later chairman of the Louisiana Educational Survey Commission, painted a similar picture of marijuana's dangers. Though not a medical doctor, Fletcher analyzed samples of the drug seized during police raids and summarized the existing, if conflicting, characterizations surrounding it. "In use for centuries as a narcotic stimulant," Fletcher noted the effects were "both mental and physical." Users showed "a gradual weakening of the thought processes, together with extreme errors of sense of time and space." Long-term use led to "indigestion, wasting of the body, cough, melancholy, impotence and dropsy." Eventually, Fletcher claimed, "its votary becomes an outcast from society, and his career terminates in crime, insanity and idiocy."32

These grave assessments and the growing fear of marijuana's spread among children fueled calls for additional legislative action. In May 1924, newly elected representative Fred W. Oser, a former police reporter for the Times-Picayune and secretary to the commissioner of public safety in New Orleans, brought the city's desire for marijuana enforcement to the state legislature in Baton Rouge. Oser said he often "observed the evils of marijuana," and one of his first actions was to introduce statewide anti-marijuana legislation.33 His proposal, which sought to forbid the sale and transportation of marijuana, carried mandatory provisions for a fine and imprisonment and prohibited the trial judge from suspending the sentence. In early June, the judiciary committee of the House favorably reported on the bill.34 Little more than a week later, Oser presented the bill for a vote and insisted there should be no objection from his colleagues. His fellow representatives declared the bill was "splendid and badly needed," insisting, "such a law is absolutely necessary." Oser's bill swept through the chamber, "84 yeas to no nays."35 On July 1, 1924, Governor Henry L. Fuqua signed the legislation into law. The measure allowed for limited sale of specific medically prescribed cannabis preparations, but otherwise prohibited possession, sale, and transportation.36

Backed by the city ordinance and state law, New Orleans law enforcement agents and civic clubs continued their efforts to curb marijuana use, especially among youth. In May 1925, New Orleans coroner, George F. Roeling urged "police cooperation with his department in endeavoring to trace the source from which persons under his care for observation obtain alcohol, habit-forming drugs and 'muggles.'"37 A meeting of the New Orleans Federation of Clubs in November included continued allegations of marijuana use by young children. "Marijuana is being sold in drug stores and candy stores throughout the city," declared Mrs. Emma Bell Stanton. "School boys are smoking this pernicious drug in cigarettes, and school girls, automobile riding at night, are becoming intoxicated by it."38 Mrs. Charles Gregson, chair of the Federation of Clubs committee on anti-narcotics, declared "Marijuana War." The first battle aimed to stop use of the marijuana cigarette—what Gregson called "a stepping stone" toward the "use of even more vicious and degrading narcotics."39 Police Detective Henry Asset stressed that the effects of marijuana were "not so deadly in themselves, but in many instances they lead to the use of more powerful drugs."40 Mrs. Gregson planned to host a series of lectures for civic clubs and older children on the evils of the drug traffic, and called upon concerned citizens to notify her of places where marijuana cigarettes were sold.41

The Louisiana Board of Health called upon Dr. Carleton Simon, a narcotic expert, deputy police commissioner, and lecturer on criminology in New York, to conduct a survey of drug use in the state. Simon's investigation concluded that, "thousands of young men and women in Louisiana are addicted to the use of marijuana, known in underworld haunts as 'muggles' and 'moota.'"42 School officials and parent groups reaffirmed Simon's assessment.43 In January 1927, A. H. Seward, president of the Public School Alliance (PSA), charged that marijuana was "being sold to children in the grammar and high schools."44 By November, the PSA reported, "a slight increase in the number of marijuana, or 'muggles,' cigarettes sold to and smoked by grammar school children." Some of those children were "as young as those of the fourth and fifth grades" with "traces of this habit . . . seen as early as the third grade."45

The PSA findings resulted in renewed calls for federal intervention.46 In December 1928, W.O. Hart, PSA legislative committee chairman, began working with Louisiana Representatives James Z. Spearing and James O'Connor to amend the existing federal Harrison Narcotic Act to include marijuana.47 Congressman Spearing was a longtime member, and two-time president, of the Orleans Parish School Board as well as a member of the Louisiana State Board of Education. "Despite the efforts of the alliance and of its private investigators," declared PSA president A. H. Seward, the traffic in this social leprosy still goes on" and would until Congress passed "suitable legislation, laws with teeth in them."48 That New Orleans played a central role in raising the issue made news as far away as New York—where headlines seized on the city's "fight to save school children."49

The existence of Mrs. Gregson's "marijuana war," the efforts of civic clubs and the PSA, as well as consistent police enforcement demonstrate that prohibitory marijuana laws in New Orleans remained anything but "dormant."50 There was significant and consistent activity aimed at curbing marijuana use in the city beginning in the early 1920s. For the period between June 1923 and December 1929—roughly the first seven years of enforcement for the city's ordinance—reporting from the Times-Picayune highlighted 225 documented marijuana arrests. The paper's reports shed light on the activities of law enforcement as well as the spatial and demographic characteristics of those arrested. Measuring the prevalence of marijuana use in New Orleans during this period remains difficult given the many source biases and limitations surrounding illicit substances. Examining these reports, however, reveals a user population with characteristics different from those often described by contemporary commentary and subsequent historical studies.

Marijuana Users in Time and Place

One of the most striking differences between the newspaper evidence and the existing historiography on marijuana prohibition is the size of the marijuana market. Most historical studies have suggested marijuana use in the 1920s was a highly regionalized, marginal practice confined to Mexican immigrants and fringe groups and likely exaggerated by contemporary sources.51 The available evidence from New Orleans suggests otherwise.52 Police activity in the city yielded arrests for possession of a single marijuana cigarette to seizures as large as forty pounds. In 1922, the Times-Picayune recorded three raids netting large quantities. In August, police raided the apartment of Genara Prugillo and Lorenzo Espinoza capturing twenty-one gallons of wine and one hundred and ninety packets of marijuana.53 A month later customs officials searched a Mexican steamship moored in New Orleans and seized "two large packages of Mexican Marijuana leaves" valued at New Orleans retail prices exceeding $800.54 In December, New Orleans police and federal agents completed an undercover investigation they believed would "smash" a local "narcotic ring." The alleged ringleader was captured with "more than $9,000 of cocaine, morphine and mariahuana."55 Little more than a year later, New Orleans police made a series of arrests that netted similarly large amounts of marijuana, including seizures of fifteen pounds, five pounds, forty pounds, and ten pounds.56

Given such volume, it is hard to dismiss the situation in New Orleans as journalistic sensationalism or law enforcement propaganda although it is easy to criticize the contemporary assessment of the dangers posed by marijuana use given our present understanding. The size and frequency of seizures in New Orleans during the early 1920s attest to the scope of the city's marijuana market. Arrests for simple possession as well as large quantities occurred regularly. Street-level arrests and sting operations often yielded only a few marijuana cigarettes, while quantities seized at larger busts ranged from hundreds of pre-rolled cigarettes to many pounds of bulk marijuana.57 These stories signal a market environment with both large-scale peddlers and small quantity buyers.

The evidence also hints at the existence of a subset of repeat offenders. During the city's "first marihuana raids," for example, police arrested Antonio Bernade and his wife—owners of the Black Cat Restaurant—with "twelve packs of the weed."58 Just a week later in a second restaurant raid, police arrested Bernade again, finding marijuana "concealed in a false window."59 Less than a month later, police alleged that Mrs. Bernade absconded with the marijuana as officers arrived. Mr. Bernade was arrested a third time on charges of selling marijuana cigarettes to Dominick Potania—"a member of one of New Orleans' best families"—as Potania was leaving the restaurant, giving them reason enough to enter.60 Potania seems to have continued his involvement in the illicit drug market. Six years later, a newspaper report chronicled his arrest alongside Carlo Giacona. According to police, Potania "attempted to conceal a packet of cocaine" while Giacona was "alleged to have had a marihuana cigarette."61 Two months later police arrested Giacona again following a raid on his boarding room, where detectives reportedly found "a pound of marihuana seeds."62 Another repeat offender, Sam Farace, faced criminal charges following his arrest with "a pillow slip containing ten pounds of raw marihuana weed." Just out of state prison, Farace was the proprietor of a "soft drink establishment" that city officials alleged was "a rendezvous for thieves and police characters."63 Three years later, during a raid on his family's restaurant, police arrested Farace's younger brother Joseph with two dozen marijuana cigarettes. During that incident, Sam Farace reportedly interfered with the police operation and was "arrested, and charged with disturbing the peace."64

The presence of repeat offenders suggests a substantial market for the drug with significant financial incentives. Both offenders and those pushing for stiffer penalties raised the idea that penalties for violation of the city's marijuana ordinance were too weak.65 Valdo Santos spoke with Times-Picayune reporters following his first arrest on marijuana charges and claimed, "It's not hard to get through. Most of it comes overland, through Texas. We pack it in a suitcase and when we sell out we go back for more. It's easy and a good business. Beats bootlegging and the fines are smaller."66 For Santos, this apparently meant big rewards and small consequences. He was arrested again a year later with five pounds of marijuana and forty-eight pre-rolled cigarettes.67 Police Detective Henry Asset agreed that the punishments for marijuana were not a major deterrent and believed violators easily managed to pay the $25 fine. "Any good peddler," he argued, "can raise that amount."68

Evidence from the Times-Picayune offers some sense of the diversity of people, places, and situations involved in marijuana arrests. Police regularly targeted soft drink stands, groceries, and restaurants and often implicated them as sites of illicit activity, including the smoking and selling of marijuana.69 In April 1924, for instance, following an undercover purchase at the restaurant of Manuel Arredondo, New Orleans police confiscated some forty pounds of marijuana. Valued at nearly $3,000, the stash was "concealed in the rear of the place under a trapdoor."70 Police frequently made marijuana arrests on the streets and sidewalks, including eight young men found smoking in Coliseum Square.71 Though reports suggest police arrested men far more often, there were also female marijuana peddlers arrested.72 Mrs. Carrie O'Donnell was in her grocery store and place of residence when police "found thirty-seven marijuana cigarettes, which complainants said she kept for sale."73 Police arrested Mrs. Sadie Garden at home where detectives seized "several thousand marijuana cigarettes, bulk marijuana, a box of morphine and a quantity of grain alcohol."74 In an era of alcohol prohibition, police frequently seized marijuana alongside liquor.75

Reporting also linked marijuana seizures to the city's many ships and sailors. Often, federal customs agents were involved in these incidents. Though the Harrison Narcotic Act did not cover marijuana, a 1915 Treasury Decision banned the importation of cannabis if intended for other than medical purposes.76 In early 1925, two Mexican seamen faced marijuana charges. Police arrested Antonio Corres on the city docks with "a bag containing marijuana."77 In a separate incident, a customs official trailed Manual Gonzalez as he left the steamship Yuma, leading to his arrest for "possessing six pounds of marijuana."78 In a third incident, Juan Horgoros, a "Spanish Seaman," faced marijuana possession charges following his arrest by a customs official.79 Four years later, customs agents apprehended William Shanakan and Edward Busamente near the Desire street docks as "the pair attempted to land a small skiff underneath the wharf apron and smuggle ashore seven bags of marihuana." The two men obtained the drug from "unnamed members of the crew of the Honduran steamship Baja California." Shanakan and Busamente floated "with the current alongside the ship on the river side and the bags of the hasheesh weed had been let down from a port-hole to the skiff." Since customs agents could not implicate individual crewmembers, they levied a fine on the entire steamship for "unmanifested contraband."80 Given the regularity with which police and customs agents seized large quantities of marijuana from ships and sailors, it appears the city's market for the drug was substantial and frequently supplied by boat.

Some of these arrests and large-scale smuggling cases lend credence to the belief that Mexican immigrants were responsible for bringing marijuana to the United States and that they made up a significant portion of users. The notion that marijuana use was "a casual adjunct to life" for many Mexican immigrants in the early twentieth century has gone virtually undisputed in the historiography on marijuana prohibition.81 This broad narrative argues that immigrant Mexican laborers brought marijuana smoking into the United States where it spread to local populations in Texas, California, Colorado, and other states west of the Mississippi River.82 In this interpretation, anti-Mexican sentiment and blatant racism provided the impetus for many state and municipal level laws prohibiting marijuana. Recently this interpretation has faced a significant challenge. Historian Isaac Campos has shown that marijuana use in Mexico was anything but a regular habit of everyday life and was largely confined to soldiers, prisoners, and other marginalized groups. Most of the general population avoided the drug, believing it caused "madness, violence, and mayhem." Campos argues that rather than bringing marijuana smoking to the United States, Mexican immigrants relayed the idea that marijuana was an incredibly dangerous drug—"one that triggered sudden paroxysms of delirious violence."83

Contemporary newspaper coverage in New Orleans reveals evidence for many of these interpretations, but yields limited support for widespread use by Mexican immigrants. Rather, a small number appear disproportionately tied to the early distribution network. Many of the largest seizures of marijuana in the city had connections to steamships from Mexico. There were also reports of a few large seizures involving Mexican suspects and false-bottomed suitcases, neatly built for concealing drugs.84 Yet, of the 225 documented marijuana arrests in the Times-Picayune between 1923 and 1929, the newspaper identified only thirty-three total suspects by their ethnicity or race. Mexicans accounted for eleven of that thirty-three, and seven of those eleven came from a single seizure. The paper also identified two additional suspects of "Spanish" origin. Another nineteen suspects not explicitly identified by race or ethnicity did have a traditional Mexican or Spanish surname.85

The arrival of Mexican immigrants smoking marijuana did not capture the attention of civic groups and law enforcement, nor did the Times-Picayune give much attention to marijuana use by Mexicans. Neither was anti-Mexican or racist sentiment central to the discussion of the New Orleans city ordinance or state law prohibiting marijuana. Given the city's prominence in launching the "marijuana menace" as a nationwide phenomenon, the absence of blatant anti-Mexican sentiment and the limited number of arrests undermines the intense emphasis on Mexican immigrants found in many histories of marijuana prohibition.86

The same was true of African Americans—another group often associated with marijuana use during this period. Bonnie and Whitebread, for example, suggested that the main users of marijuana in New Orleans were "black and lower-class white elements."87 Likewise, in the mid-1930s, FBN Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger often proclaimed a connection between marijuana and black jazz musicians. There is indeed little doubt that marijuana played an influential role in the lives and artistry of many jazz musicians by the 1930s, as many popular songs eluded to marijuana in both implicit and explicit ways.88 Yet, the arrest records featured in the Times-Picayune include almost no references to jazz musicians or African American marijuana users. Between 1923 and 1929, the paper explicitly identified just sixteen suspects as "negro."89 In the cradle of jazz, during a period defined by the use of racialized terms to distinguish and denigrate African Americans, the local newspaper evidence reveals little connection between these groups and marijuana use.

The lack of African Americans identified among those arrested for marijuana during this period appears especially stark given that the majority of those arrests occurred in and around today's French Quarter.90 The nearby Storyville, Tango Belt, and Back o' Town neighborhoods were home to many African Americans and were prominently associated with vice, entertainment, and jazz. Storyville was the legendary tenderloin district, a sanctioned site of prostitution until 1917. At its peak, the Tango Belt housed one of the highest concentrations of commercial jazz venues in the city. The Back o' Town was the boyhood home of Louis Armstrong and known as the "colored red-light district."91 Nevertheless, very few of the documented marijuana arrests in these areas identified jazz musicians or African Americans as the suspects. In May of 1925, for example, a Times-Picayune headline proclaimed, "Vice Squad Again Hits Tango Belt; Score Arrested." Of the fourteen men and six women arrested, only two faced marijuana charges, and neither was identified by the paper as African American.92

Though most marijuana arrests occurred near North Rampart Street between Elysian Fields Avenue and Canal Street, there were also smaller pockets of arrests throughout the city, especially south of St. Charles Avenue along the Mississippi River. Interestingly, however, the available home addresses for marijuana suspects show a more even distribution throughout the city when compared with their arrest location. This was true of suspects from working-class areas nearer to the river, especially between Magazine Street and Tchoupitoulas Street, as well as suspects from more affluent areas of the city, including the Garden District and the Uptown/Carrollton area near Tulane University. Based on newspaper reports, the average distance between place of arrest and place of residence was 1.7 miles, with a median distance of 1.1 miles.93 These patterns of arrest and home address suggest an illicit market, not unlike those of the present, where the sale of illicit drugs is often concentrated in specific areas of the city, but users regularly come from other neighborhoods to buy.

The dearth of documented arrests for African Americans and Mexicans in New Orleans during the 1920s calls into question long-held historiographic beliefs about the demographics of typical marijuana users.94 Indeed, the available arrest evidence from the Times-Picayune suggests the most common marijuana user in the city was a white male in his early twenties.95 Evidence from the Times-Picayune also sheds light on the contemporary concern with the use of marijuana by school age children. The belief that New Orleans youth were falling victim to the marijuana habit was a significant factor in the city's sustained efforts at prohibiting the drug and curbing its use. School officials and civic groups repeatedly claimed that children as young as third and fourth grade used marijuana.96 Despite the fact that little more than anecdotes supported these assertions, newspaper arrest reports do offer some clues. Of the approximately one hundred arrest reports that provided an age, some twenty-five percent were teenagers. Sixty percent were in their twenties, most under the age of twenty-four. The youngest documented arrest in the Times-Picayune was sixteen-year-old William Casey, seized alongside three other men in their twenties "smoking marijuana cigarettes in the rear room of a soft-drink shop."97 Two police officers arrested seventeen-year-old Eddie Barker with marijuana cigarettes after he nervously ran away when they approached him on the sidewalk.98 Though it is difficult to draw sweeping conclusions from such limited data, there is nonetheless enough evidence here to support insight into the city's concern with youthful marijuana use.

Conclusion: Patterns and Precedents from the Big Easy

As one of the first significant metropolitan markets for marijuana, New Orleans offers fascinating insights into the user population and an excellent test case for existing historiography. Based on newspaper evidence there is little doubt that a thriving illicit market for marijuana existed throughout the 1920s and continued long into the 1930s, as arrests for violation of city and state ordinances continued apace. So, too, did a stern resolve among numerous civic groups, local officials, and law enforcement to curb marijuana use.99 New Orleans played an outsized role as the "hypodermic needle feeding the entire Middle West with drugs" and as a clear nexus of the "marijuana menace" paradigm.100 Locally, two common themes informed the characterization of marijuana as dangerous—a link between the plant and crime alongside a perceived threat to its growing use by young people. The existing historiography offers minimal city- or state-level research on marijuana markets during these years, often dismissing claims of rising use as sensational journalism, police propaganda, and xenophobia. Previous studies have often perpetuated the belief that marijuana use was most prominent among African American musicians and Mexican immigrants, which prompted a racist backlash against the drug that led to its criminalization.101 Without discounting the role of overt racism in early marijuana legislation across the United States, the evidence from New Orleans shows a more complicated picture as the demographic and spatial nature of the city's marijuana market contrasts with those common depictions in the existing literature.

New Orleans is perhaps the best place in the United States to witness the emergence and consolidation of anti-marijuana sentiment, serving as the epicenter for what became broadly known as the "marijuana menace." Events that transpired in the Big Easy during the 1920s and 1930s influenced and previewed what emerged at the federal level. The ways in which media coverage, law enforcement, and civic concerns in New Orleans coalesced and reinforced a negative characterization of marijuana repeated themselves elsewhere across the country. The city's concern with youthful marijuana use and the drug's alleged criminogenic effects proved highly influential in the push for federal marijuana legislation. New Orleans produced a tight coterie of local law enforcement, public health, and social welfare officials who carried their anti-marijuana campaign to the federal level. So much so that when Commissioner Anslinger and the FBN launched the now infamous "reefer madness" campaign in the mid-1930s, they drew on existing depictions of marijuana gathered from sources across the country—especially the "muggleheads" of New Orleans.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Southern Spaces staff members Stephanie Bryan, who helped create the digital maps published here, and Hannah C. Griggs, who copyedited the map database spreadsheets.

About the Author

Adam R. Rathge holds a PhD in American history from Boston College. His dissertation and book manuscript, "Cannabis Cures: American Medicine, Mexican Marijuana, and the Origins of the War on Weed, 1840–1937," charts nearly a century of medical discourse, social concern, and legislative restrictions surrounding the drug, demonstrating that the origins of our nation's prohibitions on marijuana are much older and more complicated than previous studies have suggested. He is currently Director of Enrollment Strategies at the University of Dayton, where he also teaches undergraduate courses as part-time faculty in the department of history.

• 1. David F. Musto, "The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937,"Archives of General Psychiatry 26, no. 2 (February 1972): 102. For more on Dowling, see Richard J. Bonnie and Charles H. Whitebread, The Marijuana Conviction: A History of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States, Drug Policy Classic Reprint from the Lindesmith Center (New York: Lindesmith Center, 1999), 43–44.
• 2. Though usually spelled "marijuana" today, "marihuana" was the most common spelling in the United States during the early twentieth century. Different spellings from that period also included: marajuana, mariguana, mariahuana, marahuana, marihuano, mariguana, in addition to other common names like "reefer" and "muggles." For consistency, I use "marijuana" throughout, unless directly quoting from sources with varied spellings.
• 3. For examples of these enforcement measures, see "Cops Make First Marihuana Raids,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), June 17, 1923; "Marijuana War Is Planned by Mrs. Gregson,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), November 30, 1924, sec. Three; "Ax Killer's Trial Set as 'Muggles' Drive Is Ordered,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), April 18, 1929; "Police Open New War on Dealers in Marihuana,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), October 26, 1930.
• 4. For prominent examples, see Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1963); Alfred Ray Lindesmith, The Addict and the Law (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965); David Solomon, ed., The Marihuana Papers (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1966); Donald T. Dickson, "Bureaucracy and Morality: An Organizational Perspective on a Moral Crusade,"Social Problems 16, no. 2 (Fall 1968): 143–56; Richard J. Bonnie and Charles H. Whitebread, "The Forbidden Fruit and the Tree of Knowledge: An Inquiry into the Legal History of American Marijuana Prohibition,"Virginia Law Review 56, no. 6 (October, 1970): 971–1203; Michael Schaller, "The Federal Prohibition of Marihuana,"Journal of Social History 4, no. 1 (October 1970): 61–74; Lester Grinspoon, Marihuana Reconsidered (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Musto, "The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937"; David F Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973).
• 5. Richard J. Bonnie and Charles H. Whitebread, The Marihuana Conviction: A History of Marihuana Prohibition in the United States (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974).
• 6. Bonnie and Whitebread, 44.
• 7. Bonnie and Whitebread, 92.
• 8. Bonnie and Whitebread, 44.
• 9. Bonnie and Whitebread, 67, 71, 92.
• 10. For recent examples that draw heavily from Bonnie and Whitebread's interpretation, see Richard Davenport-Hines, The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics, 1st American ed. (New York: Norton, 2002); Martin Booth, Cannabis: A History, First U.S. Edition (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004); Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana—Medical, Recreational and Scientific (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013); Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2015). For three notable exceptions that have challenged aspects of Bonnie and Whitebread's conclusions and proved highly influential to my own research, see Jerome L. Himmelstein, The Strange Career of Marihuana: Politics and Ideology of Drug Control in America (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1983); Dale H. Gieringer, "The Forgotten Origins of Cannabis Prohibition in California,"Contemporary Drug Problems 26, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 237–88; Isaac Campos, Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico's War on Drugs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
• 11. Between May 1923 and December 1929, the Times-Picayune published at least three hundred stories with references to marijuana, roughly one per week. The number of articles mentioning marijuana more than doubled during the subsequent seven-year period. From 1930 through federal marijuana prohibition in 1937, the newspaper published more than six hundred and fifty pieces referencing marijuana, demonstrating the continued growth of public concern with the drug.
• 12."New Drug Habit Rapidly Growing, Health Heads Say,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), February 18, 1922. Though a federal law targeting marijuana use would not pass for another fifteen years, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on the "Prohibition of Peyote and Marijuana in Interstate Commerce" in 1922.
• 13."Questions and Answers,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), October 23, 1921, sec. Two.
• 14. For extensive analysis of the link between hashish and Islamic assassins, see Jerry Mandel, "Hashish, Assassins, and the Love of God,"Issues in Criminology 2, no. 2 (1966): 149–56; Farhad Daftary, The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismaʻilis (London: Tauris, 1994); Campos, "Cannabis and the Psychoactive Riddle," in Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico's War on Drugs, 7–38. Just prior to the passage of the federal Marihuana Tax Act, Harry J. Anslinger, first and long-time commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, subsequently made this link famous in "Marijuana: Assassin of Youth,"The American Magazine 124, no. 1 (July 1937).
• 15."Questions and Answers."
• 16. On the heels of pioneering experiments with cannabis conducted in India by Dr. William Brooke O'Shaughnessy, American physicians began debating the potential merits and dangers of cannabis in the 1840s and regularly published their assessments in prominent medical journals. By the late nineteenth century, most agreed that cannabis could be both helpful and harmful and was therefore in need of legal regulation and medical oversight. Nonetheless, after the turn of the century, ongoing difficulty in standardizing medicinal preparations and occasionally frightening side effects in patients led to steady declines in medicinal cannabis use. For an example promptly assessing O'Shaughnessy's work with cannabis, see W.B. O'Shaughnessy, "New Remedy for Tetanus and Other Convulsive Disorders,"The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal XXIII, no. 10 (October 1840): 153–55. On the evolution of American physicians' assessment of cannabis medicines, see Adam Rathge, "Cannabis Cures: American Medicine, Mexican Marijuana, and the Origins of the War on Weed, 1840–1937," (PhD diss., Boston College, 2017), http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:107531.
• 17. For examples, including comparisons between marijuana addiction and stamp collecting as well as a casual mention of marijuana smoking, see "Just What Is Dishonesty,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), July 1, 1923, sec. One-B; "Literature—and Less—Comments on the Books of the Day,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), July 15, 1923.
• 18."Says 'Muggles' Incites Orleans Youths to Crime,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), May 29, 1922.
• 19."Mary Warner Epidemic,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), May 8, 1923.
• 20."Council to Act on Sale in City of Mary Warner,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), May 20, 1923; "Use of Mexican Dope Forbidden by City Council,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), May 30, 1923.
• 21."Use of Mexican Dope Forbidden by City Council"; "A Yarn of Many Threads,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), July 1, 1923, sec. One-B.
• 22. For two examples, see "Police Capture Weed, Wine and Owners in Raid,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), August 26, 1922; "Drug Ring Hunt Seems to Score,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), December 24, 1922.
• 23. For example, see "Narcotic Leaves Seized on Vessel,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), September 21, 1922.
• 24. Lyle Saxon, "The Victim,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), June 3, 1923, 20. It is worth noting that while marijuana's effects are often widely varied, its use may have the exact opposite effect on a user's eyes—constricting rather than widening. Known as photophobia, this squint is now a common trope in pop culture references to marijuana use. Many of the tropes in this story appear drawn from the temperance movement. For an exploration of how "eyes wide open" was often used as a symbol of madness linked with marijuana use, see Campos, Home Grown, 155–80.
• 25. Saxon, "The Victim," 20.
• 26. Saxon, 27.
• 27. Saxon, 27.
• 28."Children Using 'Mary Warner,' Officials Fear,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), June 16, 1923.
• 29."A Yarn of Many Threads,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans).
• 30. Saxon, "The Victim," 27.
• 31."A Yarn of Many Threads."
• 32. Saxon, "The Victim," 27.
• 33. For Oser's quotes see "Red Sticks—Against Marijuana,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), May 14, 1925, 3; "Bills Introduced,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), May 15, 1924, 2.
• 34."Bill Outlaws Marijuana,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), June 4, 1924, 2.
• 35."House Warms Up to Legislative Work,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), June 13, 1924, 4.
• 36. The law restricted prescriptions to medicinal preparations containing a limited percentage of cannabis extract. "Marajuana Outlawed,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), July 2, 1924, 15; "Bills Signed by Governor Fuqua,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), July 13, 1924, sec. One-B, 5; "Orleans Parish Lawmakers to Tell About It at Dinner,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), July 28, 1924, 3.
• 37."Mentality Tests for Speeders Urged by Coroner Roeling,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), May 31, 1925, 1.
• 38."Women to Fight Marijuana Sale,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), November 25, 1924, sec. Part Two, 17.
• 39."Marijuana War Is Planned by Mrs. Gregson." Gregson's use of the term "stepping stone" here may signal the origins of the "gateway drug" theory that ultimately proved highly influential in bolstering a prohibitory stance on marijuana throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
• 40."A Yarn of Many Threads,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans).
• 41. For coverage of Gregson's announcement, see "Marijuana War Is Planned by Mrs. Gregson," 9; "No Man's Land,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), December 14, 1924, sec. Three, 15.
• 42."Thousands of State's Youth Marijuana Addicts, Survey by Criminologist Show,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), August 12, 1926, 6.
• 43. For examples, see "Women to Probe Drivers' License Issuance System,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), October 26, 1926, 3; "National Officer of School Clubs Will Visit,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), October 28, 1926, 5; "Public School Vice Quiz Opens Feb. 23,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), February 20, 1927; "School Alliance Holds Meeting—Stricter Legislation Towards Marijuana Sellers Is Urged,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), May 10, 1927; "School Children Smoke Muggles, Alliance Is Told—Startling Reports Made at Meeting by Mrs. J.G. Skinner,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), May 13, 1928.
• 44."Gambling in City Leaves Its Mark on School Boys,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), January 11, 1927, 2.
• 45."More Children Smoke Muggles Alliance Hears,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), November 15, 1927, 2.
• 46. Their efforts mirrored earlier attempts out of New Orleans urging federal action on marijuana, dating to Dr. Dowling's letters in 1920. For additional examples, see "We Want Walmsley for Congress,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), March 23, 1924, sec. One-B; "Women Endorse City Bond Issue—Federation of Clubs Will Ask Us Action Against Marijuana,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), November 23, 1926, 19. On the Public School Alliance, see "Alliance Seeks Government Ban on Marihuana,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), December 12, 1928, 37.
• 47. The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 regulated and taxed the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and coca products as well as closely monitored the proscribing habits of registered physicians.
• 48."Children Smoke Marihuana, Says Head of Alliance—Fight for More Severe Legislation to Be Carried On,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), January 15, 1929, 12; "Alliance Seeks Government Ban on Marihuana," 37.
• 49."War on Hashish Smoking Is Carried to Congress in Effort to Save School Children,"The Brooklyn Eagle, December 20, 1928, 3; "Federal Agents Powerless to End Hashish Traffic,"The Brooklyn Eagle, December 21, 1928.
• 50. See Bonnie and Whitebread, The Marijuana Conviction, 44. According to Bonnie and Whitebread, in the fall of 1926, New Orleans police suddenly "arrested more than 150 persons for violation of a law which had lain dormant for two years." It is unclear if they mean the city ordinance or the state law. Nevertheless, given the evidence shown here, there was obviously significant attention focused on marijuana for at least four to six years prior to that particular enforcement sweep in 1926. Contemporary reports clearly show continued enforcement and arrests for marijuana under both the city ordinance and state law throughout this period.
• 51. For examples, see Musto, The American Disease; Bonnie and Whitebread, The Marihuana Conviction; John Helmer and Thomas Vietorisz, Drug Use, the Labor Market and Class Conflict (Washington: Drug Abuse Council, 1974); John F. Galliher and Allynn Walker, "The Puzzle of the Social Origins of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937,"Social Problems 24, no. 3 (1977): 367–76; Himmelstein, The Strange Career of Marihuana.
• 52. The widespread digitization of newspapers and related online databases has undoubtedly made this evidence more accessible to researchers and reinforces the need to reevaluate earlier interpretations.
• 53."Police Capture Weed, Wine and Owners in Raid,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans).
• 54."Narcotic Leaves Seized on Vessel,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans).
• 55."Drug Ring Hunt Seems to Score,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans).
• 56."Marihuana Haul Made By Police,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), January 17, 1924; "American Craze for Marihuana Builds Industry,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), March 10, 1924; "Arrest Marihuana Seller,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), March 10, 1924, 14; "Marijuana Seized Valued at $3,000,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), April 20, 1924, sec. Five, 8; "Decision Upholds Recorder's Stand,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), May 1, 1924; "Alleged Ex-Convict Held, Drug Seized,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), May 31, 1924, 3.
• 57. For examples of large marijuana seizures, see "Woman Charged Under Drug Act,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), September 27, 1924, 2; "Marijuana Seized,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), July 17, 1925, 23; "Liquors and Drugs Seized by Agents,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), March 23, 1926; "Healy Launches Attack on Vice and Marihuana,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), October 17, 1926; "Marijuana Leads to Arrest of Four,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), January 16, 1927; "Marijuana Drugs Are Seized on Ship,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), February 10, 1927, sec. Part Two; "Woman Is Accused of Marijuana Sale,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), June 28, 1927, sec. Part Two; "Two Marijuana Loads Confiscated,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), October 8, 1927; "Agents on Trail of Large Liquor Smuggling Ring,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), November 11, 1927; "Marihuana, Rum Seized by Federal Officers on Ships,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), February 10, 1928; "$5000 in Marihuana Taken from Ship,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), February 29, 1928; "Marihuana Seized by Captain at Sea,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), March 22, 1929; "Customs Agents Seize Marihuana Valued at $7500,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), October 4, 1929, sec. Part Two.
• 58."Cops Make First Marihuana Raids,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans).
• 59."Alleged Marihuana Seized,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), June 24, 1923.
• 60."Restaurant Man Sold Marihuana, Police Charge,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), July 8, 1923, 9. A report for this arrest gave a different restaurant address and a slightly differently spelling of his name—Antonio Bernabe.
• 61."Cocaine, Marihuana Found, Two Jailed,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), May 24, 1929. Giacona was ultimately not tried for this offense, see "Records of the Day—Criminal Court,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), June 15, 1929.
• 62."Police Nab Youth, Seize Marihuana,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), August 1, 1929.
• 63."Alleged Ex-Convict Held, Drug Seized,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 3.
• 64."Youth Is Taken in Marijuana Raid,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), April 3, 1927, 15.
• 65. For examples, see "A Yarn of Many Threads,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans); "Marihuana Peddler Fined,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), July 3, 1923; "American Craze for Marihuana Builds Industry,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans); "Arrest Marihuana Seller,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 14.
• 66."American Craze for Marihuana Builds Industry."
• 67."Arrest Marihuana Seller," 14.
• 68."A Yarn of Many Threads."
• 69."Liquor and Mary Warner Seized,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), June 5, 1924, 26.
• 70."Marijuana Seized Valued at $3,000,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 8.
• 71. For this instance and others, see "Alleged 'Muggles' Habitues Are Fined,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), July 29, 1923, 3; "More Patrolmen Are Transferred,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), September 10, 1923, 13; "Finds Marihuana in Martina's Store,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), October 17, 1923, 7.
• 72. The roles women have played in the business of drug trafficking is highly understudied. See Elaine Carey, Women Drug Traffickers: Mules, Bosses, and Organized Crime (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014).
• 73."Unable to Find Verboten Law,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), October 2, 1924, 7.
• 74."Woman Charged Under Drug Act,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 2.
• 75. For just one example, see "Possession Is Charged,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), July 30, 1925, 16.
• 76. W. G. McAdoo, Treasury Decisions Under Customs and Other Laws, vol. 29 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1916), 257.
• 77."Smuggler Sentenced,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), March 5, 1925, 12.
• 78."Marijuana Seized,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 23.
• 79."Spanish Seaman Held,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), October 21, 1925, sec. Part Two, 17.
• 80."Pair Arrested Trying to Land with Marihuana,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), October 10, 1929, 1.
• 81. For the use of this phrase, see Bonnie and Whitebread, The Marijuana Conviction, 33–34.
• 82. Generally known as the "Mexican Hypothesis" or the "Mexican Vector model," this is the most prominent interpretation for marijuana prohibition in the United States. For more on these terms, see Himmelstein, The Strange Career of Marihuana; Campos, Home Grown.
• 83. Campos, Home Grown, 2, 5.
• 84. For examples, see "Seven Arrested and 36,000 Grains of Dope Seized,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), June 8, 1923; "Dope Swindle Exposed by Raid on Mexican Club,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), June 9, 1923; "Marihuana Haul Made By Police"; "American Craze for Marihuana Builds Industry,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans); "Arrest Marihuana Seller,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 14.
• 85. These names include: Martinez (five suspects) with one possible repeat offender, Gonzales (two suspects), Mendoza (two suspects), Busamente (one suspect), Rodrigues (one suspect), Ruiz (one suspect), Garcia (one suspect), Lopez (one suspect), Campos (one suspect), Belasques (one suspect), Torres (one suspect), Spinoza (one suspect), and Santos (one suspect). Those specifically identified as Mexican or Spanish by the Times-Picayune accounted for just five percent of the arrests reported between 1923 and 1929. Adding those with traditional surnames, but unidentified by race or ethnicity, yields twelve percent of documented arrests. The 1930 census data shows 717 citizens in New Orleans listed as "Mexican"—accounting for 0.1 percent of the city's 458,762 residents.
• 86. For the most prominent examples of the "Mexican Hypothesis," see Musto, "The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937"; Musto, The American Disease; Bonnie and Whitebread, The Marihuana Conviction.
• 87. Bonnie and Whitebread, The Marijuana Conviction, 92.
• 88. Bob Beach, "'That Funny, Funny Reefer Man': Reading Reefer Madness Through Jazz Music During the 1930s,"Points: The Blog of the Alcohol & Drugs History Society, April 30, 2015, https://pointsadhsblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/that-funny-funny-reefer-man-reading-reefer-madness-through-jazz-music-during-the-1930s/.
• 89. This number accounts for about seven percent of the total arrests covered in this article. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, African Americans made up between 26 and 28 percent of the total population of New Orleans. For census data, see Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, "Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States" (Washington, D. C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2005), https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0076/twps0076.pdf.
• 90. It is possible that newspaper reports from these areas simply implied the suspects were African American. That seems unlikely, however, given the frequent use of terms like "colored" and "negro" in other reporting by the paper, crime-related or otherwise.
• 91. The adjacent South Rampart Street corridor also had many African American businesses. See "Jazz Neighborhoods—New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)," accessed September 4, 2016, https://www.nps.gov/jazz/learn/historyculture/jazz-map.htm. Armstrong left New Orleans in 1922, but apparently did not begin using marijuana until white musicians introduced him to the drug in Chicago later that decade. Armstrong was highly fond of marijuana; he recorded the song "Muggles" in 1928, faced jail time in 1930 for marijuana possession in Los Angeles, and reportedly smoked daily for most of his life. For more on Armstrong and marijuana, see Thomas David Brothers, Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014).
• 92."Vice Squad Again Hits Tango Belt,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), May 16, 1925.
• 93. Distance data was drawn from 115 records that provided an address for both place of arrest and place of residence. Excluding records where the arrest and residence locations were the same, difficult to locate on a current map, or far outside New Orleans (Biloxi, MS, for example), left seventy-seven records for further analysis. Of those records, the average distance from arrest location to their residence was 1.7 miles, with a median distance of 1.1 miles. The maximum distance was 6.8 miles, the minimum less than 0.1 miles, with a mode of 0.3 miles.
• 94. Though it is difficult to draw firm conclusions, based on the available newspaper evidence it is likely that the vast majority of marijuana suspects were white. Contemporary newspapers generally identified non-whites as "Negro,""Colored,""Mexican," or other similar terms. Thus, when the paper did not provide a race or ethnicity, it seems likely the suspect was white. For another example of identifying and classifying race among arrest records in New Orleans, see Tanya Marie Sanchez, "The Feminine Side of Bootlegging,"Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 41, no. 4 (2000): 403–33.
• 95. About 100 of the 225 documented arrests covered in this essay provided the age of the suspect. Of those with a reported age, the average age was 23.5 years old and the median age was 22.5 years old.
• 96. For examples, see "Children Using 'Mary Warner,' Officials Fear"; "Gambling in City Leaves Its Mark on School Boys"; "More Children Smoke Muggles Alliance Hears"; "School Alliance Holds Meeting—Stricter Legislation Towards Marijuana Sellers Is Urged"; "School Children Smoke Muggles, Alliance Is Told—Startling Reports Made at Meeting by Mrs. J.G. Skinner"; "War on Hashish Smoking Is Carried to Congress in Effort to Save School Children"; "Children Smoke Marihuana, Says Head of Alliance—Fight for More Severe Legislation to Be Carried On."
• 97."Marijuana Leads to Arrest of Four,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans).
• 98."Youth Is Arrested,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), January 15, 1929.
• 99. For an excellent contemporary summary of various high points in the New Orleans anti-marijuana campaign during the 1920s, see "Crime Trail Widens as Marihuana Fume Descends Upon City,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), April 21, 1929, 22, 24.
• 100."Port Termed Hypodemic Needle Feeding Entire Middle West with Drugs,"Times-Picayune (New Orleans), March 6, 1926, 1.
• 101. See Himmelstein, "The Rise of the Killer Weed," in The Strange Career of Marihuana, 49–75. Though subsequent scholars have largely ignored his conclusions, Jerome Himmelstein remains a notable exception to this dominant interpretation. In 1983, Himmelstein emphasized the importance of youthful marijuana use in prompting federal action on marijuana in the mid-1930s. Though this essay lends credence to that finding, it also shows the specter of marijuana use among children originated in New Orleans more than a decade earlier.

Introduction

On a Saturday evening in February 2003, more than four hundred indigenous people from the Guatemala highlands gathered in the assembly hall of the Cherokee County middle school in north Georgia to celebrate the feast day of Santa Eulalia.1 Santa Eulalia is the patron saint of a town by the same name in the department of Huehuetenango where many of the Q’anjobal Maya immigrants living in north Georgia come from. In addition to Q’anjobales from Huehuetenango, the crowd included Maya from different regions of Guatemala who spoke Mam, Quiché, and Chuj, as well as Mexican immigrants and several Americans who were invited to the event. Marimba musicians played familiar songs on two marimbas that had been imported from Guatemala. Many of the women wore cortes and huipuils, the typical dress for women in highland villages, and in a special ceremony, a new Maya princess was crowned and greeted by the crowd.

This Maya Catholic celebration was an unusual sight in Cherokee County, a predominantly white, Protestant locale about fifty miles north of the city of Atlanta. The Maya first began settling in north Georgia in the 1990s.They arrived along with Mexican and other Latin American immigrants to work in construction and poultry-processing, two thriving industries in the region seeking low-wage labor. Most of the early migrants were teenage and adult men who left crowded job markets in California. As word spread about job opportunities in Georgia, they were soon joined by Maya men arriving directly from Guatemala. And while men still make up the majority of Maya migrants, a growing number of women and children have joined husbands, fathers, and brothers in Georgia, resulting in a noticeable Maya presence in local neighborhoods, schools, and churches. The large celebration in honor of Santa Eulalia in 2003 reflected the shift from a temporary population of male workers to a more permanent Maya community in north Georgia.

This multi-media project explores the history of Maya migration to the US South by focusing on the journeys of two migrant families from Santa Eulalia who became part of the Maya community in north Georgia. Through the stories of Maria and Antonio, Alfredo and Juana, we explore the conditions that led to the mass migration of the Maya, their struggles to adapt to life and work in the modern US South, and the impact of their migration on families and communities back home. We situate their journeys within the political turmoil of late twentieth century Guatemala and the social and economic developments that shaped their lives in the contemporary US South.

Antonio and Maria were among the initial wave of Maya migrants to the United States who left Guatemala in the late 1980s during the violent Civil War years.2 They arrived in north Georgia with their four children in 1999 after having lived for ten years in Los Angeles. Better job prospects and safer, less crowded neighborhoods drew them to Georgia. Both found work in poultry-processing factories and they enrolled their children in the local public schools. As they did in Los Angeles, the couple became part of a Maya Catholic group that met weekly and organized social and religious events, such as the Santa Eulalia celebration.3

Alfredo, Antonio’s nephew, headed for the United States a decade later; the violence had subsided in Guatemala, but the economic and social marginalization of the Maya in the country continued. His wife, Juana, remained in Santa Eulalia with their young daughter and her in-laws while Alfredo searched for work in the United States. Their struggle to maintain marital and familial ties across national borders reflects the predicament of many Maya migrants who either by choice or necessity leave spouses, children, parents, and siblings in Guatemala.

Maya migration to the United States is not a simple story of leaving one country for good and settling in another. As Maya migrants like Antonio, Maria, and Alfredo formed new households, work, and social arrangements in the United States, they also maintained important links with family and community members back in Guatemala. They communicated with parents, wives, children, and siblings through phone and audio- and video-taped messages and sent wages earned in southern workplaces to support families, construct homes, and finance community projects in their hometowns in Guatemala. As they struggled to provide a better future for themselves and their families, Maya migrants forged transnational social and economic ties that connected indigenous hometowns in Guatemala with their new places of settlement in the US South. The text and video that follow explore the hopes and dreams they carried and the challenges, hardships, and accomplishments they experienced in their migration journeys.

Maya Migration to the United States

Linguistic map of Guatemala, 2011.

The Maya of north Georgia are part of the large and diverse wave of immigration from Latin America that has transformed the social, cultural, and economic landscape of the US South since the late 1980s. Mexicans make up approximately 60 percent of the Latino population in the South; Central Americans comprise the next largest group, followed by South Americans from Peru, Venezuela, and Columbia.4 The Maya occupy a distinct position within the population of Latin American immigrants. With over four million people in Guatemala and Mexico, they form one of the largest indigenous groups in the Americas. Although exact figures are not known, it is estimated that as many as 500,000 Maya have migrated to the United States. Most come from poor rural towns and villages in the western highlands of Guatemala where they speak one of more than twenty different Maya languages, and families support themselves as small farmers, rural laborers, or market vendors. Meager farm incomes are often supplemented with wages earned as laborers on coffee plantations. The Maya population in the United States also includes a smaller number of high school and college-educated immigrants who worked as teachers, journalists, and in other professional fields in Guatemala.5

The Maya make up approximately 60 percent of the Guatemala population of fourteen million. Centuries of discrimination and exploitation of their land and labor, first by Spanish colonizers and later the Ladino elite, have left indigenous people impoverished and marginalized within their countries (those of mixed European and indigenous ancestry are called Ladinos). Pronouncements of Indian inferiority and backwardness by dominant groups have justified and reinforced the subordination of the Maya in Guatemala from the Spanish conquest to the present day.6

From the colonial era through most of the twentieth century, much of the Maya population lived in the Guatemala highlands where they formed close-knit communities organized in municipios or townships. The inhabitants of a municipio shared a common language and a distinct form of dress, customs, and religious practices. By the 1970s and 80s, however, numerous forces threatened the social bases of indigenous communities—overpopulation and land shortages, plantation demands for labor, the incursions of Catholic and evangelical missionaries, and political violence and repression by Ladino rulers of the country.7

The civil war between military-dominated governments and left-wing guerilla groups was especially destructive to indigenous communities. In 1954, a violent coup supported by the Central Intelligence Agency and right-wing politicians overthrew the democratically elected government in Guatemala. The ensuing political unrest resulted in a military uprising in 1960 that marked the beginning of a thirty six-year civil war. The armed conflict grew especially violent in the 1980s as it spread deeper into rural, indigenous areas. Right-wing governments carried out campaigns of violent repression against labor unions, peasants, activist organizations, and indigenous communities; guerilla groups responded with acts of economic sabotage and strikes against the military.

With the support of US military aid and training, the Guatemala armed forces carried out assassinations of suspected militants and large-scale massacres in regions thought to support guerrilla forces. The political violence eventually resulted in the deaths of two hundred thousand mostly unarmed indigenous people and the destruction of more than four hundred Maya villages. Under General Rios Montt, military dictator in the early 1980s, the government established civilian defense patrols in indigenous areas that required the participation of adult men. Montt was quoted in a New York Times article, as telling an indigenous audience, “If you are with us, we will feed you; if not, we will kill you.” According to the investigations of two human rights commissions, the vast majority of human rights abuses—torture, assassinations, and forced disappearances—were carried out by the Guatemala military and the armed groups they controlled.8

The initial migration to the United States began during this period of armed conflict. At the height of the war, tens of thousands of Maya left villages in the highlands, some headed for Mexico and others for the United States. Even though they were fleeing political violence, most Guatemalans were not accorded refugee status by the US government, but instead were treated as economic migrants. Decisions regarding the status of Central American migrants during the 1980s were influenced more by US foreign policy and Cold War concerns than by the actual conditions Central Americans faced in their origin countries. Migrants from countries whose governments the Reagan administration opposed, such as the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, were far more likely to be considered refugees than those fleeing governments supported by the United States, such as the right-wing military regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador. In 1991, the settlement from a national class-action suit charging bias in the asylum decision process paved the way for 250,000 Guatemalans and Salvadorans to reapply for asylum and many were able to legalize their status.9 This first wave of migrants from war-torn Guatemala initially settled in Los Angeles, Houston, and southern Florida, areas with long-standing Latin American populations.10 Antonio and Maria were among the thousands of Maya who left Guatemala during the political unrest and violence of the 1980s.

Born and raised in rural villages in Santa Eulalia, a municipio nestled high in the Cuchumatanes Mountains in the state of Huehuetenango,Antonio and Maria were a young married couple with an infant daughter when they made the difficult decision that he should leave the country. It was a time when Maya men in the highlands were being forced to serve on civilian defense patrols and threatened with violence or death if they refused to participate. Antonio left Santa Eulalia in 1988 and headed for Los Angeles, where his brother-in-law and a number of other townspeople already lived. His brother-in-law helped him find work in a garment factory and within the next one and one-half years, he had saved enough money to bring Maria and their daughter to the United States. Antonio and Maria spent the next eleven years working at various low wage jobs and caring for their growing family, which came to include three more children, two girls and a boy.11

When the economy worsened in California in the 1990s and the competition for jobs increased, the couple decided to leave Los Angeles and seek better prospects elsewhere. They traveled to north Georgia where they had heard about job opportunities for immigrant workers. They joined many other Central American and Mexican immigrants who were leaving traditional destinations in California and Texas for new destinations in the United States. The Southeast became a strong magnet for Latino immigrants during this decade because of plentiful jobs for low-wage workers in the construction, food-processing, agriculture, and service industries. Immigrants were also attracted by the lower cost of housing and safer neighborhoods that the South seemed to offer.12

A Second Wave of Migration

The 1996 Peace Accords ended the armed conflict between the Guatemala army and guerilla forces. However, economic devastation caused by the war and continued inequality in the aftermath of the war contributed to a second wave of Maya immigration to the United States. The Peace Accords brought about some important changes—demilitarization, creation of a civilian police force, and establishment of a human rights commission. A key part of the peace agreement addressed the rights of indigenous peoples, and reflected the influence of Maya activists and a growing pan-Maya movement in Guatemala. The movement has mounted a serious challenge to the centuries-long denigration of indigenous people and their culture in the country. Maya activists reject the plan of cultural assimilation implicit in the development strategy of the Guatemalan state as well as the left’s tendency to subsume ethnic and indigenous concerns within a rigid class analysis. Instead, they envision a radical transformation of the Guatemalan state into a multicultural nation that supports indigenous rights to self-determination and recognizes indigenous cultures and languages.13

While progress has been made in indigenous cultural rights, the Peace Accords and post-war governments did not tackle the pressing issue of land reform, and have ultimately done little to relieve the poverty and marginalization that most Maya experience in Guatemala. Economic globalization and neo-liberal policies have further threatened the livelihood of many small farmers and workers in Guatemala, and have contributed to large-scale migration to the United States. Working-age men and youth make up the vast majority of this migration, but the number of women and children migrants has increased steadily since 1990.14

In the late 1990s, twenty-three year old Alfredo, the nephew of Antonio, joined the second wave of migration to the United States while his wife Juana remained in Guatemala with their young daughter. A generation younger than Maria and Antonio, Juana and Alfredo grew up in Santa Eulalia and were children during the most violent years of the Civil War. When they finished grammar school, they experienced both the benefits and hardships of the post-war period.

William Brown and Mary Odem, Alfredo and Juana on their wedding, Guatemala.

The oldest son in a rural farm family of seven children, Alfredo decided as a young teenager that he could not make a living farming the family’s small plot of land as his father had done. The only hope for climbing out of poverty (for himself and his family), he believed, was to further his education, which meant leaving Santa Eulalia for Guatemala City. Educational opportunities were very limited for indigenous people in Guatemala, especially in rural areas. At the time, most Maya towns still had no schools beyond the elementary level. Migration to urban areas held the only possibility for secondary education for indigenous youth. With the aim of furthering his education, Alfredo left his home and family at fourteen years of age and headed for sprawling Guatemala City. With no financial help available from his family, Alfredo worked to support himself while pursuing his studies. After five years of a grueling schedule of work and study, he completed high school.15

While living in the capitol city, Alfredo met and fell in love with Juana, another Maya youth from Santa Eulalia who migrated to Guatemala City for more schooling. Her father, a teacher and leader of the Maya cultural movement, directed the Maya language institute in Santa Eulalia. As a result of the 1996 Peace Accords, similar language institutes were established in indigenous towns throughout the highlands. Juana was attending secretarial school in Guatemala City when she and Alfredo began dating and decided to marry. They married in Santa Eulalia in the presence of their parents and relatives, then returned to Guatemala City where Alfredo found a job and enrolled in a university course in computers. A year later Juana gave birth to their first child.16

The birth of their daughter caused Alfredo to carefully examine the prospects for both his new family and his parents and siblings in Santa Eulalia. As the oldest son, he was expected to provide for his parents in their old age and to help support his younger siblings. Even though he had a job, the economic prospects in Guatemala were gloomy, especially for indigenous people. With the low salaries, high unemployment, and rising inflation that existed in Guatemala, Alfredo realized he could not provide a home for his wife and daughter and contribute to the education of his siblings with his current wages. Once again, he contemplated migration, this time to the United States. Alfredo and Juana faced a painful dilemma: to secure a better future for their family, they had to endure years of separation. When Alfredo left for the United States, Juana moved back to Santa Eulalia with her daughter where they lived with Alfredo’s parents, as was the custom for the wives of departing migrants.17

In a process of chain migration, Alfredo headed to one of the places in the United States where relatives and acquaintances from Santa Eulalia had settled. He tried his luck first in Nebraska, where many Eulalenses worked in the meat-packing industry. Difficulty finding a job there led Alfredo to north Georgia, where he joined his uncle and aunt, Antonio and Maria. Alfredo moved into the home they shared with their children and two other young men from Santa Eulalia. With the help of his uncle, Alfredo found work first in the landscaping business mowing lawns, and then in construction where he learned to install electrical wiring in new suburban homes.18

The labor of immigrant workers, like Alfredo and his uncle and aunt, has contributed to the economic growth and competitiveness of southern industries. The reliance on foreign-born workers not only boosted corporate profits, but also lowered the cost of housing, food, and other goods for southern consumers. Latin American immigrants no doubt have benefited from the availability of jobs, but they, along with US-born workers, have faced exploitative conditions in southern workplaces. In the highly competitive global economy, US corporations (in the South and elsewhere) have cut labor costs by creating a more “flexible” workforce through strategies of part-time work, outsourcing, subcontracting, and the recruitment of foreign-born workers. For workers in the United States, “flexibility” has meant the erosion of benefits, job security, safe working conditions, and collective bargaining rights. To achieve labor market flexibility and control, the meat- and poultry-processing industries have increasingly relied on recruiting immigrant workers and using labor contractors to hire large portions of their workforce. Poultry corporations began large-scale hiring of immigrant workers during a period of rapid expansion between 1980 and 2000, when United States consumption of chicken doubled. Native-born and foreign-born workers alike have suffered from the harsh conditions in meat and poultry plants, including production speed-ups, disregard for health and safety standards, and pervasive violation of minimum wage laws.19

The construction trades in the South also relied heavily on recruitment of immigrants from Central America and Mexico to meet the rising labor demand caused by the building boom of the 1990s. Working as dry wall installers, carpenters, plasterers, and bricklayers, immigrant workers helped to build roads, shopping centers, office buildings, and tens of thousands of new homes in metro Atlanta and north Georgia. Their contributions were essential for the completion of the numerous building projects for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. Eager to hire immigrant workers, southern employers have not been so eager to pay them fair wages or provide safe working conditions. Numerous employers have flagrantly violated immigrant workers’ rights by cheating them out of wages and denying them compensation and medical care for accidents on the job.20

Families and Communities Left Behind

Maya immigrants such as Alfredo have endured harsh working conditions in the United States in order to use their wages to provide a better life for their spouses, children, parents, and siblings in Guatemala. The millions of US dollars sent back to families in Guatemala every year have meant improved housing, access to basic health care, and education beyond the sixth grade for many Maya youth. With the wages he earned in construction and landscaping jobs, Alfredo supported his wife and daughter and also contributed significantly to the support of his siblings. His earnings have enabled his two younger brothers to move to Guatemala City to continue their schooling. Additionally he has helped support his older sister and her two children; she was abandoned by her husband several years after he migrated to California. Alfredo and Juana have also begun construction on a new house in the center of town with the money he has earned. New homes and housing construction, seen throughout Santa Eulalia, are the most visible sign of the impact of migrant dollars on this indigenous town.

Typically Maya immigrants support not only their individual families, but also make financial contributions to community projects, earning them respect and appreciation from their fellow townspeople. Money from migrants has been used to construct new roads and schools and bring potable water to highland towns. One of the major contributions of migrants from Santa Eulalia was the construction of a medical clinic and small hospital so that people would not have to travel four hours to Huehuetenango for treatment. Antonio and Maria took part in the community effort of Eulalenses in Los Angeles to organize fund-raising drives for the clinic in their hometown.21

The economic benefits of migration, however, have come at a high cost to Maya families and communities. In many highland towns, the majority of working-age men are living and working abroad, which means that children often grow up without their fathers and wives struggle to manage households on their own, while community institutions try to function with limited involvement of adult men. The separation early in her marriage to Alfredo took its toll on Juana. Like many migrant wives, she experienced loneliness and great anxiety about when and whether her husband would return.22 While most male migrants remain committed to their families in Guatemala, a number have abandoned wives and children, causing them great economic and emotional hardship. In Maya towns, the wives of migrants are watched closely by in-laws and community members to make sure they do not behave in a way that would dishonor their husbands.

Maya migrants in the United States suffered as well from the years of separation from their loved ones. Alfredo deeply missed his wife and young daughter and worried about his mother and father and their ability to manage the farm. He sent audiotapes to Juana and his parents, and talked with them on the phone as often as his finances would allow. He was devastated when he learned during one of these phone calls that his father had died unexpectedly from appendicitis. His father was fifty-two years old. The poor access to health care and doctors in rural Guatemala made deaths from such minor illnesses all too common. Alfredo’s sorrow intensified when he and his family decided that he should not go back to Santa Eulalia for the funeral because of the great cost and the difficulty he would encounter in trying to return to the United States. With the death of his father, Alfredo suddenly became the male head of the family. His responsibility for the care of his mother and siblings increased and made his wage-earning in the United States all the more important.23

Anti-Immigrant Backlash

In the early twenty-first century, Maya and other Latin American immigrants in Georgia encountered an increasingly hostile political environment. When mass immigration from Latin America began in the late 1980s and 1990s, the media, lawmakers, and political organizations paid only limited attention, more often than not depicting immigrants as hard workers who helped the local economy in various ways. During the first years of the twenty-first century, however, anti-immigrant rhetoric and exclusionary policies rose sharply in Georgia and other new immigrant destinations due to declining economic conditions and the heightened national preoccupation with terrorism and “illegal immigration” following the attacks of September 11, 2001. Public outcry about “illegals” stealing jobs, burdening taxpayers, and increasing crime rates led state and local officials across the Southeast to pass laws and ordinances targeting unauthorized immigrants. These measures sought to block undocumented immigrants’ access to driver’s licenses, housing, employment, social services, and higher education.24

William Brown and Mary Odem, People protest immigration policy, northern Georgia.

Much of the legislation targeting unauthorized immigrants has been passed by state and local governments since 2006, in the wake of rancorous discussions in the US Congress and the national news media over the problem of illegal immigration. The failure to enact immigration reform at the federal level strengthened the efforts of state and local lawmakers to take action against unauthorized immigrants, and a record number of immigration bills came before state legislatures in 2006.

The state of Georgia took the most sweeping action of any state at the time to control illegal immigration with passage of the Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act (SB 529) in 2006. The bill was introduced by Republican legislator Chip Rogers from Cherokee County, the same county where Antonia, Maria, Alfredo and numerous other Maya immigrants have settled. Rogers’ bill denies tax-supported benefits, including health care, to immigrants who cannot prove their legal residency; penalizes employers who hire undocumented immigrants; and enlists state and local police in the enforcement of federal immigration laws. The introduction of Senate Bill 529 in Georgia followed in the wake of the punitive legislation (HR 4437) proposed by Republican lawmakers in the US House of Representatives to speed up deportations, criminalize undocumented immigrants, and authorize the construction of a wall at the Mexico–US border. Although the federal legislation failed to pass, SB 529 was passed by the Republican-controlled senate and house and signed into law by Republican Governor Sonny Perdue on April 17, 2006.25

William Brown and Mary Odem, A laborer working in masonry, northern Georgia.

The law reflects a compromise between politicians seeking aggressive action to end illegal immigration and business groups seeking to maintain an available pool of low-wage immigrant labor. After consulting with business lobbyists, Republican sponsor Chip Rogers crafted the bill so that companies would not be held responsible if an employee used false documents or if a subcontractor hired illegal workers without the knowledge of the employer.

The Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act has created a climate of uncertainty and fear among the Maya and other Latino immigrants in the state. Realtors, car dealers, and retailers in immigrant neighborhoods have reported a noticeable decline in Latino customers, which they attribute to the sense of economic and social vulnerability that immigrants now feel. The parks and shopping plazas that had been social and recreational gathering places for Latinos in north Georgia have been noticeably less populated since the legislation went into effect. With the involvement of local authorities in the enforcement of immigration law, the arrest, confinement, and deportation of unauthorized immigrants has climbed dramatically in Georgia. As a result, many families have been separated and immigrants have become more hesitant to notify law enforcement when they are victims of or witnesses to crime. A number of Maya immigrants in North Georgia have been deported and others have been targets of anti-immigrant hostility and harassment.

Pan-Maya Organizing

Although poor in material resources, Maya immigrants have brought with them a tradition of communal organization that has sustained them in face of the discrimination and hardships they have encountered in the United States. Drawing on this tradition, Maya in Georgia and other settlement areas have formed ethnic religious associations that have helped to unify immigrants and strengthen their collective resources. In the initial Maya settlements established in the 1980s in Los Angeles, Houston, and Indiantown, Florida, immigrants formed associations on the basis of hometown origin; members shared a common language, dress, and local customs linked to their particular municipio or town.26

As Maya immigrants increased in number and dispersed to new locations in the country, they began to organize on a pan-Maya basis. In north Georgia a group of Maya that included Antonio and Maria formed a Maya Catholic organization in 1999. It began as a small prayer group that met in the homes of different migrants. By the second year the group had grown from ten to approximately one hundred members and included Maya of diverse language groups (Mam, Quiché, Q’anjobal, Chuj) and regions (Huehuetenango, San Marcos, Quiché, Chimaltenango, and Quezaltenango). When Alfredo joined his aunt and uncle in north Georgia, he became an active member of the organization.

William Brown and Mary Odem, Men at meeting of Pastoral Maya, northern Georgia.

The group first called itself El Ministerio de Evangelización a la Virgen de Asunción (the Virgen de Asunción is the patron saint of Guatemala) and later changed its name to Proyecto Pastoral Maya (Maya Pastoral Project) when it joined a national network of Maya Catholic groups, supported by the US Catholic Church. Pastoral Maya seeks to provide spiritual, social, and material support to the Maya migrants struggling to make a living in North Georgia. To build bonds of solidarity among the group, leaders organize a range of programs and activities that include a weekly Saturday evening meeting of prayer, singing, and socializing; the formation of two choirs; Spanish Mass on Sunday evenings in the parish church; regular house visits to Maya immigrants in need; religious services and cultural celebrations for Christmas, Holy Week, Mother’s Day, and Santa Eulalia’s feast day. One of the organization’s first fund-raising projects was to collect $3,000 to purchase a van to provide transportation for the numerous migrants who do not have cars so that they can attend the Saturday meeting, Sunday Mass, and other activities.27

The largest religious and cultural event organized by the Maya Catholic group is the annual celebration in honor of Santa Eulalia. The event requires months of planning and preparation and the labor and contributions of many immigrants. The feast day celebration has attracted the participation of hundreds of Maya immigrants from north Georgia and the surrounding area and has increased in size each year. Approximately two hundred people from Maya settlements in Canton and Ellijay in north Georgia took part in 2002; the following year more than four hundred Maya migrants attended, including groups from Greenville, South Carolina, and two Alabama towns. By 2004, the number of participants rose to more than six hundred.28

William Brown and Mary Odem, A person participating in the annual celebration of Santa Eulalia, Cherokee County, Georgia, 2003.

The celebration combines Catholic and traditional Maya spiritual practices. It begins with a Catholic Mass led by Father Joseph Fahy of the Atlanta Archdiocese and Father David López, a Maya Catholic priest from Guatemala who visits the community annually to take part in the feast day celebration. Following the Mass is a re-enactment of a traditional Maya religious ceremony that is performed by rezadores (prayer leaders) in Santa Eulalia to pray for harmony and safety during the celebration. In the north Georgia celebration, a young man performs the role of a rezador and recites a prayer to the four directions of the earth.

Central to the Santa Eulalia celebration in Guatemala and in the United States is the marimba and its music. In Guatemala, the marimba is a key symbol of indigenous identity and it continues to play an important role in community life for the Maya who have emigrated to the United States. Soon after their arrival, numerous Maya immigrant groups (in Georgia, Florida, Los Angeles, Arizona, Colorado, and South Carolina) have raised money to purchase and import a marimba from a workshop in the Guatemala highlands.

William Brown and Mary Odem, Princesa Maya Jolom Konob, Cherokee County, Georgia, 2003.

Another major part of the fiesta is the coronation of the new princesa “Maya Jolom Konob,” who will represent the Maya community in the upcoming year. Dressed in the distinctive corte and huipuil of the township, the princess performs a Maya ideal of femininity: she demonstrates her knowledge of indigenous culture by performing a traditional dance to the music of the marimba; she demonstrates her education and learning by delivering a speech before the crowd, first in her indigenous language of Q’anjobal and then in Spanish. A new element in the celebration in Georgia is that the princess addresses the crowd in three languages instead of two: Q’anjobal, Spanish, and English.

The work of the Maya association in north Georgiahas extended beyond the religious and cultural realm. Leaders have provided assistance when Maya immigrants encountered problems such as inability to pay rent, arrest by local police, and need for housing or work. The Maya organization strengthened its presence and influence through the alliance it formed with a group of interested faculty and students at nearby Kennesaw State University who collaborated on a number of projects, such as student-led English classes and tutoring for the Maya, health seminars, and a traffic safety program for immigrants funded by university and state grants. The projects created learning opportunities and internships for students and gave the Maya access to knowledge, skills, and social contacts that enhanced their community-building efforts. On an individual level, university faculty and students also assisted Maya immigrants in navigating the US legal system and local government bureaucracies.

In the mid-1990s, the Maya association in Georgia became part of a national network of Maya Catholic organizations, a grassroots effort initiated by immigrant leaders Sister Nancy Wellmeir and Father David López in 1994 that has received financial support and recognition by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Known as the Proyecto Pastoral Maya, the network is made up of over forty local Maya Catholic groups in states throughout the country including California, Florida, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Nebraska, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina.29

William Brown and Mary Odem, New building in a Guatemalan community.

Since 1999, Pastoral Maya has organized national meetings (Encuentros Nacionales) on an annual basis. The 2003 Encuentro Nacional, which took place in Georgia at Kennesaw State University, brought together fifty-six Maya community leaders from across the country. Most of the participants were men, but as many as a dozen Maya women had a noticeable presence at the meeting. Support and funding for the Conference came from money raised by local immigrant groups, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Archdiocese of Huehuetenango, and the faculty-student group at Kennesaw State University.

Even as the Maya organization established connections with US citizens and institutions, it also fostered transnational ties to indigenous communities back home. Maya immigrants sustained connections to their hometowns in various ways—by collecting money from migrants to finance improvements, such as the building of a medical clinic or school; by raising funds when a community member dies in the United States to return the body to Guatemala for burial in the hometown cemetery; and by sponsoring the visits of priests from hometown parishes in Guatemala to meet with and provide spiritual and social guidance to their parishioners in the United States. Through the range of transnational and local activities, participants in Pastoral Maya express a sense of belonging on both sides of the border—in new settlements in the United States and in communities of origin in Guatemala.

Conclusion

Transnational migration has provided needed economic resources for the Guatemala Maya, while placing great strain on families. The burden of living across borders has fallen most heavily on the women and children left behind in Guatemala. For Juana, when the years of separation and uncertainty about her husband’s return led to anxiety and depression so grave that her family feared for her well-being, Alfredo went back to Guatemala to be with her. He left with the intention of returning to the United States because he still had not earned enough money to complete the home they were building, but he ended up staying in Santa Eulalia. The needs of his family, not only of his wife and daughter, but also of his mother and siblings, held him in Guatemala. They had suffered in his absence, especially Juana, and he had sorely missed them.

Within a year of his return, Juana gave birth to their second child, another daughter, and this time Alfredo would be around to see her learn to walk and talk.

Alfredo’s homecoming eased the emotional hardship for the family, but presented real economic hardship. With the loss of his wages from the United States, he had to work at several jobs to cover living expenses. He eventually started a small business in Santa Eulalia that provides computer, accounting, and other services. His two youngest siblings assist him with running the business. Making enough to get by is a constant struggle. A year after Alfredo returned to Guatemala, his next-oldest brother, who had recently finished high school in Guatemala City, began to make plans to migrate to the United States. Following in the footsteps of Alfredo, he wanted to build a home for his wife, who was pregnant with their first child, and to contribute to the support of his mother and siblings. The family would continue to rely on transnational migration as an important economic strategy.

Antonio and Maria, meanwhile, remained in Georgia. After years of working at low wage jobs in factories and on construction sites, they managed to save enough to open a small store where they sold products from Guatemala and inexpensive clothing and shoes, mostly to other immigrants from Central America and Mexico. They remained active in Pastoral Maya, and Antonio served for several years as the national leader of the organization, which took him to different parts of the country to meet with local chapters.

Although Maria and Antonio have talked about returning to Guatemala and have remained in close contact with Maria’s parents and siblings there, the pull of their children has kept them in the United States. Their oldest daughter graduated from the local high school, a source of great pride for her parents, and the three younger children have continued with their studies in junior high and elementary school. All of the children, even the two born in Guatemala, have been raised in the United States and know of Santa Eulalia only through the stories of their parents.

The stable, relatively prosperous life Antonio and Maria had built in Georgia came to end with the economic crisis of 2007 that ravaged many families and businesses in the United States. The business in their store dropped sharply as Latino immigrants in the area, their main customers, lost jobs and income. Soon, the couple was no longer able to pay rent and had to close the store. Then, after months of struggling to keep up with mortgage payments, they lost the house they had lived in since 2000. With the limited economic prospects they faced in Georgia, Antonio and Maria decided to return to southern California where they could live with Maria’s brother until they got back on their feet.

After three decades of Maya migration to the United States, there are Maya communities in cities and towns throughout the country, from California on the west coast to Georgia on the east. A web of familial and organizational ties link Maya settlements in the United States to one another and stretches across national borders to connect to Maya families, hometowns, and institutions in Guatemala. As the stories of Maria and Antonio, Juana and Alfredo make clear, this web of connections has provided a crucial source of support for the Maya to survive periods of war and ethnic violence, economic vulnerability, and social marginalization. They have not overcome these threats, neither in Guatemala, nor in the United States, but they have managed to lessen their impact and to provide more opportunities and security for their children and families.

Video Credits

Writer/Producer - Mary Odem
Director/Photographer/Editor - William A. Brown
Additional Editing - Brian Cox

Special thanks to Teodoro Maus, Gayla Jamison, George King, Father Joseph Fahy, Juanatano Cano, Jamie Escamilla, David Moscowitz, Alan Lebaron, David Donato Vivres, Mael Vizcarra, Norberto Sanchez of the Norsan Group, and Dutch Knotts.

This video could not have been made without the support of people and community leaders of Santa Eulalia, Guatemala, as well as the Maya immigrant community in North Georgia. This program is dedicated to Antonio, Maria, Alfredo, Juana, and all the Maya who participated in the making of this program.

Supported with travel grants and research grants from Emory University. Civil War footage courtesy of the National Archives. Maya Footage Copyright William A. Brown. Edited at ATLANTA VIDEO.

We carried out research, location shooting, and interviewing for this project from 1999 to 2004 in northeast Georgia and in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, in the town of Santa Eulalia. The research included interviews, participant observation, and archival research in both Georgia and Guatemala.

Ensayo en Español

• 1. We carried out research, location shooting, and interviewing for this project from 1999 to 2004 in northeast Georgia and in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, in the town of Santa Eulalia. The research included interviews, participant observation, and archival research in both Georgia and Guatemala.
• 2. In the essay and video we have used only the first names of immigrants and their family members.
• 3. Interviews with Antonio (2001, 2002, 2003) and Maria (2003).
• 4. Mary E. Odem and Elaine Lacy, Latino Immigration and the Transformation of the U.S. South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009): ix-xxvii.
• 5. Allan F. Burns, Maya in Exile: Guatemalans in Florida (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Leon Fink, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Jacqueline Hagan, Deciding to be Legal: A Maya Community in Houston (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); James Loucky and Marily M. Moors, The Maya Diaspora: Guatemalan Roots, New American Lives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); Cecilia Menjivar, "Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants' Lives in the United States,"American Journal of Sociology, 111(2006): 999-1037.
• 6. Nancy M. Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Marilyn M. Moors, ed., Guatemala Indians and the State, 1540 to 1988 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).
• 7. Douglas E. Britnall, Revolt Against the Dead: The Modernization of a Mayan Community in the Highlands of Guatemala (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979); Carol Smith, “Class Position and Class Consciousness in an Indian Community” in Moors, Guatmala Indians and the State, 205-229; John M. Watanabe, Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World (Austin: Univesity of Texas Press, 1992).
• 8. Beatriz Manz, Refugees of a Hidden War: The Aftermath of Counterinsurgency in Guatemala (Albany: State University of NY Press); Human Rights Office, Archdiocese of Guatemala, Guatemala Never Again! (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1999); “Guatemala Peace Accords,” NACLA on the Americas (May/June 1997) http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/47/140.html.
• 9. Susan Gzesh, “Central Americans and Asylum Policy during the Reagan Era,” Migration Policy Institute, Migration Information Source (April 2006)http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/central-americans-and-asylum-policy-reagan-era/; Menjivar, “Liminal Legality”; James Smith,“Guatemala: Economic Migrants Replace Political Refugees” Migration Policy Institute, Migration Information Source (April 2006) http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/guatemala-economic-migrants-replace-political-refugees/.
• 10. Burns, Maya in Exile; Hagan, Deciding to be Legal; Loucky and Moors, The Maya Diaspora; Nancy Wellmeir, Ritual, Identity, and the Mayan Diaspora (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
• 11. Interviews with Antonio (2001, 2002) and Maria (2003).
• 12. Mary Odem, “Global Lives, Local Struggles: Latin American Immigration to Atlanta,” Southern Spaces, May 19, 2006, http://southernspaces.org/2006/global-lives-local-struggles-latin-american-immigrants-atlanta; Odem and Lacy, Latino Immigration and the Transformation of the U.S. South.
• 13.“Guatemala Peace Accords.”
• 14. Smith, “Guatemala: Economic Migrants Replace Political Refugees.”
• 15. Interviews with Alfredo (2001, 2002).
• 16. Interviews with Alfredo (2001) and Juana (2001).
• 17. Interviews with Alfredo (2001, 2002) and Juana (2001).
• 18. Interviews with Alfredo (2001, 2002).
• 19. Angela Stuesse, “Race, Migration and Labor Control: Neoliberal Challenges to Organizing Mississippi’s Poultry Workers,” Latino Immigration, ed. Odem and Lacy, 91-111; Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001); Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
• 20. Mary E. Odem, “Unsettled in the Suburbs: Latino Immigration and Ethnic Diversity in Metro Atlanta." in Twenty-First Century Gateways: Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban America, ed. Audrey Singer, et al. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008).
• 21. Interviews with Father David López (2002, 2004) and Antonio (2001).
• 22. Interviews with Juana (2001, 2003).
• 23. Interviews with Alfredo (2001) and Juana (2001).
• 24. Odem, “Unsettled in the Suburbs.”
• 25. Ibid.
• 26. Hagan, Deciding to be Legal; Wellmeier, Ritual, Identity, and the Mayan Diaspora; Eric Popkin "Guatemalan Mayan Migration to Los Angeles: Constructing Transnational Linkages in the context of the Settlement Process."Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (1999): 238-266.
• 27. Interviews with Antonio (2002, 2003), Pablo (2003) and Efrain (2003).
• 28. Interviews with Antonio (2003) and Pablo (2003).
• 29. Interviews with Father David López (2002, 2004) and Father Joseph Fahy.

When Chuck Willis released his single "Betty and Dupree" in 1958, he and Atlantic Records wanted to keep teenagers across the country dancing the Stroll. Willis's "C. C. Rider" (1957) sparked the popularity of the dance and earned Willis the nickname "The King of the Stroll." Like much of American popular music, Willis and his songs had deep roots in the South. Willis was born in Atlanta and his version of "C. C. Rider" was a remake of the popular blues song "See See Rider Blues," which was first recorded and copyrighted by Columbus, Georgia, native Ma Rainey in 1924.1 With "Betty and Dupree," Willis revived a folk song, first recorded as "Dupree Blues" in 1930 by Blind Willie Walker from Greenville, South Carolina. Walker's song, in turn, was based on the story of Frank Dupre, who was hanged in Atlanta after stealing a diamond ring for Betty Andrews and shooting a detective.2

The teenagers in this clip from Seventeen, a teen dance show broadcast by WOI-TV to central Iowa in the late-1950s, did not need to know this history to appreciate that Willis's "Betty and Dupree" was a perfect song for dancing the Stroll, even if they did so awkwardly. The teens on Seventeen were emulating their peers in Philadelphia who popularized the dance on the nationally broadcast American Bandstand. Less obviously, the Iowa teens were also emulating teens on The Mitch Thomas Show—a black teen dance show that broadcast locally from Wilmington, Delaware, to the Philadelphia area—whose version of the Stroll influenced the American Bandstanddancers.

While Des Moines, Iowa, may be a long way from the South geographically, television connected Iowa teens to music and dance styles flowing from Delaware, Georgia, South Carolina, and elsewhere. Seventeen was one of dozens of locally broadcast teen dance shows in this era. Each show featured musical performances and records alongside dancing teenagers. The simplicity and profitability of the teen dance show format appealed to television stations, but airing images of youth music culture was a complicated proposition that involved television technologies, network affiliations, marketing, and racial segregation. This essay examines four programs that brought music and dance to southern and border state audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. I focus on three black teen shows, The Mitch Thomas Show from Wilmington, Delaware (1955–1958); Teenage Frolics (1958–1983), hosted by Raleigh, North Carolina, deejay J. D. Lewis; and Washington, DC's Teenarama Dance Party (1963–1970), hosted by Bob King. In addition, I examine Washington's The Milt Grant Show (1956–1961), which allowed only white dancers.

These shows broadcast in an era when civil rights lawsuits and protests sought to overturn policies of racial segregation in schools and public spaces in the South. Wilmington and Washington were the sites of two of the school segregation cases, Belton v. Gebhartand Bolling v. Sharpe, which the Supreme Court combined into Brown v. Boardof Education. In Raleigh, token school integration did not begin until 1960, six years after Brown.3 That same year, black students from St. Augustine University and Shaw University staged sit-ins at lunch counters in Raleigh to protest the whites-only policies at Woolworths and other stores.4Televisual representations and photographs of civil rights protests in Little Rock, Greensboro, Birmingham, Jackson, Selma, and other cities also made images of the South highly politicized.5 Part of the power of television for civil rights activists was how the medium exposed excessive acts of physical violence to audiences outside the South. In the midst of the voting rights marches in Selma in 1965, for example, Martin Luther King told marchers and the news media, "We are here to say to the white men that we no longer will let them use clubs on us in the dark corners. We're going to make them do it in the glaring light of television."6

In the context of pitched battles over segregation and civil rights, these televised teen dance shows reveal much about the visibility of different youth musical cultures in the 1950s and 1960s. First, The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama Dance Party were important for black teens because the shows offered televisual spaces that valued their creative energies and talents. As historian Earl Lewis has noted, when African Americans faced Jim Crow policies in parks, swimming pools, and movie theaters, they developed separate recreation sites through which they turned segregation into "congregation."7 Unlike other racially segregated leisure spaces, however, television brought the sounds and images of black music cultures to viewers of all colors across and beyond the cities from which the shows broadcast. Second, television technology worked to enhance and/or limit the visibility of different youth musical cultures. Broadcasting from Wilmington, Raleigh, and Washington, these shows reached regional audiences, but varied in terms of signal strength and network affiliations. Differences in terms of station power and stability shaped the duration of each program. Finally, the visibility these shows offered to teenagers was closely tied to the salability of teen music culture. For The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama Dance Party this meant trying to attract sponsors to advertise to black television audiences. For The Milt Grant Show, this meant airing black music performances while maintaining a segregated studio audience that would appeal to sponsors.

I became interested in these teen dance shows while researching and writing a book on American Bandstand. Counter to host Dick Clark's claims that he integrated American Bandstand, my research revealed how the first national television program directed at teens discriminated against black youth during its early years and how black teens and civil rights advocates protested this discrimination.8 Like American Bandstand, the local programs I explore in this essay brought dynamic music cultures to eager audiences and advertisers, while they also traced the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in their cities. Unlike American Bandstand, or Soul Train, which started broadcasting nationally in 1971, The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, Teenarama Dance Party, and The Milt Grant Show are not well known outside of their local broadcast markets. Among these four programs, only one recording is known to exist, a 1957 episode of The Milt Grant Show recorded to sell the show to sponsors. With limited televisual evidence, my analysis draws on archival documents, promotional materials, newspapers, photographs, and interviews to explore how these shows got on and stayed on the air and what they meant to their audiences. By examining these local programs this essay builds on the work of scholars Norma Coates, Murray Forman, Julie Malnig, Tim Wall, George Lipsitz, and Brian Ward who have examined the intersections of music and television, the importance of televised teen dance shows as community spaces, and the development of rhythm and blues and rock and roll.9

The Mitch Thomas Show

TheMitch Thomas Show debuted on August 13, 1955, on WPFH, an unaffiliated television station that broadcast to Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley from Wilmington.10 Born in West Palm Beach, Florida, Mitch Thomas graduated from Delaware State College and served in the army before becoming the first black disc jockey in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1949.11 His television show, broadcast every Saturday, resembled Philadelphia's Bandstand, at the time a local program hosted by Bob Horn, and other locally broadcast teenage dance programs. TheMitch Thomas Show stood out because it was the first television show hosted by a black deejay that featured a studio audience of black teenagers. Otis Givens, who lived in South Philadelphia and attended Ben Franklin High School, remembered that he watched the show every weekend for a year before he finally made the trip to Wilmington to dance on air. "When I got back to Philly, and everyone had seen me on TV, I was big time," Givens recalled. "We weren't able to get into Bandstand, [but] The Mitch Thomas Show gave me a little fame. I was sort of a celebrity at local dances."12 Similarly, South Philadelphia teen Donna Brown recalled in a 1995 interview, "I remember at the same time that Bandstand used to come on, there used to be a black dance thing that came on, and it was The Mitch Thomas Show . . . And that was something for the black kids to really identify with. Because you would look at Bandstand and we thought it was a joke."13TheMitch Thomas Show also became a frequent topic for the black teenagers who wrote the Philadelphia Tribune's "Teen-Talk" columns. Much in the same way that national teen magazines followed American Bandstand, the Tribune's teen writers kept tabs on the performers featured on Thomas's show, and described the teenagers who formed fan clubs to support their favorite musical artists and deejays.14 The fan gossip shared in these columns documented the growth of a youth culture among the black teenagers whom Bandstand excluded. In 1957, it was one of these fan clubs that made the most forceful challenge to Bandstand's discriminatory admissions policies.15 Although many of these teens watched both Bandstand and Thomas's show, as Bandstand grew in popularity and expanded into a national program, The Mitch Thomas Show remained the only television program that represented the region's black rock and roll fans.

Economics, more than a concern for racial equality, influenced WPFH's decision to provide airtime for this groundbreaking show. Eager to compete with Bandstand and the afternoon offerings on the other network-affiliated stations, WPFH hoped that Thomas's show would appeal to both black and white youth in the same way as black-oriented radio.16 The station's bet on Thomas was part of a larger strategy that included hiring white disc jockeys Joe Grady and Ed Hurst to host a daily afternoon dance program that started at 5 p.m., after Bandstand concluded its daily broadcast. While The Grady and Hurst Showbroadcast five times per week, the weekly Mitch Thomas Show proved to be more influential.

Drawing on Thomas's contacts as a radio host and on the talents of the teenagers, the program helped shape the music tastes and dance styles of young people in Philadelphia. In a 1998 interview for the documentary Black Philadelphia Memories, Thomas recalled that "the show was so strong that I could play a record one time and break it wide open."17 Indeed, Thomas's show hosted some of the biggest names in rock and roll, including Ray Charles, Little Richard, the Moonglows, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. It also featured vocal harmony groups from the Philadelphia area.18 Thomas promoted large stage shows as well as small record hops at skating rinks.19 These events were often racially integrated, "The whites that came, they just said, 'Well I'm gonna see the artist and that's it.' I brought Ray Charles in there on a Sunday night, and it was just beautiful to look out there and see everything just nice."20

Ray Smith, who attended American Bandstand frequently and has done research for one of Dick Clark's histories of the show, remembers that he and other white teenagers watched The Mitch Thomas Show to learn new dance steps. Describing the "black Bandstand," Smith recalled:

First of all, black kids had their own dance show, I think it was on channel 12, but one of the reasons I remember it is because I watched it. And I remember that there was a dance that [American Bandstand regulars] Joan Buck and Jimmy Peatross did called "The Strand" and it was a slow version of the jitterbug done to slow records. And it was fantastic. There were two black dancers on this show, the "black Bandstand," or whatever you want to call it. The guy's name was Otis and I don't remember the girl's name. And I always was like "wow." And then I saw Jimmy Peatross and Joan Buck do it, who were probably the best dancers who were ever on Bandstand. I was talking about it to Jimmy Peatross one day, when I was putting together the book, and he said, "Oh, I watched this black couple do it." And that was the black couple that he watched.21

These white teenagers were not alone in watching The Mitch Thomas Show. Smith's experience supports Mitch Thomas's belief that [American Bandstand teens] "were looking to see what dance steps we were putting out. All you had to do was look at 'Bandstand' the next Monday, and you'd say, 'Oh yeah, they were watching.'"22 They were watching, for example, when dancers on The Mitch Thomas Show started dancing The Stroll, a group dance where boys and girls faced each other in two parallel lines, while couples took turns strutting down the aisle. Thomas remembers that the teens on his show "created a dance called The Stroll. I was standing there watching them dancing in a line, and after a while I asked them, 'What are y'all doing out there?' They said, 'That's The Stroll.' And The Stroll became a big thing."23 Because the show influenced American Bandstand during its first year as a national program, teenagers across the country learned dances popularized by The Mitch Thomas Show.

Despite its success among black and white teenagers, Thomas's show remained on television for only three years, from 1955 to 1958. His short-lived television career resembled the experiences of other African American entertainers who hosted music and variety shows in this era. The Nat King Cole Show(1956–1957) failed to attract national advertisers and lasted only one year. Before Cole, shows hosted by black singers Lorenzo Fuller (1947) and Billy Daniels (1952) and the variety program Sugar Hill Times (1949) also fared poorly. Among local programs, the Al Benson Showand Richard Stamz's Open the Door Richard both had brief periods of success in 1950s Chicago.24

The failure of the station that broadcast The Mitch Thomas Show underscores the tenuous nature of such unaffiliated local programs. Storer Broadcasting Company purchased WPFH in 1956.25 Storer frequently bought and sold stations and, at the time of the WPFH acquisition, it also owned stations in Toledo, Cleveland, Atlanta, Miami, and Portland. Storer changed WPFH's call letters to WVUE and hoped to move the station's facilities from Wilmington closer to Philadelphia. The plan faltered, and the station suffered significant operating losses over the next year.26 Thomas's show was among the first victims of the station's financial problems. While advertisers started to pay more attention to black consumers in the 1950s, a product-identification stigma lingered throughout the decade, preventing many brands from sponsoring black programs.27 WVUE cancelled The Mitch Thomas Show in June 1958, citing the program's lack of sponsorship and low ratings compared to the network shows in Thomas's Saturday timeslot.28 Shortly after firing Thomas, Storer announced plans to sell WVUE in order to buy a station in Milwaukee as FCC regulations required multiple broadcast owners to divest from one license in order to buy another. Unable to find a buyer for WVUE, Storer turned the station license back to the government, and the station went dark in September 1958.29 The manager of WVUE later told broadcasting historian Gerry Wilkerson, "No one can make a profit with a TV station unless affiliated with NBC, CBS or ABC." As Dick Clark and American Bandstand celebrated the one-year anniversary of the show's national debut, local broadcast competition brought The Mitch Thomas Show's groundbreaking three-year run to an unceremonious end. Thomas continued to work as a radio disc jockey through the 1960s, until he left broadcasting in 1969 to work as a counselor to gang members in Wilmington.

TheMitch Thomas Show usefully troubles the boundary between the South and the North. Historian Brett Gadsden describes Delaware as "a provincial hybrid, one in which ostensibly southern and northern modes of race relations operated."30 Many teens who danced on TheMitch Thomas Show or watched the program would have experienced de jure school segregation and the slow realization of educational equality promised by Brown. At the same time, WPHF's Wilmington studios were only thirty miles from Philadelphia, a city that, historian Matthew Countryman notes, many black people called "Up South."31TheMitch Thomas Show teenagers would also have been familiar with segregation as practiced in Philadelphia and televised on American Bandstand. Carried out more covertly, this northern-style segregation was no less intentional or demeaning.32 Seeing The Mitch Thomas Show as "between North and South" highlights the constant negotiation of sectional identities and imaginaries.

Teenage Frolics

J. D. Lewis'Teenage Frolics, which aired from 1958 to 1983, stayed on the air longer than any other local teen dance program. A graduate of Morehouse College and a World War II veteran, John Davis (J. D.) Lewis, Jr. started his radio career at Raleigh's WRAL in 1947 as a morning deejay playing gospel music. A. J. Fletcher and Fred Fletcher's Capitol Broadcasting Company, which owned WRAL, received a TV license in 1956 and Lewis played an important role in convincing the Federal Communications Comission (FCC) that WRAL-TV would serve African American viewers.33 Unlike The Mitch Thomas Show and Teenarama, Teenage Frolics aired on a VHF (very high frequency) station with a network affiliation (WRAL-TV had a primary affiliation with NBC and a secondary affiliation with ABC).34 Despite these network ties, WRAL proved challenging in other ways. Jesse Helms, later a US senator and national conservative leader, became an executive at Capitol Broadcasting in 1960 and delivered news editorials railing against communism, liberalism, and civil rights. As program manager in the late-1960s, Helms was Lewis's boss.35 WRAL, however, offered Teenage Frolics signal strength and stability, and Lewis's success at attracting advertisers and navigating station politics kept the program on the air for twenty-five years.

In a letter to potential advertisers, WRAL billed Teenage Frolics as "a live and lively dancing party featuring colored teenagers from high schools in the Channel 5 area." The station also included a coverage map of WRAL-TV, "which includes the most heavily populated Negro areas of the state of North Carolina (Approximately 450,000 Negroes)," and promised that "'The Teen-Age Frolic Show' affords a wonderful opportunity for firsthand consumer reaction to the sponsor's product."36 Lewis secured Pepsi Cola, which sponsored Teenage Frolics as part of the "special markets" campaign to increase sales of the beverage among African Americans.37 He served as a Pepsi public relations and sales representative for the Raleigh area from 1965 to 1968. Pepsi's sponsorship proved important to making of Teenage Frolics financially viable in the 1960s as it fought for airtime against more profitable national programming. A 1967 memo from Jesse Helms highlights the pressures Teenage Frolics faced from national broadcasts and mentions Pepsi's sponsorship of the show. "As per our conversation of yesterday, it is going to be necessary that we make some adjustment in our Saturday afternoon schedule this fall with respect to Teen-Age Frolics," Helms wrote to inform Lewis and other staff that the showwould have to be shortened from its regular one hour broadcast time.

The abbreviated (15 minute) programs are necessary because of ABC's scheduling of American Bandstand from 12:30–1:30 p.m. each Saturday. To do otherwise would necessitate our preemption of a solid hour of commercial network programming, which I deem inadvisable. In the 15-minute programs, please leave two 60-second cutaways for the Pepsi-Cola commercials which I am advised are all that we have sold in Teen-Age Frolics anyhow."38

Despite Helms's backhanded reference, Pepsi's sponsorship offered Teenage Frolics a national brand sponsor, something neither The Mitch Thomas Show nor Teenarama possessed.

WRAL's mailing to advertisers also included a list of the schools and organizations that had visited the show. Mapping a partial list of the groups that visited the studio highlights how many young people wanted to appear on the show and participate in its creation of black youth music culture. When North Carolina began desegregation from 1969 to 1971, many black high schools were closed or were converted to elementary schools or junior highs. In 1970, for example, black students who attended W. E. B. DuBois High School were transferred to historically white Wake Forest High School and the DuBois High School building became Wake Forest-Rolesville Middle School.39"When black schools closed," historian David Cecelski writes, "their names, mascots, mottos, holidays, and traditions were sacrificed with them, while students were transferred to historically white schools that retained those markers of cultural and racial identity."40Teenage Frolics offered a black cultural space that bridged this period between segregated and integrated schools.

Letters from viewers and aspiring musicians to Lewis and WRAL attest that many teenagers and performers wanted to appear on Teenage Frolics. "I watch your show every Saturday and enjoy it very much," one viewer wrote. "Your records are up to date and your show is very much for teenagers. I notice everybody that come are in groups. . . . I would like to come with 6 or 7 others, and be a part of your show. I would appreciate your information by telling me if we can come and when we can come. Please rush your information."41 A letter to "John D." from an adult chaperone suggests that Lewis was a well-known and approachable local television personality, "I came to your house two Sundays ago to see you. I asked your daughter to tell you to call me, please. . . . My plan is to bring a group of 45 or 50 children . . . on Saturday, May 14^th. My question is—may they appear on your 'Dance Party'?"42 Fans also felt free to criticize the format of Teenage Frolics. One particularly opinionated "Frolic Fan" wrote, "I am very concerned with your show. Once you really had a rocking roll show up here. But now it doesn't interest anyone." This viewer offered Lewis several suggestions for how to improve the show, including, "You need more records. New records come out every day and you play old ones."43 Another letter complained that a local band, Irving Fuller and the Corvettes, appeared too often on the show, "Many of the people around Durham and elsewhere are bored of listening to the Corvettes. It seems as if you never play records anymore. Most people listening to a dance program would rather hear the latest records."44

In addition to viewer letters, Lewis received mail from local music groups that watched and wanted to appear on the show. Groups like Donald and the Hitchhikers, Tiny and the Tinniettes, Little Joe and the Diamonds, Cobra and the Fabulous Entertainers, and the Dacels saw Teenage Frolics as a way to perform for other black teenagers and become known beyond their high schools and neighborhoods. The Superiors, a group of six fourteen to sixteen-year-olds from Smithfield, North Carolina, expressed dreams of auditioning for Motown and asked, "could we sort of take an inch of your show to sing" to "show North Carolina they will be greatly represented."45

As television production became increasingly centralized in Los Angeles in the 1960s, Teenage Frolics was part of the everyday life of black teenagers in the Raleigh area. In this way, Teenage Frolics served as what scholar and musician Guthrie Ramsey calls a "community theater." Ramsey describes "community theaters" as "sites of cultural memory" that "include but are not limited to cinema, family narratives and histories, the church, the social dance, the nightclub, the skating rink, and even literature."46 From this perspective, localism was a virtue for Teenage Frolics rather than a detriment, because it offered young people a community connection that was not possible with national television. Sisters Gwendolyn and Lena Horton, for example, regularly walked from the Walnut Terrace neighborhood to appear on the show. Gwendolyn Horton recalled, "We would practice all week so we'd be ready on Saturday," while Lena Horton noted, "just to get out there, you thought you were something that could be shown on TV."47 Comparing the show to Soul Train in 1997, The Carolinian, a Raleigh-based African-American newspaper, commented that Teenage Frolics "gave the Hollywood production a run for its money in these parts."48Soul Train and American Bandstand attracted nationally known performers, but on Teenage Frolics, teenagers participated in the show's creation and saw their neighbors, classmates, friends, and family do the same.

Teenarama Dance Party

A WOOK-TV advertisement in the 1965 Broadcasting Yearbook highlights the promise and precarity of the station that broadcast Teenarama Dance Party. The advertisement billed WOOK-TV as "America's First Negro Oriented TV Station" broadcasting "To & For Washington, D.C.'s 57% Negro population." While the advertisement used large, bold font to tout the city's majority African American population to potential advertisers, smaller letters tried to put a positive spin on the station's limitations, "281,000 UHF sets in operation in WOOK area as of Oct. 1, 1964."49 Whereas all television sets could pick up VHF stations, which carried major network programming, UHF (ultra high frequency) stations required viewers to have special UHF tuners. This meant buying additional hardware to receive the channels, or, after Congress passed the All-Channels Receiver Act in 1962, buying a newer television set.50 Both of these options were cost prohibitive for many of the African American viewers WOOK hoped to reach. Teenarama Dance Party received top billing in this advertisement and ultimately the show's fortunes would rise and fall with WOOK's.

Teenarama host Bob King came to WOOK in 1956 from WRAP radio in his hometown of Norfolk, Virginia, where he hosted an R&B show.51 Looking back on his earlier radio career, King recalled, "In those days what I was playing was called 'race music.' It was a little more raucous. Then people like Presley came along and began to change it . . . In Norfolk in 1951 and 1952, they began calling it rhythm and blues. The hillbilly influence began creeping into it and the music became what we call rock and roll . . . The distinction, which may be a fine one, is the style of the singer and the background of a record. A lot of rock and roll today is bordering on what is called 'popular music.'"52 King went on to say that he considered Teenarama and his radio show to be "rhythm and blues" programs, and R&B artists like James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Walter Jackson, and Chuck Jackson all performed on Teenarama. For these and other artists who played at Washington's historically black Howard Theater, Teenarama offered an additional opportunity to perform and promote their music while they were in the city.

While performers, record companies, and music fans welcomed Teenarama'spromotion of R&B, WOOK's music programing drew criticism from Washington's black press and the city's black leaders. One editorial in the Washington Afro-American complained that WOOK-radio was "monotonous" because it played "rock 'n roll 17 hours a day," and described "'Colored' radio" as having "dedicated itself to a low-mentality level of programming which dispenses musical slop to remind colored people that's all they want to hear."53 Another editorial argued that WOOK-TV insults "the colored race's intelligence by advertising itself as nothing but a station programming plain ol' music and dancing. As colored people, we've been plagued with that image ever since we were freed from slavery. WOOK-TV only perpetuates this image."54Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chairman Julies Hobson also expressed concern, saying, "I object to foot tapping, dancing, screaming and shouting." Sterling Tucker, director of the Washington branch of the Urban League, worried that WOOK's focus on the "Negro market" was out of step with civil rights efforts, "You don't go along the road of segregation to achieve integration."55 These critiques reflected differences in age and class between the readership of the Afro-American and potential viewers and listeners of WOOK-TV and WOOK-radio.56 At the same time, the critics expressed concern that the station's management and white president, RichardEaton, would not attend to community interests and concerns beyond musical entertainment. For his part, Eaton argued on the eve of the station's first broadcast, "WOOK-TV will be a place where young Negroes can develop their talents and the problems of the Negro [will be] vividly displayed. We hope to show interracial activities which are harmonious. We do not intend to assume a controversial role."57

WOOK-TV never assumed a leadership role with regards to the main political issues of its era, but Teenarama showcased black youth culture for Washington viewers. Chuck Jackson, an R&B artist who appeared on the show several times, described Teenarama's importance, "Before this, with some kids, no one has given them a sense of being someone, a sense of independence. All kids are creative, but we don't let them express it . . . These kids are typical of all the kids who are given something to do, some responsibility."58 In an interview with filmmaker Beverly Lindsay-Johnson, who made an important documentary on the show, Teenarama regular Reginald "Lucky" Luckett recalled, "One of the key things about the program was that it got the [teens] involved. If you stood around the cameramen, they would show you how to operate the cameras. I became more fascinated with the operation than the program." Another regular, William Clemmons recalled, "We couldn't go on TheMilt GrantShow on a regular basis. We couldn't go on Shindig on a regular basis. We couldn't go on American Bandstand on a regular basis. We had Teenarama, which was ours."59 As Clemmons suggests, Teenarama afforded a level of television visibility for black teenagers and black music that was not found on national programs.

One of the challenges with analyzing The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama is that no visual traces of the shows are known to exist. Most early television shows were recorded over or discarded because storage was too expensive.In her documentary on Teenarama Beverly Lindsay-Johnson dealt with this lack of footage by recruiting contemporary Washington teenagers, teaching them the locally distinct "hand dance" of the era, and having them reenact the dances. "We had eight weeks to get these kids taught," Lindsay-Johnson remembered, "and when it came time to shoot the reenactments I wasn't sure they got it." She recalled that this changed when they got period clothing, "It was a community effort, there was a guy who used to dance on Teenarama who worked at the Salvation Army and he said, 'come in and get anything you want'…when the kids had the clothes on…the kids got it, I knew they had it."60 This story and the black and white reenactments in Lindsay-Johnson's film speak both to the creativity that historians of television must employ and to the imprint Teenarama made on the black population in Washington, DC.

The Milt Grant Show

AsWOOK-TV prepared to come on the air in 1963, the Afro-American newspaper received a letter from Rev. Clarence Burton Jr., defending the station and raising a question about the teen dance show that predated Teenarama. "Who can tell," Burton offered, "from the working of the station maybe we can increase our colored stardom. There have been many cases where our leaders needed to make outcries such as Milt Grant's TV dance program, it seems to me that that was segregation."61 As Burton suggests, during its five years The Milt Grant Show (1956–1961) was an officially segregated program. The show blocked black teens from the studio, though complaints from black viewers eventually led to one show per week featuring a black studio audience (so-called "Black Tuesday"). Despite its ban on black teenagers, the show regularly featured black R&B performers who were in town to perform at the Howard Theater. The Milt Grant Show is particularly interesting for how it sought to bring black music performances to television viewers while maintaining a segregated studio audience that would appeal to sponsors.

Only one kinescope of The Milt Grant Show is known to exist, but it features two separate performances by R&B performers—one by the duo Johnnie and Joe (Johnnie Lee Richardson and Joe Walker), and the other by LaVern Baker—that help explain how the show sought to manage the differences between black performers and white audience members. In each clip, the teenagers dance as the singers lip sync to recordings of their songs, as was the common practice in this era. The cameras shift between a medium shot of the artists and a wide shot of couples dancing, before using a picture-in-picture production technique that presented the shot of the artists in a box overlaying the shot of the teenagers dancing. A performance later in the show by white singer Jeri Renay did not use this technique. The resulting image nicely illustrates the tensions surrounding televising black music to white audiences. Broadcasting black musical performers on television was more challenging than radio, because television made the performers' bodies visible, and on dance shows like these, put their bodies in close proximity to those of dozens of teenagers. Alan Freed's Big Beattelevision show, for example, was cancelled in August 1957 after affiliated stations complained about black teenage singer Frankie Lymon dancing with a white teenage girl. A year later, an American Bandstand producer told the New York Post that this incident contributed to American Bandstand's segregation.62The Milt Grant Show clips from May 1957 predate the Freed-Lymon controversy, but the show faced similar concerns. Grant needed to be able to feature black performers in a way that was safe for the consuming pleasure of the white studio and television audiences and the sponsors that were eager to reach them. With black performers only a few feet away from the white teenage dancers in the studio, the picture-in-picture technique demarcated the racial boundary between performers and audiences and offered one strategy for televising black musicians while maintaining racial segregation.

Despite the racial segregation of the studio audience, The Milt Grant Show offered black performers like LaVern Baker valuable exposure to white consumers. In the prior three years, Baker had mixed experiences with crossing over from the R&B charts to the pop chart. Her songs "Tweedle Dee" and "Jim Dandy" both reached the top twenty of the pop chart, but white singer Georgia Gibbs's cover of "Tweedle Dee" topped the pop chart and outsold Baker's version.63 Baker's contemporary Ruth Brown explained, "I wasn't so upset about other singers copying my songs because that was their privilege, and they had to pay the writers of the song. But what did hurt me was the fact that I had originated the song, and I never got the opportunities to be in the top television shows and the talk shows. I didn't get the exposure. And the other people were copying the style, the whole idea."64 Baker, who appeared on The Milt Grant Show while she was in town to play the Howard Theater, performed "Jim Dandy Got Married" and "Play the Game of Love" on this episode. Even if The Milt Grant Show carefully managed the positioning of black singers and white dancers, television viewers in the greater Washington area saw Baker perform and this exposure was one step towards establishing her as a crossover star in the late-1950s and early-1960s.

The Milt Grant Show dedicated almost every minute to selling products, and Grant, as this message to potential sponsors makes clear, was a compelling and unabashed salesman. While WTTG-TV lacked a network affiliation, Grant proved skilled at recruiting and serving sponsors.65"Grant provides an all-out sponsor and agency service,"Billboard reported in 1961. "He attends sales meetings, store openings and maintains close identification with his sponsors' products off the air as well as on."66 He promised potential sponsors that for an hour every afternoon WTTG-TV's studio in the Raleigh Hotel in downtown Washington would be a nexus for selling products to area teenagers. From paid advertisements for consumer goods to promotions of records and musical guests, also often paid for by record promoters, The Milt Grant Show presented its viewers with a host of messages. The show urged teenagers to drink Pepsi, eat at Tops' Drive-Inn, listen to Motorola portable radios, and buy the newest records at the Music Box record store. This was an extraordinarily high level of promotional activity, even by the standards of commercial television. Music was the glue that held together a carnival of consumption.

Sponsors that advertised on The Milt Grant Show bought interaction between their products and the show's teenagers. For example, in a 1957 episode the show's teens finished dancing to The Everly Brothers'"Bye Bye Love" and the camera focused on Grant in front of a table with dozens of bottles of Pepsi. After Grant took a big drink of the soda and delivered the sales pitch ("Never too heavy, never too sweet, always just right"), he asked two teenagers to help hand out bottles of the sponsor's drink to the dancers. As Grant introduced The Four Aces'"I Just Don't Know," he exited the scene, the camera pulled back to focus on teens who flocked to pick up their free Pepsi. The teens held and drank their sodas while dancing, keeping the sponsor's product in the picture throughout the song. Some teens were still holding their bottles when Grant started the next advertisement for Motorola portable radios. Here again, the advertisement incorporated the studio audience, with one young woman holding the radio while Grant praised its features. These interpolated commercials, common in radio and television in this era, offered sponsors daily visual evidence of teenagers' eagerness to consume and encouraged The Milt Grant Show's viewers to participate in the same rituals of consumption.

Conclusion

From one perspective, these televised teen dance shows were commercialized diversions during an era of profound changes in the racial dynamics of the South. From another, however, these shows were spaces that celebrated the creative potential and everyday lives of black youth. To show how these perspectives are intertwined I'll conclude with a brief discussion of a dance show that started broadcasting at a pivotal time and from a pivotal place in the history of civil rights. Steve's Showdebuted in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the spring of 1957, months before the integration crisis at Central High School drew national attention. Examining Little Rock,political theorist Danielle Allen writes, "Nineteen fifty-seven forced citizens to confront the nature of their citizenship—that is, the basic habits of interaction in public spaces—and many were shamed into desiring a new order."67 Allen argues that images, like Will Counts's iconic photograph of black student, Elizabeth Eckford, surrounded by a white mob and being cursed by white student Hazel Bryan, forced some white Americans to revaluate their "habits of citizenship."

Changes to the structure of public life took place slowly. Televised teen dance shows offer an example of how "basic habits of interaction in public spaces" did not change dramatically in 1957. Just over one mile from Central High School, Steve's Show broadcast from the KTHV-TV studios. While Little Rock's school desegregation crisis led print and television news across the country in the fall of 1957, Arkansas viewers could tune in every afternoon to watch white teenagers dance on the still-segregated Steve's Show. Like other white teens that protested the desegregation of Central High, Hazel Bryan danced regularly on Steve's Show. After the widely circulated photograph made her a local celebrity she attended the show with a bodyguard.68Steve's Show was a highly visible regional space that asserted a racially segregated public culture and continued to do so until it went off the air in 1961. And Steve's Show was not unique: Dick Reid's Record Hop in Charleston, West Virginia; Ginny Pace's Saturday Hop in Houston, Texas; John Dixon's Dixon on Disc in Mobile, Alabama; Bill Sanders's show in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Dewey Phillips's Pop Shop in Memphis, Tennessee; and Chuck Allen's Teen Tempo in Jackson, Mississippi were all segregated dance shows. Like TheMilt Grant Show, Baltimore's Buddy Deane Show, the inspiration for John Waters's Hairspray film and the later Broadway musical and Hollywood film, was officially segregated and only allowed black teens to enter the studio on specific days. Nationally, American Bandstand blocked black teens from entering the studio during its years in Philadelphia, despite host Dick Clark's claims to the contrary. Every weekday afternoon, in each of these broadcast markets, these shows presented images of exclusively white teenagers.

In his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to what it meant for young black people to be excluded from these sorts of entertainment spaces. In a long list of reasons why "we find it difficult to wait," King includes, "when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky…then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait." King's mention of "Funtown" is preceded by references to lynch mobs, police brutality and the "airtight cage of poverty," and followed by references to hotel segregation and racial slurs. While it is tempting to see "Funtown" as somehow less important than these issues, to do so is a mistake. The "Funtown" reference is powerful because it captures one of the ways that Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy were most meaningful to children and teenagers. For many young people being blocked from amusements parks, swimming pools, and skating rinks would be their first exposure to what King calls the feeling of "forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness.'"69

The prevalence of racial segregation in recreational spaces and on white teen dance shows throws the importance of The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama into sharp relief. If white teen shows sought to shore up the supremacy of whiteness in youth music culture, the black teen shows visualized black teens as equal participants in the production and consumption of music culture. In her study of the landmark black television show Soul!, that ran from 1968 to 1972, Gayle Wald argues that the show "created a television space where black people…could see, hear, and almost feel each other." Wald describes this as an "affective compact" that "complicates the clear division between production and consumption."70 While Soul! was more politically and aesthetically adventurous than The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama, these teen dance shows fostered a similar compact between their audiences and performers. Mitch Thomas, J. D. Lewis, and Bob King created televisual spaces that privileged black audiences and displayed the creative energies and talents of black youth. Years before Soul Train (1971–2006) brought black dance television to national audiences, The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama highlighted black music and dance styles.71 Unlike Soul Train,which moved from Chicago to Hollywood after one year, these local shows featured and appealed to black teens from Wilmington, Raleigh, and Washington, and as the opening clip from Seventeen suggests, they influenced American musical cultures in surprising ways.

Ultimately, these televised teen dance shows encourage us to expand the range of sounds and images we associate with black youth in the South. It takes nothing away from the young men and women who risked their lives to desegregate schools and lunch counters to recognize that thousands of teenagers found joy and value in dancing on television or watching their peers do the same. If the iconic civil rights images from cities like Little Rock, Greensboro, and Birmingham attest to the fact that young activists struggled to be treated as first-class citizens, The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama emphasized that black youth were worthy of being first-class consumers and teenagers.72

About the Author

Matthew Delmont is associate professor of history at Arizona State University and author of The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia (University of California Press, American Crossroads series, February 2012), and Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (University of California Press, American Crossroads series, forthcoming February 2016). He is currently finishing a book titled Making Roots: How an Epic Book and Television Miniseries Made History and Why Roots Still Matters (under contract with University of California Press).

• 1. Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, vocal performance of "See See Rider Blues" by Ma Rainey and Lena Arant, recorded October 16, 1924, by Paramount, catalogue number 12252, 78 rpm.
• 2. Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 74–75; Tom Hughes, Hanging the Peachtree Bandit: The True Tale of Atlanta's Infamous Frank Dupree (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2014).
• 3. Sarah Caroline Thuesen, Greater Than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919 –1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 225–229.
• 4. Jeffrey Crow, Paul Escott, and Flora Hatley, A History of African Americans in North Carolina (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1992).
• 5. Aniko Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Martin Berger, Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
• 6. Quoted in Bodrogkozy, Equal Time,2.
• 7."Afro-Americans who lived in communities as diverse as Chicago, Norfolk, and Buxton, Iowa, congregated—sometimes along class lines, but always together," Earl Lewis argues. "In the southern context, congregation was important because it symbolized an act of free will, whereas segregation represented the imposition of another's will." Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 91–92.
• 8. Matthew Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
• 9. Norma Coates, "Elvis from the Waist Up and Other Myths: 1950s Music Television and the Gendering of Rock Discourse," in Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones, eds. Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 226–251; Coates, "Filling in Holes: Television Music as a Recuperation of Popular Music on Television,"Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 1, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 21–25; Murray Forman, One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Julie Malnig, "Let's Go to the Hop: Community Values in Televised Teen Dance Programs of the 1950s,"Dance & Community: Proceedings of The Congress on Research in Dance (August, 2006): 171–175; Tim Wall, "Rocking Around the Clock: Teenage Dance Fads from 1955 to 1965," in Ballrooms, Boogie, Shimmy, Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, ed. Julie Malnig (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 182–198; George Lipsitz, Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
• 10."The NAACP Reports: WCAM (Radio)," August 7, 1955, NAACP collection, URB 6, box 21, folder 423, TUUA.
• 11. Eustace Gay, "Pioneer In TV Field Doing Marvelous Job Furnishing Youth With Recreation,"Philadelphia Tribune, February 11, 1956; Gary Mullinax, "Radio Guided DJ to Stars,"The News Journal Papers (Wilmington, DE), January 28, 1986, D4.
• 12. Otis Givens, interview with author, June 27, 2007.
• 13. Quoted in John Roberts, From Hucklebuck to Hip-Hop: Social Dance in the African American Community in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Odunde, 1995), 37.
• 14. On the Philadelphia Tribune's "Teen-Talk" coverage of Mitch Thomas' show, see "They're 'Movin' and Groovin,'"Philadelphia Tribune, July 31, 1956; Dolores Lewis, "Talking With Mitch,"Philadelphia Tribune, November 9, 1957; Lewis, "Stage Door Spotlight,"Philadelphia Tribune, November 9, 1957; Laurine Blackson, "Penny Sez,"Philadelphia Tribune, December 7, 1957 and April 26, 1958; Dolores Lewis, "Philly Date Line,"Philadelphia Tribune, December 7, 1957; "Queen Lane Apartment Group [photo],"Philadelphia Tribune, December 7, 1957; Jimmy Rivers, "Crickets' Corner,"Philadelphia Tribune, January 21 and April 22, 1958; Edith Marshall, "Current Hops,"Philadelphia Tribune, March 1, 8 and 22, 1958; Marshall, "Talk of the Teens,"Philadelphia Tribune, March 22, 1958; and "Presented in Charity Show [Mitch Thomas photo],"Philadelphia Tribune, April 22, 1958.
• 15. Art Peters, "Negroes Crack Barrier of Bandstand TV Show,"Philadelphia Tribune, October 5, 1957; "Couldn't Keep Them Out [photo],"Philadelphia Tribune, October 5, 1957; Delores Lewis, "Bobby Brooks' Club Lists 25 Members,"Philadelphia Tribune, December 14, 1957.
• 16. On the crossover appeal of black-oriented radio, see Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2004); William Barlow, Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); and Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (New York: Times Books, 1999), 219–255.
• 17.Black Philadelphia Memories, directed by Trudi Brown (Philadelphia, WHYY-TV12, 1999), television documentary.
• 18."Teen-Age 'Superiors' Debut on M.T. Show,"Philadelphia Tribune, November 19, 1957.
• 19. On Mitch Thomas' concerts, see Archie Miller, "Fun & Thrills,"Philadelphia Tribune, December 4, 1956; "Rock 'n Roll Show & Dance,"Philadelphia Tribune, April 19, 1958; "Swingin' the Blues,"Philadelphia Tribune, August 5, 1958; "Mitch Thomas Show Attracts Over 2000,"Philadelphia Tribune, August 18, 1958; "Don't Miss the Mitch Thomas Rock & Roll Show,"Philadelphia Tribune, July 2, 1960.
• 20. Mullinax, "Radio Guided DJ to Stars."
• 21. Ray Smith, interview with author, August 10, 2006. Jimmy Peatross and Joan Buck tell a related story about learning how to do The Strand from black teenagers in Twist, directed by Ron Mann (Sphinx Productions, 1992), documentary.
• 22. Ibid.
• 23.Black Philadelphia Memories, dir. Trudi Brown.
• 24. J. Fred MacDonald, Blacks and White TV: African Americans in Television Since 1948 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983), 17–21, 57–64; Jannette Dates, "Commercial Television," in Split Image: African Americans and the Mass Media, ed., Davis and Barlow (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993), 267–327; Christopher Lehman, A Critical History of Soul Train on Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2008), 28; Richard Stamz, Give 'Em Soul, Richard! (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 62–63, 77–78; Barlow, Voice Over, 98–103.
• 25. Herbert Howard, Multiple Ownership in Television Broadcasting (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 142–147.
• 26. Ibid.
• 27. Barlow, Voice Over, 129; Giacomo Ortizano, "One Your Radio: A Descriptive History of Rhythm-and-blues Radio During the 1950s" (PhD dissertation, Ohio University, 1993), 391–423.
• 28. Art Peters, "Mitch Thomas Fired From TV Dance Party Job,"Philadelphia Tribune, June 17, 1958.
• 29. Howard, Multiple Ownership in Television Broadcasting, 146.
• 30. Brett Gadsden, Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 7.
• 31. Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 10.
• 32. On the limitations of the de jure/de facto framework, see Matthew Lassiter, "De Jure/De Facto Segregation: The Long Shadow of a National Myth," in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, eds., Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 25–48. On race and segregation in Philadelphia, see Countryman, Up South; Countryman, "'From Protest to Politics': Community Control and Black Independent Politics in Philadelphia, 1965–1984,"Journal of Urban History 32 (September 2006): 813–861; Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town; James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Wolfinger, "The Limits of Black Activism: Philadelphia's Public Housing in the Depression and World War II,"Journal of Urban History 35 (September 2009): 787–814; Guian McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2008); McKee, "'I've Never Dealt with a Government Agency Before': Philadelphia's Somerset Knitting Mills Project, the Local State, and the Missed Opportunities of Urban Renewal,"Journal of Urban History 35 (March 2009): 387–409; and Lisa Levenstein, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
• 33. Clarence Williams, "JD Lewis Jr.: A Living Broadcasting Legend,"Ace: Magazine of the Triangle, September–October 2002, 12–14, 70.
• 34."WRAL-TV,"1960 Broadcasting Yearbook, A–73
• 35. Jesse Helms, Here's Where I Stand (New York, Random House, 2005), 44–51; Ernest Furgurson, Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 69–91; William Link, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008), 64–98.
• 36. J.D. Lewis (WRAL), letter to Dick Snyder, May 24, 1963, Lewis Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, catalog number 5499, folder 139.
• 37. On Pepsi marketing to black customers, see Stephanie Capparell, The Real Pepsi Challenge: How One Pioneering Company Broke Color Barriers in 1940s American Business (New York: Free Press, 2008).
• 38. Jesse Helms, memo to Ray Reeve, July 6, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 139; Ray Reeve, memo to J.D. Lewis, July 7, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 139.
• 39. Barry Malone, "Before Brown: Cultural and Social Capital in a Rural Black School Community, W.E.B. Dubois High School, Wake Forest, North Carolina,"The North Carolina Historical Review 85, no. 4 (October 2008): 443–444.
• 40. David Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 9.
• 41. Susan Jordan, letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. 1966-67], Lewis Family Papers, folder 140.
• 42. Hazel Jordan, letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), May 8, 1966, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140.
• 43."Frolic Fan," letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. 1966-67], Lewis Family Papers, folder 140.
• 44. Anonymous ("102 Pilot St.), letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), June 10, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140.
• 45. Donald Hodge, letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), June 21, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; Guadalupe Hudson, letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), June 24, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; Daniel Jackson, letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), May 29, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; "Nero, the Mad," letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), June 24, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140, July 22, 1967; Gwendolyn Gilmore, J.D. Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. 1967], Lewis Family Papers, folder 140.
• 46. Guthrie Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 4.
• 47. Cash Michaels, "Memories of Teenage Frolics,"The Carolinian, December 4, 1997.
• 48. Ibid.
• 49."WOOK-TV,"1965 Broadcasting Yearbook, A–10.
• 50. Christopher Sterling and John Michael Kittross, Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting, Third Edition (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 255–256, 351–352, 383, 415–416.
• 51. James Lee, "He Plays Teens Picks,"Washington Star, [n.d.] ca. 1963.
• 52. Ibid.
• 53."WOOK-TV's Coloring Book,"Washington Afro-American, February 16, 1963; "WOOK's Insult to Our Race,"Washington Afro-American, February 23, 1963.
• 54."Voice of the People: In Defense of WOOK-TV,"Washington Afro-American, February 23, 1963.
• 55."WOOK Says it Isn't Just One-Color TV,"Washington Star, February 11, 1963.
• 56.John Henry Murphy, Sr. started publishing the Afro-American newspaper in Baltimore in 1892. By 1960, under the control of Carl Murphy, the Afro-American published editions across the Mid-Atlantic States. The Afro-American papers cultivated an older and more middle class black audience than the viewers and listeners WOOK-TV and WOOK-radio targeted.
• 57."Nation's First Minority Group TV Station to Broadcast Today,"Chicago Defender, February 11, 1963.
• 58. Nan Randall, "Rocking and Rolling Road to Respectability,"Washington Post, July 4, 1965.
• 59."Dance Party (The Teenarama Story), Research Narrative," Box 2, Kendall Production Records, Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum.
• 60. Beverly Lindsay-Johnson, interview with author, January 8, 2013.
• 61."Voice of the People: In Defense of WOOK-TV,"Washington Afro-American, February 23, 1963.
• 62. John Jackson, Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll (New York: Shirmer Trade Books, 2000), 168–169; Jackson, American Bandstand: Dick Clark and the Making of a Rock 'n' Roll Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 56.
• 63. Arnold Shaw, Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 376.
• 64. Quoted in Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 48.
• 65. WTTG-TV was was founded as a DuMont station and DuMont ended network operations in 1956.
• 66."TV Jockey Profile: The Milt Grant Show,"Billboard, February 6, 1961, 43.
• 67. Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5.
• 68. David Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 44, 290.
• 69. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963.
• 70. Gayle Wald, It's Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 217, 72.
• 71. Ericka Blount Danois, Love, Peace, and Soul: Behind the Scenes of America's Favorite Dance Show Soul Train: Classic Moments (Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2013); Nelson George, The Hippest Trip in America: Soul Train and the Evolution of Culture and Style (New York: William Morrow, 2014); Questlove, Soul Train: The Music, Dance, and Style of a Generation (New York: Harper Design, 2013).
• 72. On the relationship between citizenship and consumption, see Lizbeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumptions in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); Robert Weems, Jr., Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Victoria Wolcott, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 2012).