This week, a couple summers ago, the Scalawag team was getting back from our series of in-person summer jubilees in our hometowns across the South.
Life “on tour” was exhausting, not just from throwing bomb-ass parties, but from sifting through y'all's responses to our questions we posed you, and absorbing the topics you wanted to see more of from lil ol’ us. We've been trying to deliver on those promises ever since, but I'm especially thinking about them these days.
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We all advocate for our hometowns and the nuances they contain. We’re all experts in the issues we face throughout our daily lives, and the intricacies we discover only by living inside of them. Getting out of our bubbles of what needs our attention, meeting folks where they’re at, listening to the ways this work intersects with countless real lives, has always affirmed why this work matters.
This can feel like a lot of work when you're isolated, especially reporting in and about a pandemic—let alone the myriad other crises we're dealing with. But however isolated we might feel right now, just know we're with y'all in spirit—these days, and always.
Today, some stories about people, places, and things we think are important, too.
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Soul City: A Black dream killed just as it was coming true
Danielle Purifoy, Scalawag
"The story of Soul City is a version of the story of each Black town I’ve lived in, studied, or heard about in passing. Every time I tell one story in public, I come away with at least two more of the same, in every region, but especially in the South—where the Black town was born. The stories are about how white supremacy and its twin, anti-Blackness, intervene in the most basic life processes—drinking water, flushing toilets, possessing the voltage necessary to cook and wash clothes at the same time, being able to see the streets after dark. And how parties from every sector—from business to media to the state—participate to reinforce these conditions."
In 1990, former Scalawag editor Danielle moved with her family from the mega-Black city of Detroit to North Carolina when her dad got a job in the micro-Black town of Soul City. He was a pediatrician, and many of his patients were sick from a lack of sanitation infrastructure, which wasn't uncommon in Black towns at the time. The former tobacco plantation that Floyd McKissick Jr. envisioned as a safe haven for Black empowerment was no different.
Eventually sold in foreclosure, Soul City failed because of targeted political attacks performed solely out of hatred for Black leadership. The real story has for too long gone overlooked in history books.
This coming Thursday, Danielle's leading a conversation about Soul City for SPACES & PLACES 2021: Visions of Black-led Communities, highlighting utopian planning and community self-determination. In partnership with Scalawag, Next City, the APA Housing & Community Development Division, and the BlackSpace Urbanist Collective, the two-day virtual film festival and learning exchange centers the past, present, and future of Black leadership in rural U.S. communities. [Link]
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1. Inside a KKK murder plot: ‘Grab him up, take him to the river’
Jason Dearen, The Associated Press
Joseph Moore was a husband and father, a veteran and klansman. He was also a confidential informant being paid to provide information to the FBI.
In 2015, the FBI uncovered a KKK plot to murder a Black man in Florida. In the 21st Century, the klan was not among the target victim’s list of worries, but FBI recordings of the terrifying logic that went into the plan provide a detailed look inside the Florida klan’s link to local law enforcement.
Warren Williams, the would-be victim of the attack, had served time in a Florida prison—that's where he was first identified as a target. On a recent visit to the prison where the three klansmen involved in the case worked, numerous cars and trucks in the employee and volunteer parking lots were decorated with symbols associated with white supremacy: Confederate flags, QAnon symbols and Thin Blue Line flag decals.
Williams' attorney is frustrated that Florida hasn’t investigated more thoroughly to see if there are more white supremacists working for the state prisons, and wants them to take responsibility. Florida, for its part, has sought to have the case dismissed and declined further comment on it. This is truly a buckwild read, from start to finish.
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2. On the Heels of Foot Soldiers
Kelundra Smith, The Bitter Southerner
Fueled by the power of love, Black Voters Matter co-founder LaTosha Brown wants the next generation of activists to learn from the music and wisdom of the past and to press on to protect voting rights in the rural South and beyond.
For Black Voters Matter Fund co-founders Cliff Albright and LaTosha Brown, Atlanta is the fourth stop in a 10-city bus tour across the Southeast. In the spirit of the 1960s freedom rides, they're making stops in partnership with various grassroots organizations focused on voting and human rights issues in cities across the South.
Brown never saw herself marching on Washington and appearing on cable news every day. More than anything, she simply wanted to sing. “But the Movement called me forth.” Brown, who the Bitter Southerner’s guest editor Aunjanue Ellis calls “daughter-heir to the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer,” integrates her love of music with her passion for voting rights. “I want people to radically re-imagine the South. The South is rich, glorious, and beautiful. If we can uproot the tree of hate, what would the landscape really look like?”
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3. Eating Dirt, Searching Archives
Endia L. Hayes, Southern Cultures
“There are many Black afterlives that have yet to be unearthed.”
How does one respond to the history of a place that has eagerly consumed its violent pasts at the expense of Black life? This question became particularly relevant in April 2018 when the city of Sugar Land, Texas, unearthed the remains of 95 laborers on the grounds of a former sugar plantation turned prison farm. This essay speculatively plays with a history of Sugar Land that does not rely on the city’s industrial legacies, instead turning to dirt as the archive of Texas’s invisible Black geographies. The soil itself is theorized as a means of preserving Black Texas life and memory alongside the difficulty of Sugar Land’s violent pasts.
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