I'm Staying: In Defense of the South

by Dr. Robert L. Reece, PhD

I have to admit I tire of the phone calls. The text messages. The social media direct messages from people who I’ve only ever seen through a screen on my phone. And the one Californian attorney who kept saying I live in “occupied territory.”

The message is often the same, and it has advanced past care into cliché. They ask if I’m going to leave the South or leave Texas; effectively asking me if I plan to leave my comfortable tenured, pensioned job and all of my friends and community for a more “liberal” place. They ask if I’m afraid, implicitly drawing on imagery of the lynchings they viewed in their African American Studies courses in college. They ask if I’m worried about my teaching or my research.

They ask me “What’s it like living in a ‘red’ state?” And I respond “what’s the difference?” with a straight face that baffles their thinking. I know what they want, and I won’t give it to them. They want me to admit that at least some of the stereotypes are true, that the South is racist and dangerous. They want me to affirm their already inflated sense of moral superiority so they can feel more confident in their opinions of us because “a southerner said it.” But it won’t happen here, not from me.

I always dismiss them. Sometimes more rudely than I intend. But forgive me for losing patience with the same tired narratives and being asked the same questions again and again. At this point the questions hit my ear like a broken record stuck on a chorus of voices attempting to remind me that “The South is backwards and wayward.” But I wear my ear plugs because that is simply not how I feel and never how I will feel.

This region, this contiguous group of states with a collective legacy marred by the institution of plantation slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow, haunted by the cries of lynched black men and slain Civil Rights workers, formerly enriched by fertile soil and the chattel that worked it, is more than those things. The South is more than home to the malice borne of the worst impulses of white people. It is home to the courage and resilience of black people and their allies, both Southern and not, who have faced down the violence they met and stood strong.

…

In 1966, a group of sharecroppers in rural Washington County, Mississippi, on a plantation just a few miles from my hometown of Leland, went on strike and became part of the founding membership of the short-lived Mississippi Freedom Labor Union (an offshoot of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party made famous by Fannie Lou Hamer’s fiery speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention). They demanded better pay, better healthcare, age restrictions on labor, among other things. They were quickly evicted from the plantation where they lived (ironically forcing the plantation owner to use white labor that harvest season), and they turned their attention to founding their own town, a self-sufficient black community they named Strike City.

Their grand vision for Strike City was a place where local black people could be safe to raise their families and peacefully live their lives, a deceptively simple request at a time when white people saw the mere existence of happy black people as a threat to their dominance. The strikers sought to build a community on direct democratic principles. They hosted town hall meetings where they voted on policies and ideas. They all shared in the labor, using their individual talents for the good of the community.

But the peace and autonomy they desired may as well have been a dream.  Local white people refused to allow them to live quietly and keep to themselves. White people would drive through the community and fire gunshots through the tents the community used as temporary housing. White businessmen refused to sell them the materials to build permanent houses and threatened outside white people who considered doing business with the strikers.

Amidst these hardships a reporter asked one of the leaders, one of the original strikers, a man aptly named John Henry Sylvester for his strength and influence, why he didn’t simply move north like so many others had done and were doing. I quote his response to this day when I’m propositioned about leaving the South—or even leaving the country. He said, “I don’t see why people should have to leave their homes in the South. I’d rather stay here and fight than come North”

…

I would rather stay here and fight. This is the Southern legacy I’m building on. I am descended from the people who didn’t flee to the north, those who stood their ground, rebuilding on the ruins of broken lives because they valued their right to build a safe home wherever they pleased.

Yet, instead of acknowledging, praising, and building on this legacy of defiance and resistance, people want to write us off as “red states” and tell us the lie that “blue states” will be safer for us. Even if blue states were safer (they aren’t), that’s not the point. The point is that there is power here. There’s power in the South. Power to create positive change. Because people are power. People who organize and empathize. People who fall and get up. People who love. People who cook, cook food and cook schemes. People who have yet to realize their own power and are waiting for someone to activate it.

Fred Hampton, a neighbor of the slain Emmett Till and former Chairman of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party, who was brutally murdered in his sleep by the FBI and Chicago Police Department, once said there’s “Power anywhere where there’s people.”

I want to be part of that power. I want to honor those who paved a way for me to grow up in the relative safety of rural Mississippi, surrounded by loving and encouraging black people.

I will be a part of that power by rebuffing every attempt by well-meaning non-Southerners to vilify and pull me away from my home and every attempt by ill-meaning Southerners to push me away and claim my space for themselves. I will be here. Unsilenced. Fighting. Until the fight is won or there’s no more fight to have.