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On the first day of class, my students often ask me, "Where are you from?" My southern accent throws them, I suppose, since we're in a classroom in downtown Chicago.

For the past few years, I've responded, "Are you familiar with the reality TV series Duck Dynasty?" Most of them nod, wide-eyed. "I'm from that town," I say. Then I add, "but don't hold it against me."

A couple of things are happening when I do this. First, I'm attempting to break the ice with these young adults by personalizing myself and revealing I'm up on current trends in reality television. Second, I'm also distancing myself from my hometown for fear that my incoming students will liken me to my televised counterparts: southern "rednecks."

Over the past five years, reality television has worked its way into Louisiana, thanks in part to the Louisiana Motion Picture Tax Incentive Act (2002), a bill that grants tax credits for TV and film production in the state. Since 2010, the industry has churned out such Louisiana-based reality programs as Swamp People, Cajun Pawn Stars, Swamp'd!, Country Buck$, Bayou Billionaries, My Big Redneck Vacation, Billy the Exterminator, Ragin' Cajuns, and the most successful of all, Duck Dynasty.

What is a "redneck" exactly? A brief history of the term.

Unsurprisingly, several of these programs perpetuate the stereotype of the southern redneck: a God-fearing, gun-toting, truck-driving, inbred bumpkin. What's more, some characters therein proudly identify as "rednecks," and some shows like Duck Dynasty feature the term in episode titles (e.g., "High Tech Redneck," "Redneck Logic," "Ring Around the Redneck").

But by many accounts, several people on these reality TV programs are not rednecks, at least in the accepted stereotype. They are not inbred, they have their own teeth, and they are not (all) bigots. In fact, many are wealthy and well-educated. So what is a redneck today?

Rednecks, Back in the Day

In America, the word redneck dates back to the 1800s, and in different parts of the country at different times, its meaning has shifted. Over the course of nearly 200 years, it has stood for the following:

poor, Southern whites

a name "applied by the better class of people to the poorer [white] inhabitants of the rural districts"

a word used "to denigrate [white] farmers within their party who supported populist reforms"

white Presbyterians living in North Carolina (specific rednecks!)

Communists

a term black southerners used-alongside poor white trash, cracker, and peckerwood-to poke fun at poor white country folks

white coal miners who belonged to labor unions (in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and southern Illinois and Indiana)

any white racist, regardless of his or her class position or birthplace

These are all pretty degrading characterizations and perhaps what most people have in mind when they hear the word redneck.

But according to Patrick Huber and Kathleen Drowne, the term-originally an allusion to the sunburned red necks of farmers-was not always used as a slur amongst whites. For example, wearing red neckties and kerchiefs to political rallies, some southerners claimed the label as a "badge of class pride for a county's populist voters."

Chic and Upscale Rednecks

In the 1970s, being a "redneck" became fashionable, and the term redneck chic, which seems to have little to do with outwardly disparaging race or class,was born. According to Patrick Huber, this is what was happening during the Carter presidency and afterward. He writes in "A Short History of Redneck: The Fashioning of a Southern White Masculine Identity:"

Suddenly, trendy white Americans across the country affected phony southern drawls, dressed up in Levi's and cowboy boots, sipped Lone Star and Pabst longnecks, tuned into Waylon and Willie, and hankered for meals of fried pork chops, grits, greens, and biscuits and gravy. "Redneck chic"-which anticipated by half a decade the western-wear and bull-riding fad created by the blockbuster hit film Urban Cowboy (1981)-spawned its own distinct body of literature, to use the term loosely.

Similarly, in the late 1980s, a salesman working in Jackson, Mississippi, distinguishes "upscale 'rednecks'" from those who "live in a trailer someplace out in Rankin County."
There's an upscale redneck, and he's going to want it cleaned up. Yard mowed, a little garden in the back. Old Mama, she's gonna wear designer jeans and they're gonna go to Shoney's to eat once every three weeks. [...] If he or she moves to North Jackson, he'd be upscale. [The wife's] got some little piddling job. She's probably the basis of the income. She's going to try to work every day. [...] You see, he doesn't want to work all day long. He's satisfied by getting by.
The Postmodern Redneck

We can now add to "redneck chic" and "upscale rednecks" the 1990s country music boom and its crossover stars like Tim McGraw, Garth Brooks, and Sawyer Brown whose videos featured wealthy "rednecks" doing, well, lots of non redneck-y things.

See also the rise of comedian Jeff Foxworthy, who in 2007 had sold more comedy recordings than anyone in history-more than twice as many as Richard Pryor and Steve Martin combined.

Now, our definition of redneck as defined via class, politics, and/or rural geography gets a bit more jumbled.

Foxworthy, for instance, claims his "redneck" heritage even though he grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, had an IBM executive for a father, and attended Georgia Tech. For the record, Foxworthy's fellow blue-collar comics Larry the Cable Guy and Bill Engvall also went to college. The same goes for Duck Dynasty 's Phil Robertson who earned a Master of Arts in Education.

These men are what I call postmodern rednecks. And they remind me of the white, educated, middle- or upper-middle class guys from North Louisiana with whom I (and some of the Duck Dynasty clan) went to school.

These are the "rednecks" who frosted their hair and wore camouflage; who played golf and ditched school to shoot and then eat deer, ducks, and turkeys; who wore suits and rode four-wheelers; who joined preppy fraternities and took their dates mud-hogging (look it up). And today, these are the same "rednecks" who post to social media photographs of their families in Grand Cayman and Disneyworld-right alongside shots of themselves disemboweling deer, wearing overalls, and chewing tobacco.

Next time I associate myself with Duck Dynasty, perhaps I'll use the opportunity not to distance myself from the series, but to explain that the meaning of the word redneck- as it did through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and as do many stereotypes)-has shifted and, thus, complicated itself even more.

JSTOR Citations

By: Patrick Huber and Kathleen Drowne

American Speech, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 434-437

The American Dialect Society

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On the first day of class, my students often ask me, "Where are you from?" My southern accent throws them, I suppose, since we're in a classroom in downtown Chicago. For the past few years, I've responded, "Are you familiar with the reality TV series Duck Dynasty ?"

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Teaching Mockingbird suggests a central question around which a class's study of Harper Lee's novel can be organized: What factors influence our moral growth? What kinds of experiences help us learn how to judge right from wrong? As students read and reflect on the novel, they return to this question and can begin to make deeper and broader connections between the novel and their own moral and ethical lives. They begin by considering the pivotal moments in their lives that shape who they are and their senses of right and wrong. Then they analyze how the characters in To Kill A Mockingbird change over the course of the story, identifying pivotal moments in the story that influence how the characters think about morality and justice.

The complete Teaching Mockingbird guide also introduces models of moral development that have emerged from the field of developmental psychology, which students can use as the basis for even deeper character analysis.

1. Watch a reflection of growing up in the South
What are the pivotal moments of her childhood that Strom shares in the video? Why do you think she chose to share those experiences instead of others? How did these pivotal moments impact her sense of right and wrong?

2. Do Analysis: Pivotal Moments in the Novel
Trace the moral growth of one character-Scout, Jem, or Atticus-over the course of the novel. How does his or her sense of right and wrong change as the story unfolds? Which pivotal moments influenced the character's moral growth?

3. Do Personal Reflection
What has influenced your moral growth? What people and pivotal moments have helped shape your sense of right and wrong? Choose one person or pivotal moment and describe it in detail. How did it change or deepen your beliefs about right and wrong?

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Moral Growth: A Framework for Character Analysis

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Teaching Mockingbird suggests a central question around which a class's study of Harper Lee's novel can be organized: What factors influence our moral growth? What kinds of experiences help us learn how to judge right from wrong?

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Scout as narrator- Ch. 15

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As Scout and Jem confront the issues of difference and belonging embedded in their community, Harper Lee's choice to tell the story through the eyes of Scout becomes more crucial to the story. Scout's wide-eyed naiveté heightens the impact of both the social expectations she resists and the injustices she sees unfold. Indeed, one of the primary narrative arcs of the novel is Scout's "coming of age" through these experiences. At the same time, Scout's lack of life experience and knowledge about the world she inhabits leaves readers with gaps to fill in their own understanding of several important events and characters in the book.

Scout's reliability as the narrator is important to understand because of what it shows about both the value and limitations of attempting to "walk in someone else's skin." As students simultaneously grapple with Scout's limited perspective and observe it slowly expand as the story unfolds, they might reflect on the ways in which their own perspectives are limited, as are everyone's. By wrestling with these challenges, students can begin to strengthen their understanding and practice of empathy.

1. Read Excerpt: the lynch mob scene at the end of Chapter 15

What does this incident suggest about mob mentality and how Harper Lee thinks it might be defeated? How does Scout's limited understanding of the events in this chapter affect the reader? What parts of the story must the reader piece together on his or her own? What does this process reveal about her reliability as a narrator?

2. Watch Video "The Origins of Lynching Culture" Video

How do Paula Giddings's insights deepen our understanding of the tension in the jailhouse scene? What myths and fears were used to justify the lynching of black men? What does Giddings define as the primary function that lynching played? How does having deeper knowledge of this history reaffirm or change our analysis of the choices that Atticus, Scout, Jem, and Walter Cunningham make? How does this video help us understand Scout's limitations as a narrator?

3. Do Analysis: Consider other characters' perspectives

Another way to help students understand Scout's limitations as the narrator is to ask them to consider how a different character might have described the jailhouse scene. Ask them to rewrite the scene from the perspective of another character who was there: Tom Robinson, Walter Cunningham, Atticus, or Jem.

Regardless of the character that students choose or are assigned, they should include responses to the following questions in their work:

How does the character understand what the men intended to do when they arrived at the courthouse?

How did the character feel when Scout ran to Atticus? How did he respond?

How would the character explain why the men decided to leave? To whom does the character give credit for convincing them to back down?

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Scout as Narrator: The Impact of Point of View

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As Scout and Jem confront the issues of difference and belonging embedded in their community, Harper Lee's choice to tell the story through the eyes of Scout becomes more crucial to the story. Scout's wide-eyed naiveté heightens the impact of both the social expectations she resists and the injustices she sees unfold.

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Literary critic Wayne C. Booth writes that the plots of great stories "are built out of the characters' efforts to face moral choices. In tracing those efforts, we readers stretch our own capacities for thinking about how life should be lived." In order to understand the moral choices depicted in To Kill a Mockingbird, we must first look at both the identities of those making moral choices and the context in which they are made. In other words, we must start by examining character and setting.

Just as character includes more than surface traits, setting goes well beyond simply establishing the time and place of the novel. Meaningfully understanding the setting of To Kill A Mockingbird requires understanding the moral universe in which the story takes place. In other words, it requires having a sense of the "rules, constraints, possibilities, potential conflicts and possible consequences" that affect the choices the characters make.

This lesson explores the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird in order to understand the moral choices that characters make in the novel. You'll find activities that use our original video about the Jim Crow South, Studs Terkel radio clips offering first-hand accounts of the Great Depression, and readings from Teaching Mockingbird.

1. Looking at race and segregation in Alabama during the Jim Crow Era

Read Excerpt: Atticus explaining to Scout why he must take the Robinson case seriously (Chapter 9)

How does Atticus explain his choice? Why is there so much tension in Maycomb (and in the Finch household) about this choice?

Watch the video: "Understanding Jim Crow"

How does this video deepen our understanding of the "moral universe" in which Atticus must make choices about his defense of Tom Robinson? What does this video help us understand about the consequences of his choice?

2. Looking at class in a small southern town in the 1930s
Read Excerpt: Atticus describes the Ewells to Scout (Chapter 3)
What does this passage tell us about the "moral universe" of Maycomb? Who is part of the "common folk" and who isn't?

Listen to Studs Terkel first-hand accounts:

How do these perspectives change or deepen our understanding of the Ewells' predicament? How do they affect our understanding of Atticus's attitude toward the Ewells?

Read text excerpt: "Being Well Born" from New Civic Biology by George William Hunter

3. Exploring gender expectations in Maycomb
Read Excerpt: Aunt Alexandra describing what it means to be a lady (Chapter 9)
What is Aunt Alexandra's vision for what is "lady-like"? What metaphor does Alexandra use to describe the role that Scout should play in her father's life because she is a girl? How does her repetition of the metaphor help establish her tone and indicate her feelings about Alexandra's attempt to influence her?

Read text excerpt: "The Southern Lady and Belle" from The Companion to Southern Literature by Joseph Flora and Lucinda MacKethan

How does the description of this historical social type help us understand Aunt Alexandra's perspective? What does it suggest about both the pressures on Scout and her choices in response to those pressures?

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Maycomb's Ways: Setting as Moral Universe

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Literary critic Wayne C. Booth writes that the plots of great stories "are built out of the characters' efforts to face moral choices. In tracing those efforts, we readers stretch our own capacities for thinking about how life should be lived."

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Blacks in the South, Carlton told me, are submissive. He was a young African-American man from Kansas City. We were sitting in a classroom in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. A teacher friend of mine had asked me to mentor him and another of her high school students.

Blacks in the South are submissive.

Story Continued Below

It rolled off his tongue, not as indictment, but as description.

His family sent him "down South" for that very reason, to get him away from, Carlton said, the kind of black people who stand up for themselves and firmly against injustice-personal and otherwise-the kind of black people he had been getting in trouble with as they fought back ... against whatever it was they were fighting, something he couldn't quite explain.

Being among submissive blacks, there would be none of the fighting and mischief that had his mother worried about how long he would live, because Southern blacks don't fight, don't question authority, unthinkingly fall in line-the kind of environment he needed.

The proof was all around us.

Never mind the rich history of the Civil Rights movement, born in the South and carried out by men and women so fearless they were willing to be lynched. What caught Carlton's attention were Confederate flags in store windows, hanging from front poles in people's yards, on bumper stickers and T-shirts, and gated communities developers named after pretend plantations, hoping to invoke the image of Southern elegance portrayed in Gone with the Wind.

No way that kind of thing would be allowed where he was from, Carlton reasoned. There would be rioting in the streets. (Notice how black South Carolinians have been praised for not rioting after a white North Charleston cop shot a fleeing black man in the back or when nine black people were targeted for death in a church.) The Southern blacks he saw-people like me-seemed too content, too happy, too accepting of the unacceptable.

Listening to him, I felt like Hattie McDaniel, which was fitting, given that I have driven by a restaurant named Mammy's so frequently it had become part of the landscape, no longer a point of reflection. The sight of it, or riding down roads named for Confederate heroes, no longer left me wondering how much my state's reverence for a war it started to keep people like me in chains a century and a half ago helped perpetuate 21st-century racial disparities.

That conversation with Carlton was a little more than a decade ago. The memory of that day came flashing back as I watched commentators throughout the country wax poetic with righteous anger about the Confederate flag flying on State House grounds in the capitol of my native state and their clear, unapologetic calls to "bring it down."

I was ashamed, began wondering if Carlton was right because I knew that in some ways black people and white people in South Carolina had for years done what President Barack Obama warned against during his eulogy for the "Charleston Nine" killed at Emanuel AME-slipped "into comfortable silence."

Despite the headlines and rhetoric dripping from the lips of Southern politicians so white-hot they make national news and late-night comedians drool, a comfortable silence has been a more accurate description of everyday black life in my part of the South than constant, overt racial unrest.

And that's why it took the massacre of nine black people in a church once burned down by slavery supporters to make the Confederate flag an issue politicians have to grapple with today.

The Confederate flag had been flying in a place of sovereignty in our state for four decades-but my primary concern was protecting the image of one of the soft-spoken, rich white men who made sure it was going to stay there.

I was raised about 45 miles from where Dylann Roof allegedly sat in a Bible study for an hour before shooting the people he reportedly hesitated to kill because they had been so nice to him. My childhood included many trips to Charleston, including to Emanuel AME during the summer of 1990 on the day the Ku Klux Klan held a rally a five-minute walk from the church.

I grew up in an under-funded, rural high school that remained segregated for four decades after Brown v. Board of Education, and was taught by a white high school teacher who forbade us from writing about Malcolm X for Black History Month.

I rushed to the TV like many people I grew up with to watch "The Dukes of Hazzard." I cheered for Daisy and Uncle Jesse against Jefferson "Boss Hog" Davis, and with Bo and Luke Duke in an orange Dodge Charger with the Confederate flag on the roof and named after the most revered Confederate soldier of them all, Gen. Robert E. Lee.

By the time that show ended its six-year run in 1985, the Confederate flag had been flying above the South Carolina State House dome for almost a quarter of a century, placed there in 1962 in defiance of the burgeoning civil rights movement. As it was flying at our capitol to celebrate men who fought to implement a permanent form of black enslavement, we were celebrating it in our homes in the form of the good-natured Duke boys.

By night, for at least an hour every week, we were immersed in the kind of sanitized version of the ugliest period of our past that was codified by Gone with the Wind. By day, we were taught in public schools from a history book written by the daughter of a Confederate soldier that included descriptions of happy slaves and a sympathetic Klan.

We had (and have) friends who revere the flag and told us they were protecting their heritage and honoring the sacrifice their ancestors made to protect the state from an invading army.

They never stopped reminding us of the horrors inflicted upon the South during General Sherman's infamous march during the Civil War.

Their lines are so well-rehearsed, I can't tell if they are sincere or a knee-jerk reaction to any criticism of the South.

"There were slave owners who fought for the North, too."

"Did you know there were black slave owners?"

"Most white Confederate soldiers were too poor to own slaves."

"That war had nothing to do with slavery; they invaded our homeland and we had to protect it. That's why Lincoln will never represent me."

"Thousands of black people fought for the South."

"How I wish the South would have freed all the slaves, then fought the war."

Some of the most educated white people I know have told me these things, despite the overwhelming historical record which shows that South Carolina began that war-the first shots were fired by Citadel cadets in Charleston, a military school created in response to the potential slave revolt hatched by Denmark Vesey at Emanuel AME-because they wanted to protect slavery, that all of their claims about states' rights and self-rule hinged on the South's claim that white people could and should own black people. The constitution of the Confederate States of America included a permanent form of black slavery built upon the premise that God made the races different for a reason.

Looking back, that's what I've seen black people in South Carolina do for white people time and time again, desperately trying to honor their complex humanity beneath the hurt their daily denials cause us.

"Of course they treated their slaves well," the head of a prominent business in the Myrtle Beach area once told me. "If they didn't, it would have been like taking a sledge hammer to a $200,000 piece of farm equipment today."

Looking back, my initial response to him showed just how much I had succumbed to the comfortable silence Obama spoke of Friday and Carlton alluded to all those years ago. I didn't get upset, didn't challenge him. My first instinct was to better understand his point of view to be able to put it in proper context, afraid some might think him a delusional racist, when I knew he was no such thing.

By that time, the Confederate flag had been flying in a place of sovereignty in our state for four decades-but my primary concern was protecting the image of one of the soft-spoken, rich white men who made sure it was going to stay there.

I've done the same for others, focusing on their kindness and philanthropy to ignore or explain away their love of a flag that makes me wince.

Looking back, that's what I've seen black people in South Carolina do for white people time and time again, desperately trying to honor their complex humanity beneath the hurt their daily denials cause us. It happened when people like my mother and mother-in-law would leave their kids to work in "the white man's house" and take care of their children and accept the pennies for the hours they spent toiling, doing it all with gratitude and grace even as they were being denied an equal education and the right to walk on the sidewalk or swim in a public pool, or even the Atlantic Ocean, if white people wanted to.

I've seen black people swallow their disgust about the flag and racial disparities and unspoken indignities and white people thank them for doing it-calling them dignified, true children of God-while not budging from their position that the Confederate flag is to be honored on public property, no matter that the Ku Klux Klan was founded by Confederate soldiers and unleashed a century's worth of terror on blacks in the South that would make the Islamic State blush.

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I'm a Black Southerner Who's Seen Racism All My Life. Why Do I Stay Silent?

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Blacks in the South, Carlton told me, are submissive. He was a young African-American man from Kansas City. We were sitting in a classroom in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. A teacher friend of mine had asked me to mentor him and another of her high school students. Blacks in the South are submissive.

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American History: Reconstruction: After the Civil War, the American South Rebuilds (VOA Special English 2005-07-13)

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Listen and Read Along - Text with Audio - For ESL Students - For Learning English

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When Charlie Cox told his friends he was leaving Chicago, no one tried to talk him out of it. After 35 years at General Motors, he was ready to retire. Ready to trade the cold and the crime and the frenetic pace of life for the rivers and fields of his youth. He had grown up in rural West Point, Miss., and he had moved north with his family when he was 9 years old, but somehow his heart had never quite followed. His spirit yearned for the South, and, as the years passed, the memories of his childhood burned brighter until he couldn't stand it any longer.

There was only one problem: His wife, Darlene, wasn't so enamored of the idea. She had been born and raised in Chicago and had deep roots in the South as well, but her impressions of the region were far from idyllic. Her ancestors were slaves, working the cotton fields of Tunica, Miss., and she didn't have fond memories of her family's trips to Mississippi in the 1960s.

As a result, she and Charlie found themselves at an impasse - he longed to return to a place he had never wanted to leave, but it was a place she had never wanted to live.

Was he sure, she asked?

Yes, he said. I have to do this. Come with me.

She did. Today, as she prepares breakfast in the kitchen of their three-bedroom house in West Point - a town whose entire population would fill only a quarter of the seats at Wrigley Field - she shares his enthusiasm about the move. They recently returned from a trip to Chicago and couldn't wait to get home.

"I wouldn't [trade] anything for West Point now," Ms. Cox says as she slides a thick slice of bacon into a cast-iron skillet.

"It's quiet here," Mr. Cox agrees. "You can relax more down here. I don't worry about my car when I park out here in the yard."

The Coxes' decision is one unfolding in African-American households across the nation. After decades of mass exodus, blacks are returning to the South in one of the most notable migrations of the new century.

It's a subtle but significant shift that experts say provides not only a snapshot of the changing economics and sociology of the nation but of an emerging new South and, in some cases, of a growing disillusionment with the urban North.

For most of the 20th century, blacks were buying one-way tickets out of the Jim Crow South in hopes of a better life. Nearly 6 million African-Americans followed the railroads to places like Detroit and Chicago, never dreaming that their children and grandchildren would someday lead a return migration, chasing the American dream back down the Mississippi and straight across the Mason-Dixon line.

The Great Migration slowly eased in the 1970s as the North's economic fortunes began to dim and the South's racial climate began to improve. But it wasn't until the 2000 Census, when the South posted its first black population increase in more than a century, that demographers started to really take notice. By 2010, about 57 percent of the nation's African-Americans were living in the South - a higher percentage than at any time in 50 years.

The South, to be sure, has been a population magnet for people of all races since the end of World War II. The region was the top destination for newcomers between 1997 and 2011, picking up 1.52 million people - the majority from the Midwest - according to the US Census Bureau's 2012 American Community Survey.

Economics is part of the overall draw, notes William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., but for African-Americans, there's something else to consider: Even at its lowest points, the South was still home to the majority of the nation's black residents, giving it a culturally and sociologically significant role in African-American history and making it, if not always comfortable, at least always familiar.

Some of the return migrants, like the Coxes, are retirees, while others are college-educated young people, driven by economic realities, historical curiosity, and the old-fashioned American drive to explore new frontiers and create new worlds. But there is a universal thread that runs through their narratives - the pull of a cultural homeland.

The South has a way of resonating with people, says John Giggie, associate professor of history and director of graduate studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. For African-Americans, many of whom have maintained their Southern ties through family reunions and church homecomings, it is not so much a homeland to which they are returning as it is a heartland they never left.

It doesn't surprise Dr. Giggie to hear of people like Mr. Cox, who doesn't live on the 25-acre homestead his family owns but still pays the property taxes and cuts the grass. On weekends, he can be found there hunting, fishing, or just walking in the fields, enjoying the silence.

"Owning land is a key component of Southern identity," Giggie says. "Southerners with money invested in slaves and land, and those with land were the ones who came away with the greatest political clout. There's always been that promise you bequeath to your loved ones. For those able to procure it, land became a prized possession."

* * *

The search for roots, and the urge to explore their African-American heritage, is a key motivator for some of the new migration's youngest participants. Many are the first, second, or third generations to be born in Northern cities.

Most have visited family in the South, but some have not. Many have never stood in a field of blinding white cotton. Few can imagine a Jim Crow world, where courtrooms used separate Bibles for blacks and whites, towns had separate parks, and some businesses wouldn't allow black and white employees to walk through the same doors.

And yet, these young people have grown up with the language, the music, the food, the cultural touch points that sustained their ancestors for so long, says Isabel Wilkerson, author of "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration," a chronicle of the journey north by blacks between 1915 and 1970. For them, moving back to the South is a way to connect with their heritage on a deeper level and understand their culture in a new way.

Detroit native Aretha Frison had traveled extensively and even attended college at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, but she says she felt most at home when she moved to New Orleans in 2006. Her ancestors were slaves in Tuscaloosa, and her last name is a variant of the plantation owner's name, "Frierson." She vividly remembers visiting family in Tuscaloosa and seeing the historical site where slaves were bought and sold.

As an ardent history buff, she was drawn to the South, first by curiosity and later by love. She was thrilled when she received a scholarship to study journalism in Florida, determined to treat the experience as a grand adventure.

But Ms. Frison was homesick. She and other Detroit natives in her program spent a lot of time looking at their high school yearbooks, reminiscing about home. Sometimes, she says, they "trailed" each other from Tallahassee to Detroit, waving as they passed on the Interstate.

Then, in August 2005, hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Intuitively, she felt impelled to help out. After traveling to Louisiana three times with church mission teams, she moved there permanently in August 2006, taking a job as a teacher in a private school. New Orleans became home.

Now Frison works as a news producer at WDSU-TV, and she credits the city with making her the person she is today. Her exuberance is infectious as she talks of the people she has met who grew up elsewhere but came to visit New Orleans - and stayed.

"It's not just snowbirds," she says. "People are moving down here and trying to make a better quality of life, trying to make a difference."

She likes the climate, the beaches, the parks. She likes the diversity and the cultural mélange. She likes the food and the spirit of the city that was battered but refused to break. But mostly, she loves the people.

"My roots are here in the South, even though they went north for a while," she says.

* * *

Of course, the economy has been a major impetus for some migrants' journeys. But it usually takes more than the promise of a bigger paycheck or a better job to lure people across state lines.

"People move not only for economic incentives, but also to pursue dreams and escape nightmares," says Michael Barone, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of "Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics." "The South, with its widespread rising prosperity, seems to be less of a nightmare."

When World War II began, black newspapers in the South began to hail the North's virtues as a land of economic opportunity. They depicted it as a place where blacks could escape segregation and pursue their dreams of a better life. As a result, nearly one-third of the South's black population eventually headed north. In the mid-1960s, as riots rocked Northern cities and legal segregation ended in the South, that migration stream dried up, according to Mr. Barone.

It was that kind of "escape logic" that led Betsy Hurt to leave Flint, Mich., after more than 30 years. Ms. Hurt grew up in Columbus, Miss., but like so many others, she headed for Chicago in 1953 in search of work. After several years of bouncing back and forth between the regions, she got married and made Michigan her home.

Before the Great Recession began in 2007, her neighborhood was a quiet place where longtime residents enjoyed summer evenings in their yards.

Then came the layoffs. The factory closings. The foreclosures. Gangs moved in. Drug sales took place in the middle of the street. Vandals stripped homes of aluminum siding and stole cooling systems from churches.

One by one, her neighbors moved away. Renters took their places. People locked their doors, and no one sat outside anymore.

One day in 2011 she was standing on her front porch, talking to the mailman, when a gunfight broke out in front of her house. A few days later, gang members tried to shoot one of her grandsons.

"That was the final straw," says Hurt. "My children said, 'You're going to leave there,' so I let my house go into foreclosure and closed the door on 30 years of memories."

A lot of her friends had retired and returned to the South. Since she had a daughter in Raleigh, N.C., she decided to make that her new home. By 2012, she was a Southerner again.

Recently, Hurt moved into a senior citizen apartment complex, and she was surprised to find that many of her new neighbors are from the North, too.

She lives on the third floor, and from her window, she looks down on beds of cheerful pansies. She rarely needs her heavy winter coat when she takes her Yorkiepoo, Quasi, for his evening stroll.

"When I first got here, it just looked magical," Hurt says. "I never would have thought I would end up here, but it's just awesome. It's a very, very nice, safe place."

Her decision to move stemmed as much from a desire to flee the North as it did to settle in the South. In that sense, she reflects the sentiments of some of the new migrants. Some critics, in fact, have portrayed the reverse migration as an indictment of the urban North - as a flight from the lack of jobs, the abundance of mean streets, and the growing social woes of Northern cities.

Others believe the movement of blacks to the South, like that of many other Americans, is rooted in the natural and inevitable rhythms of a mobile society - the enduring growth of the Sun Belt, the simple yearning for warmer weather among retirees, and the desire to start fresh in a region where the cost of living is often cheaper.

Either way, the black migration comes at the expense of Northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York. A 2009 study by sociologists at Queens College in New York, for instance, found that approximately 17 percent of the South's new migrants over a 10-year period came from New York State.

Lorrinn Woods simply wanted a nice, safe place to live. Although she was born and raised in Philadelphia - and loved it there - she felt the city was becoming too dangerous. So she moved to Georgia, which she felt was "someplace better." She went to work for a local nonprofit and found a nice apartment in midtown. But by 2009, Atlanta was beginning to feel the pangs of the economic downturn, and she lost her job. Her family's roots were in Prichard, Ala., so she moved there briefly, then settled a few miles away in Mobile. She went back to college for a degree in accounting and is now working as a business consultant at a minority business development agency.

"Alabama is one of those states that have bad reputations, but those times have passed," Ms. Woods says. "It's not 1854 anymore. Alabama is a new frontier and a wonderful place for opportunities."

* * *

The Coxes discovered new opportunities in Mississippi, too. It just took them a while. Initially, they had a tough time adjusting to the slower lifestyle, particularly Darlene.

She missed the food in Chicago and the way anything she wanted was available a short distance away, at any hour. During the first few months of the couple's return, she caught a Greyhound back to the Windy City every chance she got until, finally, she "snapped out of it." She let herself embrace her new home.

She became a substitute teacher for the West Point School District. Last May, she ran for city mayor, opposing a longtime area politician. She lost by a substantial margin but still feels she left a mark.

The couple's engagement in their community raises a fundamental question about the reverse migration: What effect will it end up having on the South - and the nation?

The Great Migration transformed the nation politically, economically, and culturally. But most experts don't see the current cavalcade in the opposite direction having anything like that level of impact.

For one thing, far fewer blacks are moving this time. They are also moving back to a region that is far more racially diverse than when they moved up north. Many of the African-Americans returning to the South are settling in urban and rural areas across the region. During the Great Migration, blacks concentrated largely in a handful of Northern cities, where they helped reshape neighborhoods, race relations, and politics.

Still, any migration of significance will have at least some implications. One could be to boost the Democratic Party, as large numbers of middle-class African-Americans return to predominantly Republican states. Yet their influx could bring new tensions to the party as well: According to the University of Alabama's Giggie, many of the migrants come with a "Northern-inflected liberalism" that may nudge Democrats across the region, traditionally fairly conservative, leftward.

Some of the biggest adjustments may have to come from the new arrivals themselves. Author Ms. Wilkerson and others say that, even though the discriminatory laws of the South have long since vanished, there is a caste system in place that makes it difficult for outsiders to rise in the power structure politically or socially.

Darlene Cox quickly came to that conclusion after her brief foray into politics. "You can't climb the ladder here unless somebody knows you," she says.

Still, the newcomers are infusing the region with new energy and ideas. Demographer Mr. Frey notes that, while a weak national economy is slowing migration in the United States in general, the flow of people to the South will continue. Among the African-Americans, he says, will be a large number of young, middle-class, college-educated professionals ready to move into neighborhoods that are becoming more integrated. They will be drawn by an idealism about the future as well as the ever-present pull of the past.

"[The South] is home," says Charles Steele, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. "Even though it's a dark side of your history, you can never forget about it. You always want to make it better."

You won't get any argument from the Coxes. Both Charlie and Darlene volunteer at church and community events. Every year, they organize a free, community-wide Thanksgiving meal. They are rooted in their new home in the South, as are many of their friends who have returned, too.

"The cost of living is cheaper, the property taxes - all that is cheaper," Charlie says. "I just wanted to relax."

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Why African-Americans are moving back to the South

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When Charlie Cox told his friends he was leaving Chicago, no one tried to talk him out of it. After 35 years at General Motors, he was ready to retire. Ready to trade the cold and the crime and the frenetic pace of life for the rivers and fields of his youth.

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After the Civil War and Reconstruction, southern states employed a range of tactics to prevent blacks from exercising their right to vote. They used violence, vote fraud, gerrymandering, literacy tests, white primaries, among others. These tactics caused registration by blacks to drop significantly. Such measures as the poll tax, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and the white primary proved especially effective in disfranchising blacks.

The poll tax, as it applied to primary elections leading to general elections for federal office, was abolished in the Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified in 1964. Qualifications to vote based on some element of property ownership have a history that extends to colonial days. However, the poll tax was instituted in seven southern states following Reconstruction. The poll tax was a flat fee required before voting; it was often levied as high as $200 per person. The voting rights of poor blacks were disproportionately discriminated against in this method.

The U.S. Congress eventually came to view the financial qualification as an impediment to individuals' suffrage rights. Despite Congressional sentiment, though, a constitutional amendment was necessary to abolish poll taxes, as the poll tax had previously withstood constitutional challenges in the courts. Even with the ratification of the Twenty-fourth Amendment, some states continued to look for ways to use poll taxes as an impediment to blacks' exercising their right to vote. Finally, in the 1965 opinion in the case of Harman v. Forssenius, the Supreme Court struck down a Virginia law which had partially eliminated the poll tax as an absolute qualification for voting in federal elections. The Virginia law had given voters in federal elections the choice of either paying the tax or of filing a certificate of residence six months before the election. The Court found the latter requirement to be an unfair procedural requirement for voters in federal elections, particularly because the law was not imposed on those who otherwise agreed to pay the poll tax. The Court unanimously held the law to conflict with the Twenty-fourth Amendment as it penalized those who chose to exercise a right guaranteed them by the amendment.

There were many uneducated African Americans in the post-Civil War era. Literacy tests were used to help exclude them from the polls. However, whites found that literacy tests also would exclude large numbers of whites from becoming eligible voters since many whites could not read or write either. As a remedy, some jurisdictions adopted a "reasonable interpretation" clause; these laws gave voting registrars discretion to evaluate applicants' performance on literacy tests. The effect was predictable: most whites passed and most blacks did not. By the beginning of the twentieth century, almost every black had been disfranchised in the South.

Grandfather clauses, a peculiarly irksome impediment to achieving voting rights for African Americans, were enacted by seven Southern states between 1895 and 1910. These laws provided that those who had enjoyed the right to vote prior to 1866 or 1867 or their lineal descendants would be exempt from educational, property, or tax requirements for voting. Because former slaves had not been granted the right to vote until the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, these clauses effectively excluded blacks from the vote. At the same time, grandfather clauses assured the right to vote to many impoverished, ignorant, and illiterate whites. In 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court finally declared the grandfather clause unconstitutional because it violated equal voting rights guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment.

The so-called white primary was a tactic Southern whites used in which the Democratic Party was declared a private organization that could exclude whomever it pleased. State party rules or state laws that excluded blacks from the Democratic primary virtually disenfranchised all blacks (and only blacks) by keeping them out of the election that generally determined who would hold office in a state that was dominated by the Democratic Party. In 1944, the white primary was ruled unconstitutional in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Smith v. Allwright.

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Grandfather Clauses, Literacy Tests, and the White Primary

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After the Civil War and Reconstruction, southern states employed a range of tactics to prevent blacks from exercising their right to vote. They used violence, vote fraud, gerrymandering, literacy tests, white primaries, among others. These tactics caused registration by blacks to drop significantly.

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After the Civil War, African Americans were free but not equal. The Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, were made virtual dead letters by hostile court decisions, culminating in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, which gave legal sanction to the principle of "separate but equal" facilities segregated by race.

In fact, separate facilities for blacks were hardly ever equal. They were inferior because segregation-the separation of people based on skin color-was based on the idea, expressed in the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857, that blacks were "an inferior and subordinate class of beings." Despite the Civil War and emancipation, this remained the attitude of most whites and, hence, of governments. Jim Crow, taking its name from a fictional minstrel character, was the name given to America's own system of racial apartheid.

In Virginia, the South, and some northern states, Plessy v. Ferguson, both confirmed the status quo and gave impetus to even more rigid segregation laws. Blacks had to sit at the back of streetcars or stand if there were not enough seats for whites. They were made to sit at separate sections of theaters, libraries, and train stations. They could not use water fountains, bathrooms, beaches or swimming pools used by whites. They could only order takeout food from restaurants that served whites. They attended separate, usually ramshackle schools. Social life and everything from sports teams to funeral parlors were segregated.

When blacks gave blood, it was segregated from that of white donors. As black men and women in the uniform of their country traveled, they often could not use restrooms at bus and gas stations and were directed instead to a nearby tree. After Korean War-veteran Thomas Hardy returned home to Virginia in 1951, he wondered "What was I fighting for?"

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After the Civil War, African Americans were free but not equal. The Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, were made virtual dead letters by hostile court decisions, culminating in 1896 in Plessy v.

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Instilling Fear

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Following the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan emerges to suppress and victimize newly freed slaves.

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VERY GRAPHIC-WARNING

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About the Great Depression | The Depression in the United States--An Overview | About The Dust Bowl | A Depression Photo Essay | A Great Depression Art Gallery |

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On the Civil Rights Memorial are inscribed the names of individuals who lost their lives in the struggle for freedom during the modern Civil Rights Movement - 1954 to 1968. The martyrs include activists who were targeted for death because of their civil rights work; random victims of vigilantes determined to halt the movement; and individuals who, in the sacrifice of their own lives, brought new awareness to the struggle.

The chronology below briefly describes their lives. More information is available at the Civil Rights Memorial Center.

1955

May 7, 1955 · Belzoni, Mississippi

Rev. George Lee, one of the first black people registered to vote in Humphreys County, used his pulpit and his printing press to urge others to vote. White officials offered Lee protection on the condition he end his voter registration efforts, but Lee refused and was murdered.

August 13, 1955 · Brookhaven, Mississippi

Lamar Smith was shot dead on the courthouse lawn by a white man in broad daylight while dozens of people watched. The killer was never indicted because no one would admit they saw a white man shoot a black man. Smith had organized blacks to vote in a recent election.

August 28, 1955 · Money, Mississippi

Emmett Louis Till, a 14-year-old boy on vacation from Chicago, reportedly flirted with a white woman in a store. Three nights later, two men took Till from his bed, beat him, shot him and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. An all-white jury found the men innocent of murder.

October 22, 1955 · Mayflower, Texas

John Earl Reese, 16, was dancing in a café when white men fired shots into the windows. Reese was killed and two others were wounded. The shootings were part of an attempt by whites to terrorize blacks into giving up plans for a new school. (photograph unavailable)

1957

January 23, 1957 · Montgomery, Alabama

Willie Edwards Jr., a truck driver, was on his way to work when he was stopped by four Klansmen. The men mistook Edwards for another man who they believed was dating a white woman. They forced Edwards at gunpoint to jump off a bridge into the Alabama River. Edwards' body was found three months later.

1959

April 25, 1959 · Poplarville, Mississippi

Mack Charles Parker, 23, was accused of raping a white woman. Three days before his case was set for trial, a masked mob took him from his jail cell, beat him, shot him and threw him in the Pearl River.

1961

September 25, 1961 · Liberty, Mississippi

Herbert Lee, who worked with civil rights leader Bob Moses to help register black voters, was killed by a state legislator who claimed self-defense and was never arrested. Louis Allen, a black man who witnessed the murder, was later also killed.

1962

April 9, 1962 · Taylorsville, Mississippi

Cpl. Roman Ducksworth Jr., a military police officer stationed in Maryland, was on leave to visit his sick wife when he was ordered off a bus by a police officer and shot dead. The police officer may have mistaken Ducksworth for a "freedom rider" who was testing bus desegregation laws.

September 30, 1962 · Oxford, Mississippi

Paul Guihard, a reporter for a French news service, was killed by gunfire from a white mob during protests over the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi.

1963

April 23, 1963 · Attalla, Alabama

William Lewis Moore, a postman from Baltimore, was shot and killed during a one-man march against segregation. Moore had planned to deliver a letter to the governor of Mississippi urging an end to intolerance.

June 12, 1963 · Jackson, Mississippi

Medgar Evers, who directed NAACP operations in Mississippi, was leading a campaign for integration in Jackson when he was shot and killed by a sniper at his home.

September 15, 1963 · Birmingham, Alabama

Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley were getting ready for church services when a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing all four of the school-age girls. The church had been a center for civil rights meetings and marches.

September 15, 1963 · Birmingham, Alabama

Virgil Lamar Ware, 13, was riding on the handlebars of his brother's bicycle when he was fatally shot by white teenagers. The white youths had come from a segregationist rally held in the aftermath of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.

1964

January 31, 1964 · Liberty, Mississippi

Louis Allen, who witnessed the murder of civil rights worker Herbert Lee, endured years of threats, jailings and harassment. He was making final arrangements to move north on the day he was killed.

March 23, 1964 · Jacksonville, Florida

Johnnie Mae Chappell was murdered as she walked along a roadside. Her killers were white men looking for a black person to shoot following a day of racial unrest. (photograph unavailable)

April 7, 1964 · Cleveland, Ohio

Rev. Bruce Klunder was among civil rights activists who protested the building of a segregated school by placing their bodies in the way of construction equipment. Klunder was crushed to death when a bulldozer backed over him.

May 2, 1964 · Meadville, Mississippi

Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore were killed by Klansmen who believed the two were part of a plot to arm blacks in the area. (There was no such plot.) Their bodies were found during a massive search for the missing civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner.

June 21, 1964 · Philadelphia, Mississippi

James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Henry Schwerner, young civil rights workers, were arrested by a deputy sheriff and then released into the hands of Klansmen who had plotted their murders. They were shot, and their bodies were buried in an earthen dam.

July 11, 1964 · Colbert, Georgia

Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, a Washington, D.C., educator, was driving home from U.S. Army Reserves training when he was shot and killed by Klansmen in a passing car.

1965

February 26, 1965 · Marion, Alabama

Jimmie Lee Jackson was beaten and shot by state troopers as he tried to protect his grandfather and mother from a trooper attack on civil rights marchers. His death led to the Selma-Montgomery march and the eventual passage of the Voting Rights Act.

March 11, 1965 · Selma, Alabama

Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, was among many white clergymen who joined the Selma marchers after the attack by state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Reeb was beaten to death by white men while he walked down a Selma street.

March 25, 1965 · Selma Highway, Alabama

Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a housewife and mother from Detroit, drove alone to Alabama to help with the Selma march after seeing televised reports of the attack at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. She was ferrying marchers between Selma and Montgomery when she was shot and killed by a Klansmen in a passing car.

June 2, 1965 · Bogalusa, Louisiana

Oneal Moore was one of two black deputies hired by white officials in an attempt to appease civil rights demands. Moore and his partner, Creed Rogers, were on patrol when they were blasted with gunfire from a passing car. Moore was killed and Rogers was wounded.

July 18, 1965 · Anniston, Alabama

Willie Brewster was on his way home from work when he was shot and killed by white men. The men belonged to the National States Rights Party, a violent neo-Nazi group whose members had been involved in church bombings and murders of blacks.

August 20, 1965 · Hayneville, Alabama

Jonathan Myrick Daniels, an Episcopal Seminary student in Boston, had come to Alabama to help with black voter registration in Lowndes County. He was arrested at a demonstration, jailed in Hayneville and then suddenly released. Moments after his release, he was shot to death by a deputy sheriff.

1966

January 3, 1966 · Tuskegee, Alabama

Samuel Leamon Younge Jr., a student civil rights activist, was fatally shot by a white gas station owner following an argument over segregated restrooms.

January 10, 1966 · Hattiesburg, Mississippi

Vernon Ferdinand Dahmer, a wealthy businessman, offered to pay poll taxes for those who couldn't afford the fee required to vote. The night after a radio station broadcasted Dahmer's offer, his home was firebombed. Dahmer died later from severe burns.

June 10, 1966 · Natchez, Mississippi

Ben Chester White, who had worked most of his life as a caretaker on a plantation, had no involvement in civil rights work. He was murdered by Klansmen who thought they could divert attention from a civil rights march by killing a black person.

July 30, 1966 · Bogalusa, Louisiana

Clarence Triggs was a bricklayer who had attended civil rights meetings sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality. He was found dead on a roadside, shot through the head. (photograph unavailable)

1967

February 27, 1967 · Natchez, Mississippi

Wharlest Jackson, the treasurer of his local NAACP chapter, was one of many blacks who received threatening Klan notices at his job. After Jackson was promoted to a position previously reserved for whites, a bomb was planted in his car. It exploded minutes after he left work one day, killing him instantly.

May 12, 1967 · Jackson, Mississippi

Benjamin Brown, a former civil rights organizer, was watching a student protest from the sidelines when he was hit by stray gunshots from police who fired into the crowd.

1968

February 8, 1968 · Orangeburg, South Carolina

Samuel Ephesians Hammond Jr., Delano Herman Middleton and Henry Ezekial Smith were shot and killed by police who fired on student demonstrators at the South Carolina State College campus.

April 4, 1968 · Memphis, Tennessee

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister, was a major architect of the Civil Rights Movement. He led and inspired major non-violent desegregation campaigns, including those in Montgomery and Birmingham. He won the Nobel peace prize. He was assassinated as he prepared to lead a demonstration in Memphis.

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On the Civil Rights Memorial are inscribed the names of individuals who lost their lives in the struggle for freedom during the modern Civil Rights Movement - 1954 to 1968. The martyrs include activists who were targeted for death because of their civil rights work; random victims of vigilantes determined to halt the movement; and individuals who, in the sacrifice of their own lives, brought new awareness to the struggle.

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The civil rights movement in the American South was one of the most significant and successful social movements in the modern world. Black Georgians formed part of this southern movement for full civil rights and the wider national struggle for racial equality. From Atlanta to the most rural counties in Georgia's southwest Cotton Belt, black activists protested white supremacy in myriad ways-from legal challenges and mass demonstrations to strikes and self-defense. In many ways, the results were remarkable. As late as World War II (1941-45) black Georgians were effectively denied the vote, segregated in most areas of daily life, and subject to persistent discrimination and often violence. But by 1965, sweeping federal civil rights legislation prohibited segregation and discrimination, and this new phase of race relations was first officially welcomed into Georgia by Governor Jimmy Carter in 1971.

Although the southern civil rights movement first hit the national headlines in the 1950s and 1960s, the struggle for racial equality in America had begun long before. Indeed, resistance to institutionalized white supremacy dates back to the formal establishment of segregation in the late nineteenth century. Community leaders in Savannah and Atlanta protested the segregation of public transport at the turn of the century, and individual and community acts of resistance to white domination abounded across the state even during the height of lynching and repression. Atlanta washerwomen, for example, joined together to strike for better pay, and black homes often contained guns to fight off the Ku Klux Klan.

Around the turn of the century political leader and African Methodist Episcopal bishop Henry McNeal Turner was an avid supporter of back-to-Africa programs. Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement in the 1920s gained support among Georgia African Americans, as did other national organizations later, such as the Communist Party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Meanwhile, black Georgians established schools, churches, and social institutions within their separate communities as bulwarks against everyday racism and discrimination.

The 1940s marked a major change in Georgia's civil rights struggle. The New Deal and World War II precipitated major economic changes in the state, hastening urbanization, industrialization, and the decline of the power of the planter elite. Emboldened by their experience in the army, black veterans confronted white supremacy, and riots were common on Georgia's army bases. Furthermore, the political tumult of the World War II era, as the nation fought for democracy in Europe, presented an ideal opportunity for African American leaders to press for racial change in the South. As some black leaders pointed out, the notorious German leader Adolf Hitler gave racism a bad name.

African Americans across Georgia seized the opportunity. In 1944 Thomas Brewer, a medical doctor in Columbus, planned an attempt to vote in the July 4, 1944, Democratic primary. Primus King, whom Brewer recruited to actually attempt the vote, was turned away from the ballot box. Several other African American men were turned away at the door. The following year a legal challenge ( King v. Chapman et al.) to the Democratic Party's ruling that only white men could vote in the Democratic primary was successful. The decision was upheld in 1946. In response, black registration across the state rose from a negligible number to some 125,000 within a few months-by far the highest registration total in any southern state. In the larger cities, notably Atlanta, Macon, and Savannah, local black leaders used their voting power to elect more moderate officials, forcing concessions such as the appointment of black police and higher spending for black schools. Under the charismatic leadership of the Reverend Ralph Mark Gilbert from Savannah, the NAACP grew to more than fifty branches by 1946.

At a state level, black leaders confidently sought to prevent the notorious white supremacist Eugene Talmadge from being elected governor for the fourth time. In his campaign speeches, Talmadge asserted that "the election tomorrow is a question of white supremacy." Talmadge won the 1946 election through a combination of violence, fraud, and the vagaries of Georgia's county unit election system. In the weeks leading up to the Democratic primary, his supporters had systematically challenged the qualifications of black voters and purged them from electoral rolls.

In the primary, moderate Democrat James V. Carmichael, supported by Governor Ellis Arnall (who had previously defeated Talmadge and was prevented by the state constitution from a succeeding term), won the popular vote over Talmadge by 313,389 to 297,245 votes. Owing to the county unit system that gave disproportionate power to rural voters, and which would be abolished by the federal courts in 1963, however, Talmadge secured victory by winning the county unit vote 242 to 146. But Talmadge died before he could take office. The resulting " three governors controversy" led to his son, Herman Talmadge, who had not even run for the office, being selected governor by the state legislature.

Herman Talmadge's victory ushered in a resurgence of white supremacy. Time magazine quoted a Georgia voter who said, "Pore ol' Georgia-first Sherman, then Herman." Segregation was tightened up in the statute book, state officials sought to outlaw the NAACP, and vigilantes targeted local black leaders. Gilbert, despairing over the collapse of the state network of black protesters, resigned from the leadership of the NAACP. Brewer, who had received death threats from a local Klan member, was assassinated on a Columbus street in 1956 by an unknown assailant, and the group he had founded to oppose white supremacy disbanded.

During the ensuing decade, defenders of white supremacy powerfully interlinked their attack on black insurgency with the more general fear of communism. Organized black protest continued on a significant scale only in Atlanta, Macon, and Savannah, which became relative oases of moderate race relations in the state. Yet even there, strict segregation continued and violent assaults on black residents were frequent.

The segregation of public schools in Georgia and other southern states was declared unconstitutional in 1954 with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Many white Georgians resisted integration and advocated closing schools rather than abiding by the court's decision. In 1960 Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver Jr. formed a special committee chaired by Atlanta attorney John A. Sibley to conduct public hearings on the issue. The committee, known as the Sibley Commission, ultimately recommended local option on the matter.

Of all Georgia's cities, Albany garnered the most national headlines because of the involvement of Martin Luther King Jr. in a mass protest campaign during 1961-62, called the Albany Movement. King's presence certainly bolstered the scale of the existing protests, with up to 1,200 black residents spending time in jail (sources on the mass jailing numbers vary, from 750 to 1,200). However, divisions among protest leaders (King's brief presence was resented by some student activists), tactical mistakes, the machinations of local police chief Laurie Pritchett, and the stubborn defense of white supremacy meant that the campaign was unable to force a citywide desegregation agreement in the short term. It was King's worst setback in the South, although in Albany itself residents and student volunteers continued to press for racial equality, with some success, long after King had moved on.

In Savannah, a united, widespread, and unremitting campaign led by W. W. Law, head of the local NAACP, forced city leaders to agree to desegregate public and private facilities from October 1, 1963, some eight months ahead of federal civil rights legislation. In his 1964 New Year's Day address, Martin Luther King Jr. described Savannah "as the most desegregated city south of the Mason-Dixon line." Law himself was fired from his job as a postman during the height of the crisis but was reinstated when the trumped-up nature of his charges became a national scandal. Georgia's other notably successful movements were in Brunswick, Macon, and Rome, where black leaders often used the threat of heightened protest to force anxious city governments to take the lead in avoiding social unrest.

Protesters in Augusta also faced insurmountable, often violent, supremacist opposition, and black leaders in Columbus, still reeling from the murder of Thomas Brewer, were reluctant to launch a major campaign.

Protest away from the major cities, however, was comparatively faltering and sporadic. Some black leaders commented ruefully that the civil rights movement stopped in Perry, a small town to the south of Atlanta. The tradition of supremacist control and violence coupled with black poverty and economic dependence countered any prospect of widespread organized protest.

Counties like "Terrible" Terrell and "Bad" Baker in southwest Georgia were notorious for the violent supremacist antics of local police. Under the leadership of Charles Sherrod, a young black preacher from Virginia, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) targeted Georgia's notorious southwest Black Belt region in an attempt to overturn the worst vestiges of rural white supremacy. "Our criterion for success is not how many people we register" to vote, Sherrod explained. "We feel that we are in a psychological battle for the minds of the enslaved."

Seeking to build up local leaders, SNCC volunteers lived in the Black Belt, far away from the attention of journalists covering the civil rights movement. Many were shot, and student leaders in Americus were charged with insurrection in 1963-a crime that carried the death penalty. Although they were ultimately released, the ferocity and economic strength of white supremacists meant that SNCC's work was by necessity piecemeal and long term-indeed some of the volunteers, including Sherrod, made the region their permanent home.

More generally, the federal civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 ushered in a new phase in Georgia's struggle for racial equality. In many small towns, protests to force integration began only after 1965, and often many years later.

In her book Praying for Sheetrock Melissa Fay Greene describes how in McIntosh County in the early 1970s, "the epic of the civil rights movement was still a fabulous tale about distant places to the black people of McIntosh." Sheriff Thomas Poppell controlled the county through a "system of favoritism, nepotism, and paternalism" and manipulated the black vote to stay in office. It was not until one Friday afternoon in 1972, when Darien's police chief shot and seriously wounded a black garbage worker for disturbing the peace by drinking and arguing with his girlfriend, that the black community in McIntosh County finally got involved in the fight for civil rights.

In politics, civil rights leaders sought to effectively mobilize black voters and also oppose the gerrymandering of political districts that decreased the power of the black vote. By 1980 black Georgians still represented less than 10 percent of the total number of elected officials in the state, although notable successes included the elections of Andrew Young to the U.S. Congress in 1972 from a majority-white district, and Maynard Jackson as Atlanta's first black mayor in 1973. Young was the first black congressman from Georgia since Reconstruction.

Herman Talmadge lost his campaign for reelection to the Senate in 1980-a result that Jackson claimed showed the importance of the black electorate: "You cannot spit in our eye and tell us it's raining." Talmadge's defeat, however, was probably due more to bad publicity generated by problems in his personal life.

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The civil rights movement in the American South was one of the most significant and successful social movements in the modern world. Black Georgians formed part of this southern movement for full civil rights and the wider national struggle for racial equality.

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also includes Civil Rights Info

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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries using

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We Shall Overcome -- The Need for Change

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background to the novel

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Overview

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is the rare American novel that can be discovered with excitement in adolescence and reread into adulthood without fear of disappointment. Few novels so appealingly evoke the daily world of childhood in a way that seems convincing whether you are 16 or 66.

Introduction to the Book

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird begins at the end. The novel opens with the adult Jean Louise "Scout" Finch writing, "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." By the time Jem finally gets around to breaking his arm more than 250 pages later most readers will have forgotten they were ever warned. This echoes the way the whole book unfolds-in no special hurry, with lifelike indirection. Nothing happens all by itself. The book's two plots inch forward along parallel tracks, only converging near the end.

The first plot revolves around Arthur "Boo" Radley, who lives in a shuttered house down the street from the Finches and is rumored to be some kind of monster. Scout, Jem, and their next-door neighbor Dill engage in pranks, trying to make Boo show himself. Unexpectedly, Boo reciprocates their interest with a series of small gifts, until he ultimately steps off his porch and into their lives when they need him most.

The second story concerns Scout and Jem's father, the attorney Atticus Finch. The local judge appoints him to defend a black man, Tom Robinson, who is falsely accused of raping a white woman. Atticus suspects he will lose the case, but he faces up to the challenge just the same, at one point heroically stepping between his client and a lynch mob.

Along with its twin plot lines, To Kill a Mockingbird has two broad themes: tolerance and justice. Lee treats the first through the children's fear of their mysterious neighbor. She illustrates the second with Atticus's courage in defending Robinson to the best of his ability, despite the racial prejudices of their small Southern town.

Tying the stories together is a simple but profound piece of advice Atticus gives Scout: "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." By the end of the novel, Scout has done exactly that-guessed at the pain not only beneath Tom Robinson's skin, but also under that of her neighbor.

How the Novel Came to Be Written

Any claims for To Kill a Mockingbird as a book that changed history could not have seemed more far-fetched one winter night in 1958, as Nelle Harper Lee huddled in her outer-borough New York apartment trying to finesse her unruly, episodic manuscript into some semblance of a cohesive novel. All but drowning in multiple drafts of the same material, Lee suddenly threw open a window and scattered five years of work onto the dirty snow below.

Did Lee really intend to destroy To Kill a Mockingbird? We'll never know. Fortunately, in the next moment, she called her editor. J.B. Lippincott's formidable Tay Hohoff promptly sent her outside to gather all the pages back-thus rescuing To Kill a Mockingbird from the slush.

The novel had its origins in Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama-the small, Southern town that the fictional Maycomb is based upon. Her father's unsuccessful defense of a black man and his son accused of murder, in addition to the Scottsboro Boys trials and another notorious interracial rape case, helped to shape Lee's budding social conscience and sense of a dramatic story.

Along with his legal practice, Lee's father published and edited the town newspaper. His regard for the written word impacted Lee's sensibility as surely as his respect for the law. Lee would name her idealized vision of her father after Titus Pomponius Atticus, a friend of the Roman orator Cicero renowned as, according to Lee, "a wise, learned and humane man." For a long time, Lee called her work in progress Atticus. Once she fastened on To Kill a Mockingbird she did not look back.

An early version of the novel, titled Go Set a Watchman, featured Scout as an adult returning to Maycomb. Lee's editor, Tay Hohoff, asked her to rewrite the story from a child's perspective, which she did. Until recently, the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman was believed lost. It was discovered decades later and published by HarperCollins in July 2015.

Lippincott finally published To Kill a Mockingbird on July 11, 1960, by which time an unprecedented four national mail-order book clubs had already selected it for their readers. The first line of the Washington Post's review echoed many similar notices that praised the novel for its moral impact: "A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird."

Eighty weeks later, the novel still perched on the hardcover bestseller list. During that time, it had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the hearts of American readers. One can't help wondering how literary history might have been different had Harper Lee thrown her manuscript out the window on a slightly windier night.

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Overview Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is the rare American novel that can be discovered with excitement in adolescence and reread into adulthood without fear of disappointment. Few novels so appealingly evoke the daily world of childhood in a way that seems convincing whether you are 16 or 66.

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Documenting the American South: Oral Histories of the American South

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Doctors, lawyers, academics, mill workers, maids, and mothers share their recollections of life and work in the interviews collected here. Many of the women in these interviews were professional or political trailblazers, women who succeeded in male-dominated workplaces or became leaders in civil rights movements. Many were both.

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The First Scottsboro Boys Trials, as reported by Hollace Ransdell

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Agriculture, Industry and development

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Economic Development in the 1930s: Balance Agriculture with Industry | Mississippi History Now

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Historians of southern industrialization view the legacy of BAWI as mixed. The determination to balance agriculture with industry, and not simply invite industrial development for short-term gains, represented a transformation of the state's economic outlook. Nevertheless, the unwillingness to protect workers and invest in new innovative industries perpetuated low-wage, unskilled, no-benefits employment.

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Southern USA

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The Southern United States (sometimes Dixie, also referred to as the Southern States, the American South, the Southland, or simply the South) is a geographic and cultural region of the United States of America. It is between the Atlantic Ocean and the Western United States, with the Midwestern and Northeastern United States to its north and the Gulf of Mexico and Mexico to its south.

Historically, the South was defined as all states south of the 18th century Mason-Dixon line, the Ohio River, and 36°30′ parallel. Within the South are different subregions, such as the Southeast, South Central, Upper South and Deep South. Due to an influx of Northern transplants since the mid-to-late 20th century, Maryland, Delaware, Northern Virginia, and Washington, D.C. have become more culturally, economically, and politically aligned in certain aspects with that of the Northeastern United States, and are often identified as part of the Mid-Atlantic subregion or Northeast by many residents, businesses, public institutions, and private organizations. However, the United States Census Bureau continues to define them as in the South with regard to Census regions. Due to cultural variations across the region, some scholars have proposed definitions of the South that do not coincide neatly with state boundaries. The South does not precisely correspond to the entire geographic south of the United States, but primarily includes the south-central and southeastern states. For example, California, which is geographically in the southwestern part of the country, is not considered part of the South. However, the geographically southeastern state of Georgia is.

Aspects of the historical and cultural development of the South were influenced by the institution of slave labor, especially in the Deep South and coastal plain areas, from the early 1600s to mid-1800s. This includes the presence of a large proportion of African Americans within the population, support for the doctrine of states' rights, and legacy of racism magnified by the Civil War and Reconstruction era (1865-1877). Following effects included thousands of lynchings (mostly from 1880 to 1930), a segregated system of separate schools and public facilities established from Jim Crow laws that remained until the 1960s, and the widespread use of poll taxes and other methods to deny black and poor people the ability to vote or hold office until the 1960s. Scholars have characterized pockets of the Southern United States as being authoritarian enclaves from Reconstruction until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Since the 1970s, with improved racial relations, a growing economic base and job opportunities in the region, the South has seen increases of African Americans moving back from other U.S. regions in a New Great Migration.

When looked at broadly, studies have shown that Southerners tend to be more conservative than most non-Southerners, with liberalism being mostly predominant in places with a Black majority or urban areas in the South. The South usually elects Republicans in most states, but both the Republican and Democratic Party are competitive in certain Southern swing states. The region contains almost all of the Bible Belt, an area of high Protestant church attendance, especially evangelical churches such as the Southern Baptist Convention. Historically, the South relied heavily on agriculture as its main economic base, and was predominantly rural until after World War II. Since the 1940s, the region has become more economically diversified and metropolitan, helping attract both national and international migrants. In the 21st century, it is the fastest-growing region in the United States, with Houston being the region's largest city.

The question of how to define the boundaries and subregions in the South has been the focus of research and debate for centuries. As defined by the United States Census Bureau, the Southern region of the United States includes sixteen states. As of 2010, an estimated 114,555,744 people, or thirty seven percent of all U.S. residents, lived in the South, the nation's most populous region. The Census Bureau defined three smaller divisions:

The Council of State Governments, an organization for communication and coordination between states, includes in its South regional office the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia.

Other terms related to the South include:

The Old South: Can mean either southern states that were among the Thirteen Colonies (Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina) or all southern slave states before 1860 (which also includes Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas).

The New South: All southern states following the American Civil War, post Reconstruction era.

Southeastern United States: Usually includes the Carolinas, the Virginias, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida.

Southern Appalachia: Mainly refers to areas situated in the southern Appalachian Mountains, namely Eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Western Maryland, West Virginia, Southwest Virginia, North Georgia and Northwestern South Carolina.

Upper South: Usually includes Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and on rare occasions Missouri, Maryland and Delaware. When combined with the southern Appalachian Mountains, it is sometimes referred to as "Greater Appalachia" following Ulster Protestant migrations to the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Various definitions, usually includes Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina.

Border States: Includes Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia. These were slave states on or near the border of the Confederacy that did not secede from the U.S. in the 1860s. Large numbers of residents who joined both the Union and Confederate armed forces. Kentucky and Missouri had Confederate governments-in-exile and were represented in the Confederate Congress and by stars on the Confederate battle flag. West Virginia formed in 1863, after the western region of Virginia broke away to protest the Old Dominion's joining of the Confederacy, but residents of the new state were about evenly divided on supporting the Union or Confederacy.

Dixie: Nickname applied to Southern U.S. region, various definitions include certain areas more than others, but most commonly associated with the eleven former Confederate States.

Solid South: Electoral voting bloc largely controlled by the Democratic Party from 1877 to 1964, largely resulting from disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction era in the late 19th century. Disfranchisement effectively denied most of the black and sometimes poor white population from voting or holding public office during this time period.

Includes Gulf coasts of Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama.

Low-lying Atlantic coastal plain regions of Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina.

Various definitions, includes states within the Census Bureau of the East and West South Central United States. In another informal definition, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi are included, with adjoining areas of other states.

Historically, the South was defined as all states south of the 18th century Mason-Dixon line, the Ohio River, and 36°30′ parallel. Newer definitions of the South today are harder to define, due to cultural and sub-regional differences throughout the region, however definitions usually refer to states that are in the southeastern and south central geographic region of the United States.

Although not included in the Census definition, two U.S. territories located southeast of Florida ( Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands) are sometimes included as part of the Southern United States. The Federal Aviation Administration includes Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands as part of the South, as does the Agricultural Research Service and the U.S. National Park Service.

The first well-dated evidence of human occupation in the south United States occurs around 9500 BC with the appearance of the earliest documented Americans, who are now referred to as Paleo-Indians. Paleoindians were hunter-gatherers that roamed in bands and frequently hunted megafauna. Several cultural stages, such as Archaic ( c. 8000-1000 BC) and the Woodland ( c. 1000 BC - AD 1000), preceded what the Europeans found at the end of the 15th century - the Mississippian culture.

The Mississippian culture was a complex, mound-building Native American culture that flourished in what is now the Southeastern United States from approximately 800 AD to 1500 AD. Natives had elaborate and lengthy trading routes connecting their main residential and ceremonial centers extending through the river valleys and from the East Coast to the Great Lakes. Some noted explorers who encountered and described the Mississippian culture, by then in decline, included Pánfilo de Narváez (1528), Hernando de Soto (1540), and Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville (1699).

Native American descendants of the mound-builders include Alabama, Apalachee, Caddo, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Guale, Hitchiti, Houma, and Seminole peoples, all of whom still reside in the South.

Other peoples whose ancestral links to the Mississippian culture are less clear but were clearly in the region before the European incursion include the Catawba and the Powhatan.

European immigration caused a die-off of Native Americans, whose immune systems could not protect them from the diseases the Europeans unwittingly introduced.

The predominant culture of the original Southern states was English. In the 17th century, most voluntary immigrants were of English origin, and settled chiefly along the eastern coast but had pushed as far inland as the Appalachian Mountains by the 18th century. The majority of early English settlers were indentured servants, who gained freedom after working off their passage. The wealthier men who paid their way received land grants known as headrights, to encourage settlement.

The Spanish and French established settlements in Florida, Texas, and Louisiana. The Spanish settled Florida in the 16th century, reaching a peak in the late 17th century, but the population was small because the Spaniards were relatively uninterested in agriculture, and Florida had no mineral resources.

In the British colonies, immigration began in 1607 and continued until the outbreak of the Revolution in 1775. Settlers cleared land, built houses and outbuildings, and on their own farms. The Southern rich owned large plantations that dominated export agriculture and used slaves. Many were involved in the labor-intensive cultivation of tobacco, the first cash crop of Virginia. Tobacco exhausted the soil quickly, requiring that farmers regularly clear new fields. They used old fields as pasture, and for crops such as corn wheat, or allowed them to grow into woodlots.

In the mid-to-late-18th century, large groups of Ulster Scots (later called the Scotch-Irish) and people from the Anglo-Scottish border region immigrated and settled in the back country of Appalachia and the Piedmont. They were the largest group of non-English immigrants from the British Isles before the American Revolution. In the 1980 Census, 34% of Southerners reported that they were of English ancestry; English was the largest reported European ancestry in every Southern state by a large margin.

The early colonists engaged in warfare, trade, and cultural exchanges. Those living in the backcountry were more likely to encounter Creek Indians, Cherokee, and Choctaws and other regional native groups.

During the American Revolutionary War, the Southern colonies helped embrace the Patriot cause. Virginia would provide leaders such as commander-in-chief George Washington, and the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson.

In 1780 and 1781, the British largely halted reconquest of the northern states, and concentrated on the south, where they were told there was a large Loyalist population ready to leap to arms once the royal forces arrived. The British took control of Savannah and Charleston, capturing a large American army in the process, and set up a network of bases inland. Although there were Loyalists within the Southern colonies, they were concentrated in larger coastal cities, and were not great enough in number to overcome the revolutionaries. The British forces at the Battle of Monck's Corner and the Battle of Lenud's Ferry consisted entirely of Loyalists with the exception of the commanding officer ( Banastre Tarleton). Both white and black Loyalists fought for the British at the Battle of Kemp's Landing in Virginia. Led by Nathanael Greene and other generals, the Americans engaged in Fabian tactics designed to wear down the British invasion force, and to neutralize its strong points one by one. There were numerous battles large and small, with each side claiming some victories.

By 1781, however, British General Cornwallis moved north to Virginia, where an approaching army forced him to fortify and await rescue by the British Navy. The British Navy did arrive, but so did a stronger French fleet, and Cornwallis was trapped. American and French armies, led by George Washington, forced Cornwallis to surrender his entire army in Yorktown, Virginia in October 1781, effectively winning the North American part of the war.

The Revolution provided a shock to slavery in the South and other regions of the new country. Thousands of slaves took advantage of wartime disruption to find their own freedom, catalyzed by the British Governor Dunmore of Virginia's promise of freedom for service. Many others were removed by Loyalist owners and became slaves elsewhere in the British Empire. Between 1770 and 1790, there was a sharp decline in the percentage of blacks - from 61% to 44% in South Carolina and from 45% to 36% in Georgia. In addition, some slaveholders were inspired to free their slaves after the Revolution. They were moved by the principles of the Revolution, along with Quaker and Methodist preachers who worked to encourage slaveholders to free their slaves. Planters such as George Washington often freed slaves by their wills. In the Upper South, more than 10% of all blacks were free by 1810, a significant expansion from pre-war proportions of less than 1% free.

Cotton became dominant in the lower South after 1800. After the invention of the cotton gin, short staple cotton could be grown more widely. This led to an explosion of cotton cultivation, especially in the frontier uplands of Georgia, Alabama and other parts of the Deep South, as well as riverfront areas of the Mississippi Delta. Migrants poured into those areas in the early decades of the 19th century, when county population figures rose and fell as swells of people kept moving west. The expansion of cotton cultivation required more slave labor, and the institution became even more deeply an integral part of the South's economy.

With the opening up of frontier lands after the government forced most Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi, there was a major migration of both whites and blacks to those territories. From the 1820s through the 1850s, more than one million enslaved Africans were transported to the Deep South in forced migration, two-thirds of them by slave traders and the others by masters who moved there. Planters in the Upper South sold slaves excess to their needs as they shifted from tobacco to mixed agriculture. Many enslaved families were broken up, as planters preferred mostly strong males for field work.

Two major political issues that festered in the first half of the 19th century caused political alignment along sectional lines, strengthened the identities of North and South as distinct regions with certain strongly opposed interests, and fed the arguments over states' rights that culminated in secession and the Civil War. One of these issues concerned the protective tariffs enacted to assist the growth of the manufacturing sector, primarily in the North. In 1832, in resistance to federal legislation increasing tariffs, South Carolina passed an ordinance of nullification, a procedure in which a state would, in effect, repeal a Federal law. Soon a naval flotilla was sent to Charleston harbor, and the threat of landing ground troops was used to compel the collection of tariffs. A compromise was reached by which the tariffs would be gradually reduced, but the underlying argument over states' rights continued to escalate in the following decades.

The second issue concerned slavery, primarily the question of whether slavery would be permitted in newly admitted states. The issue was initially finessed by political compromises designed to balance the number of "free" and "slave" states. The issue resurfaced in more virulent form, however, around the time of the Mexican-American War, which raised the stakes by adding new territories primarily on the Southern side of the imaginary geographic divide. Congress opposed allowing slavery in these territories.

Before the Civil War, the number of immigrants arriving at Southern ports began to increase, although the North continued to receive the most immigrants. Huguenots were among the first settlers in Charleston, along with the largest number of Orthodox Jews outside of New York City.[citation needed ] Numerous Irish immigrants settled in New Orleans, establishing a distinct ethnic enclave now known as the Irish Channel. Germans also went to New Orleans and its environs, resulting in a large area north of the city (along the Mississippi) becoming known as the German Coast. Still greater numbers immigrated to Texas (especially after 1848), where many bought land and were farmers. Many more German immigrants arrived in Texas after the Civil War, where they created the brewing industry in Houston and elsewhere, became grocers in numerous cities, and also established wide areas of farming.

By 1840, New Orleans was the wealthiest city in the country and the third largest in population. The success of the city was based on the growth of international trade associated with products being shipped to and from the interior of the country down the Mississippi River. New Orleans also had the largest slave market in the country, as traders brought slaves by ship and overland to sell to planters across the Deep South. The city was a cosmopolitan port with a variety of jobs that attracted more immigrants than other areas of the South. Because of lack of investment, however, construction of railroads to span the region lagged behind the North. People relied most heavily on river traffic for getting their crops to market and for transportation.

By 1856, the South had lost control of Congress, and was no longer able to silence calls for an end to slavery - which came mostly from the more populated, free states of the North. The Republican Party, founded in 1854, pledged to stop the spread of slavery beyond those states where it already existed. After Abraham Lincoln was elected the first Republican president in 1860, seven cotton states declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America before Lincoln was inaugurated. The United States government, both outgoing and incoming, refused to recognize the Confederacy, and when the new Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered his troops to open fire on Fort Sumter in April 1861, war broke out. Only the state of Kentucky attempted to remain neutral, and it could only do so briefly. When Lincoln called for troops to suppress what he referred to as "combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary" judicial or martial means, four more states decided to secede and join the Confederacy (which then moved its capital to Richmond, Virginia). Although the Confederacy had large supplies of captured munitions and many volunteers, it was slower than the Union in dealing with the border states. While the Upland border states of Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, as well as the District of Columbia, continued to permit slavery during the Civil War, they remained with the Union. By March 1862, the Union largely controlled all the border state areas, had shut down all commercial traffic from all Confederate ports, had prevented European recognition of the Confederate government, and was poised to seize New Orleans. The rugged mountainous East Tennessee region attempted to rejoin the Union as a new state, having opposed succession and slavery compared to most of Tennessee.

In the four years of war 1861-65 the South was the primary battleground, with all but two of the major battles taking place on Southern soil. Union forces led numerous campaigns into the western Confederacy, controlling the border states in 1861, the Tennessee River, the Cumberland River and New Orleans in 1862, and the Mississippi River in 1863. In the East, however, the Confederate Army under Robert E. Lee beat off attack after attack in its defense of their capital at Richmond. But when Lee tried to move north, he was repulsed (and nearly captured) at Sharpsburg (1862) and Gettysburg (1863).

The Confederacy had the resources for a short war, but was unable to finance or supply a longer war. It reversed the traditional low-tariff policy of the South by imposing a new 15% tax on all imports from the Union. The Union blockade stopped most commerce from entering the South, and smugglers avoided the tax, so the Confederate tariff produced too little revenue to finance the war. Inflated currency was the solution, but that created distrust of the Richmond government. Because of low investment in railroads, the Southern transportation system depended primarily on river and coastal traffic by boat; both were shut down by the Union Navy. The small railroad system virtually collapsed, so that by 1864 internal travel was so difficult that the Confederate economy was crippled.

The Confederate cause was hopeless by the time Atlanta fell and William T. Sherman marched through Georgia in late 1864, but the rebels fought on until Lee's army surrendered in April 1865. Once the Confederate forces surrendered, the region moved into the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877), in a partially successful attempt to rebuild the destroyed region and grant civil rights to freed slaves.

Southerners who were against the Confederate cause during the Civil War were known as Southern Unionists. They were also known as Union Loyalists or Lincoln's Loyalists. Within the eleven Confederate states, states such as Tennessee (especially East Tennessee), Virginia (which included West Virginia at the time), and North Carolina were home to the largest populations of Unionists. Many areas of Southern Appalachia harbored pro-Union sentiment as well. As many as 100,000 men living in states under Confederate control would serve in the Union Army or pro-Union guerilla groups. Although Southern Unionists came from all classes, most differed socially, culturally, and economically from the regions dominant pre-war planter class.

The South suffered more than the North overall, as the Union strategy of attrition warfare meant that Lee could not replace his casualties, and the total war waged by Sherman, Sheridan and other Union armies devastated the infrastructure and caused widespread poverty and distress. The Confederacy suffered military losses of 95,000 soldiers killed in action and 165,000 who died of disease, for a total of 260,000, out of a total white Southern population at the time of around 5.5 million. Based on 1860 census figures, 8% of all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6% in the North and about 18% in the South. Northern military deaths were greater than Southern military deaths in absolute numbers, but were two-thirds smaller in terms of proportion of the population affected.

After the Civil War, the South was devastated in terms of infrastructure and economy. Because of states' reluctance to grant voting rights to freedmen, Congress instituted Reconstruction governments. It established military districts and governors to rule over the South until new governments could be established. Many white Southerners who had actively supported the Confederacy were temporarily disenfranchised. Rebuilding was difficult as people grappled with the effects of a new labor economy of a free market in the midst of a widespread agricultural depression. In addition, limited infrastructure the South had was mostly destroyed by the war. At the same time, the North was rapidly industrializing. To avoid the social effects of the war, most of the Southern states initially passed black codes. During Reconstruction, these were mostly legally nullified by federal law and anti-Confederate legislatures, which existed for a short time during Reconstruction.

There were thousands of people on the move, as African Americans tried to reunite families separated by slave sales, and sometimes migrated for better opportunities in towns or other states. Other freed people moved from plantation areas to cities or towns for a chance to get different jobs. At the same time, whites returned from refuges to reclaim plantations or town dwellings. In some areas, many whites returned to the land to farm for a while. Some freedpeople left the South altogether for states such as Ohio and Indiana, and later, Kansas. Thousands of others joined the migration to new opportunities in the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta bottomlands, and Texas.

With passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States (which outlawed slavery), the 14th Amendment (which granted full U.S. citizenship to African Americans) and the 15th amendment (which extended the right to vote to African American males), African Americans in the South were made free citizens and were given the right to vote. Under Federal protection, white and black Republicans formed constitutional conventions and state governments. Among their accomplishments were creating the first public education systems in Southern states, and providing for welfare through orphanages, hospitals and similar institutions.

Northerners came south to participate in politics and business. Some were representatives of the Freedmen's Bureau and other agencies of Reconstruction; some were humanitarians with the intent to help black people. Some were adventurers who hoped to benefit themselves by questionable methods. They were all condemned with the pejorative term of carpetbagger. Some Southerners would also take advantage of the disrupted environment and made money off various schemes, including bonds and financing for railroads. White southerners who supported Reconstruction policies and efforts became known as scalawag's.

Secret vigilante organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan - an organization sworn to perpetuate white supremacy - had arisen quickly after the war's end in the 1860s, and used lynching, physical attacks, house burnings and other forms of intimidation to keep African Americans from exercising their political rights. Although the first Klan was disrupted by prosecution by the Federal government in the early 1870s, other groups persisted. By the mid-to-late-1870s, some upper class Southerners created increasing resistance to the altered social structure. Paramilitary organizations such as the White League in Louisiana (1874), the Red Shirts in Mississippi (1875) and rifle clubs, all "White Line" organizations, used organized violence against Republicans, both black and white, to remove Republicans from political office, repress and bar black voting, and restore the Democratic Party to power. In 1876 white Democrats regained power in most of the state legislatures. They began to pass laws designed to strip African Americans and Poor Whites from the voter registration rolls. The success of late-19th century interracial coalitions in several states inspired a reaction among some white Democrats, who worked harder to prevent both groups from voting.

Despite discrimination, many blacks became property owners in areas that were still developing. For instance, 90% of the Mississippi's bottomlands were still frontier and undeveloped after the war. By the end of the century, two-thirds of the farmers in Mississippi's Delta bottomlands were black. They had cleared the land themselves and often made money in early years by selling off timber. Tens of thousands of migrants went to the Delta, both to work as laborers to clear timber for lumber companies, and many to develop their own farms. Nonetheless, the long agricultural depression, along with disenfranchisement and lack of access to credit, led to many blacks in the Delta losing their property by 1910 and becoming sharecroppers or landless workers over the following decade. More than two generations of free African Americans lost their stake in property.

Migrations continued in the late 19th and early 20th centuries among both blacks and whites. In the last two decades of the 19th century about 141,000 blacks left the South, and more after 1900, totaling a loss of 537,000. After that the movement increased in what became known as the Great Migration from 1910 to 1940, and the Second Great Migration through 1970. Even more whites left the South, some going to California for opportunities and others heading to Northern industrial cities after 1900. Between 1880 and 1910, the loss of whites totaled 1,243,000. Five million more left between 1940 and 1970.

From 1890 to 1908, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, along with Oklahoma upon statehood, passed disenfranchising constitutions or amendments that introduced voter registration barriers - such as poll taxes, residency requirements and literacy tests - that were hard for minorities to meet. Most African Americans, most Mexican Americans, and tens of thousands of poor whites were disenfranchised, losing the vote for decades. In some states, grandfather clauses temporarily exempted white illiterates from literacy tests. The numbers of voters dropped drastically throughout the former Confederacy as a result. This can be seen via the feature "Turnout in Presidential and Midterm Elections" at the University of Texas' Politics: Barriers to Voting. Alabama, which had established universal white suffrage in 1819 when it became a state, also substantially reduced voting by poor whites. Democrat-controlled legislatures passed Jim Crow laws to segregate public facilities and services, including transportation.

While African Americans, poor whites and civil rights groups started litigation against such provisions in the early 20th century, for decades Supreme Court decisions overturning such provisions were rapidly followed by new state laws with new devices to restrict voting. Most blacks in the former Confederacy and Oklahoma could not vote until 1965, after passage of the Voting Rights Act and Federal enforcement to ensure people could register. Despite increases in the eligible voting population with the inclusion of women, blacks, and those eighteen and over throughout this period, turnout in ex-Confederate states remained below the national average throughout the 20th century. Not until the late 1960s did all American citizens regain protected civil rights by passage of legislation following the leadership of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Historian William Chafe has explored the defensive techniques developed inside the African American community to avoid the worst features of Jim Crow as expressed in the legal system, unbalanced economic power, and intimidation and psychological pressure. Chafe says "protective socialization by blacks themselves" was created inside the community to accommodate white-imposed sanctions while subtly encouraging challenges to those sanctions. Known as "walking the tightrope," such efforts at bringing about change were only slightly effective before the 1920s, but did build the foundation that younger African Americans deployed in their aggressive, large-scale activism during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

At the end of the 19th century, white Democrats in the South had created state constitutions that were hostile to industry and business development, with anti-industrial laws extensive from the time new constitutions were adopted in the 1890s. Banks were few and small; there was little access to credit. Traditional agriculture persisted across the region. Especially in Alabama and Florida, rural minorities held control in many state legislatures long after population had shifted to industrializing cities, and legislators resisted business and modernizing interests: Alabama refused to redistrict between 1901 and 1972, long after major population and economic shifts to cities. For decades Birmingham generated the majority of revenue for the state, for instance, but received little back in services or infrastructure.

In the late 19th century, Texas rapidly expanded its railroad network, creating a network of cities connected on a radial plan and linked to the port of Galveston. It was the first state[citation needed ] in which urban and economic development proceeded independently of rivers, the primary transportation network of the past. A reflection of increasing industry were strikes and labor unrest: "in 1885 Texas ranked ninth among forty states in number of workers involved in strikes (4,000); for the six-year period it ranked fifteenth. Seventy-five of the one hundred strikes, chiefly interstate strikes of telegraphers and railway workers, occurred in the year 1886."

Business interests were ignored by the Southern Democrat ruling class. Nonetheless, major new industries started developing in cities such as Atlanta, GA; Birmingham, AL; and Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston, Texas. Growth began occurring at a geometric rate. Birmingham became a major steel producer and mining town, with major population growth in the early decades of the 20th century.

The first major oil well in the South was drilled at Spindletop near Beaumont, Texas, on the morning of January 10, 1901. Other oil fields were later discovered nearby in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and under the Gulf of Mexico. The resulting "Oil Boom" permanently transformed the economy of the West South Central states and produced the richest economic expansion after the Civil War.

In the early 20th century, invasion of the boll weevil devastated cotton crops in the South, producing an additional catalyst to African Americans' decisions to leave the South. From 1910 to 1970, more than 6.5 million African Americans left the South in the Great Migration to Northern and Western cities, defecting from persistent lynching, violence, segregation, poor education, and inability to vote. Black migration transformed many Northern and Western cities, creating new cultures and music. Many African Americans, like other groups, became industrial workers; others started their own businesses within the communities. Southern whites also migrated to industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, and Los Angeles, where they took jobs in the booming new auto and defense industry.

Later, the Southern economy was dealt additional blows by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the economy suffered significant reversals and millions were left unemployed. Beginning in 1934 and lasting until 1939, an ecological disaster of severe wind and drought caused an exodus from Texas and Arkansas, the Oklahoma Panhandle region, and the surrounding plains, in which over 500,000 Americans were homeless, hungry and jobless. Thousands would leave the region to seek economic opportunities along the West Coast.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt noted the South as the "number one priority" in terms of need of assistance during the Great Depression. His administration created programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933 to provide rural electrification and stimulate development. Locked into low-productivity agriculture, the region's growth was slowed by limited industrial development, low levels of entrepreneurship, and the lack of capital investment.

World War II marked a time of dramatic change within the South from an economic standpoint, as new industries and military bases were developed by the federal government, providing much needed capital and infrastructure in many regions. People from all parts of the US came to the South for military training and work in the region's many bases and new industries. During and after the war millions of hard-scrabble farmers, both white and black, left agriculture for other occupations and urban jobs.

The United States began mobilizing for war in a major way in the spring of 1940. The warm weather of the South proved ideal for building 60% of the Army's new training camps and nearly half the new airfields. In all, 40% of spending on new military installations went to the South. For example, in 1940 the small town of 1500 people in Starke, Florida, became the base of Camp Blanding. By March 1941, 20,000 men were constructing a permanent camp for 60,000 soldiers. Money flowed freely for the war effort, as over $4 billion went into military facilities in the South, and another $5 billion into defense plants. Major shipyards were built in Virginia, and Charleston, SC, and along the Gulf Coast.

Huge warplane plants were opened in Dallas-Fort Worth and Georgia. The most secret and expensive operation was at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where unlimited amounts of locally generated electricity were used to prepare uranium for the atom bomb. The number of production workers doubled during the war. Most training centers, factories and shipyards were closed in 1945, but not all, and the families that left hardscrabble farms remained to find jobs in the growing urban South. The region had finally reached the take off stage into industrial and commercial growth, although its income and wage levels lagged well behind the national average. Nevertheless, as George B. Tindall notes, the transformation was, "The demonstration of industrial potential, new habits of mind, and a recognition that industrialization demanded community services."

Per capita income jumped 140% from 1940 to 1945, compared to 100% elsewhere in the United States. Southern income rose from 59% to 65%. Dewey Grantham says the war, "brought an abrupt departure from the South's economic backwardness, poverty, and distinctive rural life, as the region moved perceptively closer to the mainstream of national economic and social life."

Farming shifted from cotton and tobacco, to include cattle, rice, soybeans, corn, and other foods. Industrial growth increased in the 1960s and greatly accelerated into the 1980s and 1990s. Several large urban areas in Texas, Georgia, and Florida grew to over four million people. Rapid expansion in industries such as autos, telecommunications, textiles, technology, banking, and aviation gave some states in the South an industrial strength to rival large states elsewhere in the country. By the 2000 census, the South (along with the West) was leading the nation in population growth. With this growth, however, has come long commute times and air pollution problems in cities such as Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, and others that rely on sprawling development and highway networks.

In the late 20th century, the South changed dramatically. It saw a boom in its service economy, manufacturing base, high technology industries, and the financial sector. Texas in particular witnessed dramatic growth and population change with the dominance of the energy industry and tourism industries, such as the Alamo Mission in San Antonio. Tourism in Florida and along the Gulf Coast also grew steadily throughout the last decades of the 20th century.

The two largest research parks in the country are located in the South: Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (the world's largest) and the Cummings Research Park in Huntsville, Alabama (the world's fourth largest).

In medicine, the Texas Medical Center in Houston has achieved international recognition in education, research, and patient care, especially in the fields of heart disease, cancer, and rehabilitation. In 1994 the Texas Medical Center was the largest medical center in the world including fourteen hospitals, two medical schools, four colleges of nursing, and six university systems. The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center is consistently ranked the No. 1 cancer research and treatment center in the United States.

Many corporations are headquartered in Atlanta and its surrounding area, such as The Coca-Cola Company, Delta Air Lines, and The Home Depot, and also to many cable television networks, such as the Turner Broadcasting System ( CNN, TBS, TNT, Turner South, Cartoon Network) and The Weather Channel. In 2019, Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Southern states included: Texas with 50, Virginia with 21, Florida with 18, Georgia with 17, North Carolina with 11, and Tennessee with 10. This economic expansion has enabled parts of the South to report some of the lowest unemployment rates in the United States. In 2022, Texas led the nation with the most Fortune 500 company headquarters with 53.

Southern public schools in the past have ranked in the lower half of some national surveys. When allowance for race is considered, a 2007 US Government list of test scores often shows white fourth and eighth graders performing better than average for reading and math; while black fourth and eighth graders also performed better than average. This comparison does not hold across the board. Mississippi often scores lower than national averages, no matter how statistics are compared. Newer data from 2009 suggests that secondary school education in the South is on par nationally, with 72% of high schoolers graduating compared to 73% nationwide.

The Southern United States is home to some of the nation's largest and most prominent public and private institutions of higher education. Notable public colleges and universities in the South include:

Notable private colleges and universities in the South include:

Several Southern states (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia) were among the British colonies that sent delegates to sign the Declaration of Independence and then fought against the government (Great Britain), along with the Middle and New England colonies, during the Revolutionary War. The basis for much of Southern culture derives from these states being among the original Thirteen Colonies, and from much of the population of the colonial South having ancestral links to colonists who emigrated west. Southern manners and customs reflect the relationship with England that was held by the early population.

Overall, the South has had lower housing values, lower household incomes, and lower cost of living than the rest of the United States. These factors, combined with the fact that Southerners have continued to maintain strong loyalty to family ties, has led some sociologists to label white Southerners an ethnic or quasi-ethnic group, though this interpretation has been subject to criticism on the grounds that proponents of the view do not satisfactorily indicate how Southerners meet the criteria of ethnicity.

The predominant culture of the South has its origins with the settlement of the region by large groups of people from parts of southern England such as Sussex, Kent, the West Country, and East Anglia who moved to the Tidewater and the eastern parts of the Deep South in the 17th and early 18th centuries, Northern English, Scots lowlanders and Ulster-Scots (later called the Scotch-Irish) who settled in Appalachia and the Upland South in the mid to late 18th century, and the many African slaves who were part of the Southern economy. African American descendants of the slaves brought into the South compose the United States' second-largest racial minority, accounting for 12.1% of the total population according to the 2000 census. Despite Jim Crow era outflow to the North, the majority of the black population remains concentrated in Southern states, and has heavily contributed to the cultural blend of religion, food, art, and music (see spiritual, blues, jazz, R&B, soul music, country music, zydeco, bluegrass and rock and roll) that characterize Southern culture today.

In previous censuses, the largest ancestry group identified by Southerners was English or mostly English, with 19,618,370 self-reporting "English" as an ancestry on the 1980 census, followed by 12,709,872 listing " Irish" and 11,054,127 " Afro-American". Almost a third of all Americans who claim English ancestry can be found in the American South, and over a quarter of all Southerners claim English descent as well.

The South has had a majority of its population adhering to evangelical Protestantism ever since the Second Great Awakening, although the upper classes often stayed Anglican/Episcopalian or Presbyterian. The First Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening from about 1742 to about 1850 generated large numbers of Methodists and Baptists, which remain the two main Christian confessions in the South. By 1900, the Southern Baptist Convention had become the largest Protestant denomination in the whole United States with its membership concentrated in rural areas of the South. Baptists are the most common religious group, followed by Methodists, Pentecostals and other denominations. Roman Catholics historically were concentrated in Maryland, Louisiana, and Hispanic areas such as South Texas and South Florida and along the Gulf Coast. The great majority of black Southerners are either Baptist or Methodist. Statistics show that Southern states have the highest religious attendance figures of any region in the United States, constituting the so-called Bible Belt. Pentecostalism has been strong across the South since the late 19th century.

Apart from its climate, the living experience in the South increasingly resembles the rest of the nation. The arrival of millions of Northerners and Westerners, mainly since the late 20th century, has reshaped the culture of major metropolitan areas and coastal areas. Observers conclude that collective identity and Southern distinctiveness are declining, particularly when defined against "an earlier South that was somehow more authentic, real, more unified and distinct".

While Hispanics have long been a major factor in Texas, millions more have arrived in other Southern states during the 1990s and early 2000s bringing values not rooted in local traditions. Historian Raymond Mohl emphasizes the role of NAFTA in lowering trade barriers and facilitating large-scale population movements. He adds other factors such as ongoing economic crisis in Mexico, new more liberal immigration policies in the United States, labor recruitment and smuggling, that have produced a major flow of Mexican and Hispanic migration to the southeast. That region's low-wage, low-skill economy readily hired cheap, reliable, nonunion labor, without asking applicants too many questions about legal status. Richard J. Gonzales argues that the rise of La Raza (Mexican American community) in terms of numbers and influence in politics, education, and language and cultural rights will grow rapidly in Texas by 2030 when demographers predict Hispanics will outnumber Anglos in Texas. However thus far their political participation and the Latino vote have been low, so the potential political impact is much higher than the actual one thus far.

Scholars have suggested that in the Deep South collective identity and Southern distinctiveness are thus declining, particularly when defined against "an earlier South that was somehow more authentic, real, more unified and distinct". On the other hand, Southerners have moved west in large numbers, especially to California and to the Midwest. Thus, journalist Michael Hirsh proposed that aspects of Southern culture have spread throughout a greater portion of the rest of the United States in a process termed " Southernization".

American football is heavily considered the most popular team sport in most areas of the Southern United States.

The region is home to numerous decorated and historic college football programs, particularly in the Southeastern Conference (known as the "SEC"), Atlantic Coast Conference (known as the "ACC"), and the Big 12 Conference. The SEC, consisting almost entirely of teams based in Southern states, is widely considered to be the strongest league in contemporary college football and includes the Alabama Crimson Tide, the program with the most national championships in the sport's modern history. The sport is also highly competitive and has a spectator following at the high school level, particularly in rural areas, where high school football games often serve as prominent community gatherings.

The first established professional American football team based in the South were the Washington Redskins, now called the Washington Commanders. They still retain a large following in most of Virginia, and parts of Maryland. Later on, the National Football League (NFL) and American Football League (AFL) began to expand many teams in the Southern US during the 1960s, with franchises like the Atlanta Falcons, New Orleans Saints, Houston Oilers, Miami Dolphins, and most prominently the Dallas Cowboys, who overtook Washington as the region's most popular team and eventually became widely considered the most popular team in the United States. In later decades, NFL expansion into Southern states continued, with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers during the 1970s, along with the Carolina Panthers, Jacksonville Jaguars, and Baltimore Ravens during the 1990s. The Houston Oilers were eventually replaced by the Houston Texans, after the Oilers relocated to Nashville to become the Tennessee Titans.

Baseball has been played in the Southern United States dating back to the mid-19th century. It was traditionally more popular than American football until the 1980s, and still accounts for the largest annual attendance amongst sports played in the South. The first mention of a baseball team in Houston was on April 11, 1861. During the late 19th century and early 20th century games were common, especially once the professional leagues such as the Texas League, the Dixie League, and the Southern League were organized.

The short-lived Louisville Colonels were a part of the early National League and American Association, but ceased to exist in 1899. The first Southern Major League Baseball team after the Colonels appeared in 1962, when the Houston Colt .45s (known today as the Houston Astros) were enfranchised. Later, the Atlanta Braves came in 1966, followed by the Texas Rangers in 1972, and finally the Miami Marlins and Tampa Bay Rays in the 1990s.

College baseball appears to be more well attended in the South than elsewhere, as teams like Florida State, Arkansas, LSU, Virginia, Mississippi State, Ole Miss, South Carolina, Florida and Texas are commonly at the top of the NCAA's attendance. The South generally produces very successful collegiate baseball teams with Virginia, Vanderbilt, LSU, South Carolina, Florida and Coastal Carolina winning recent College World Series Titles.

The following is a list of each MLB team in the Southern U.S. and the total fan attendance for 2019:

The Southern states are commonly associated with stock car racing and its most prominent competition level NASCAR, which is headquartered in Charlotte and Daytona Beach. The sport was developed in the South during the early 20th century, with stock car racing's historic mecca being Daytona Beach, where cars initially raced on the wide, flat beachfront, before the construction of Daytona International Speedway. Though the sport has attained a following throughout the United States, a majority of NASCAR races continue to take place at Southern tracks.

Basketball is very popular throughout the Southern United States as both a recreational and spectator sport, particularly in the states of Kentucky and North Carolina. Both states are home to several prominent college basketball programs, including the Kentucky Wildcats, Louisville Cardinals, Duke Blue Devils and North Carolina Tar Heels.

Golf is a popular recreational sport in most areas of the South, with the region's warm climate allowing it to host many professional tournaments and numerous destination golf resorts, particularly in the state of Florida. The region is home to The Masters which is played at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia, and has become one of the professional game's most important tournaments. One of the four major championships in Hilton Head Island, in South Carolina, is also home to a prominent American golf tournament and has several high-quality courses.

In recent decades association football, known in the South as in the rest of the United States as "soccer", has become a popular sport at youth and collegiate levels throughout the region. The game has been historically widespread at the college level in the Atlantic coast states of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas; which contain many of the nation's most successful college soccer programs.

The Southern region is home to numerous professional sports franchises in the "Big Four" leagues (NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB), with many championships collectively among them.

Dallas-Fort Worth: Cowboys (NFL), Rangers (MLB), Mavericks (NBA), Stars (NHL)

Washington, D.C.: Washington Commanders (NFL), Nationals (MLB), Wizards (NBA), Capitals (NHL)

Miami-Fort Lauderdale: Dolphins (NFL), Marlins (MLB), Heat (NBA), Panthers (NHL)

Houston: Texans (NFL), Astros (MLB), Rockets (NBA)

Atlanta: Falcons (NFL), Braves (MLB), Hawks (NBA)

Tampa Bay: Buccaneers (NFL), Rays (MLB), Lightning (NHL)

Baltimore: Ravens (NFL), Orioles (MLB)

Charlotte: Panthers (NFL), Hornets (NBA)

Nashville: Titans (NFL), Predators (NHL)

New Orleans: Saints (NFL), Pelicans (NBA)

Orlando: Magic (NBA)

San Antonio: Spurs (NBA)

Jacksonville: Jaguars (NFL)

Oklahoma City: Thunder (NBA)

Memphis: Grizzlies (NBA)

Raleigh: Hurricanes (NHL)

Nine Southern states have obesity rates exceeding 30% of the population, the highest in the country. Those states include: Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, Alabama, Oklahoma, Arkansas, South Carolina, Kentucky and Texas. Rates for hypertension and diabetes for these states are also the highest in the nation. A study reported that six Southern states have the worst incidence of sleep disturbances in the nation, attributing the disturbances to high rates of obesity and smoking. The South has a higher percentage of obese people and diabetics when compared to national regional averages. The region also has the largest number of people dying from stroke complications and the highest rates of cognitive decline. Life expectancy is lower and death rates are higher, when compared to national averages of other regions in the United States. This disparity reflects substantial divergence between the South and other regions since the middle of the 20th century.

For cancer causes, the South, particularly an axis from West Virginia through Texas, leads the nation in adult obesity, adult smoking, low exercise, low fruit consumption, low vegetable consumption, all known cancer risk factors, which matches a similar high risk axis in "All Cancers Combined, Death Rates by State, 2011" from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The South is home to some of the nation's largest academic health systems, including the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Duke University Health, University of Florida Health, UNC Medical Center, University of Miami Health, UT Health Science Center at Houston, Emory Healthcare and University of South Florida Health among others.

In the first decades after Reconstruction (1880s-1890s), white Democrats regained power in the state legislatures, and began to make voter registration more complicated, to reduce black voting. With a combination of intimidation, fraud and violence by paramilitary groups, they suppressed black voting and turned Republicans out of office. From 1890 to 1908, ten of eleven states ratified new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most black voters and many poor white voters. This disenfranchisement persisted for six decades into the 20th century, depriving blacks and poor whites of all political representation. Because they could not vote, they could not sit on juries. They had no one to represent their interests, resulting in state legislatures consistently underfunding programs and services, such as schools, for blacks and poor whites. Scholars have characterized pockets of the Southern United States as being "authoritarian enclaves" from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Act.

With the collapse of the Republican Party in nearly all parts of the South, the region became known as the " Solid South", and the Democratic Party after 1900 moved to a system of primaries to select their candidates. Victory in a primary was tantamount to election. From the late 1870s to the 1960s, only rarely was a state or national Southern politician a Republican, outside from Southern Republican strongholds within the Appalachian mountain districts. Southern Republicans during this time period would continue to control parts of the Appalachian Mountain areas and compete for power in the former Border States. Apart from a few states (such as the Byrd Machine in Virginia, the Crump Machine in Memphis), and a few other local organizations, the Democratic Party itself was very lightly organized. It managed primaries but party officials had little other role. To be successful a politician built his own network of friends, neighbors and allies. Reelection was the norm, and the result from 1910 to the late 20th century was that Southern Democrats in Congress had accumulated seniority, and automatically took the chairmanships of all committees. By the 1940s the Supreme Court began to find disenfranchisement measures like the "grandfather clause" and the white primary unconstitutional. Southern legislatures quickly passed other measures to keep blacks disenfranchised, even after suffrage was extended more widely to poor whites. Because white Democrats controlled all the Southern seats in the U.S. Congress, they had outsize power and could sidetrack or filibuster efforts to pass legislation they didn't agree with.

Increasing support for civil rights legislation by the national Democratic Party beginning in 1948 caused segregationist Southern Democrats to nominate Strom Thurmond on a third-party "Dixiecrat" ticket in 1948. These Dixiecrats returned to the party by 1950, but Southern Democrats held off Republican inroads in the suburbs by arguing that only they could defend the region from the onslaught of northern liberals and the civil rights movement. In response to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954, 101 Southern congressmen (19 senators, 82 House members of which 99 were Southern Democrats and 2 were Republicans) in 1956 denounced the Brown decisions as a "clear abuse of judicial power [that] climaxes a trend in the federal judiciary undertaking to legislate in derogation of the authority of Congress and to encroach upon the reserved rights of the states and the people." The manifesto lauded, "...those states which have declared the intention to resist enforced integration by any lawful means". It was signed by all Southern senators except Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, and Tennessee senators Albert Gore Sr. and Estes Kefauver. Virginia closed schools in Warren County, Prince Edward County, Charlottesville, and Norfolk rather than integrate, but no other state followed suit. Democratic governors Orval Faubus of Arkansas, Ross Barnett of Mississippi, John Connally of Texas, Lester Maddox of Georgia, and, especially, George Wallace of Alabama resisted integration and appealed to a rural and blue-collar electorate.

The northern Democrats' support of civil rights issues culminated when Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended legal segregation and provided federal enforcement of voting rights for blacks. In the presidential election of 1964, Barry Goldwater's only electoral victories outside his home state of Arizona were in the states of the Deep South where few blacks could vote before the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Pockets of resistance to integration in public places broke out in violence during the 1960s by the shadowy Ku Klux Klan, which caused a backlash among moderates. Major resistance to school busing extended into the 1970s.

National Republicans such as Richard Nixon began to develop their Southern strategy to attract conservative white Southerners, especially the middle class and suburban voters, in addition to migrants from the North and traditional GOP pockets in Appalachia. The transition to a Republican stronghold in the South took decades. First, the states started voting Republican in presidential elections, except for native southerners Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. Then the states began electing Republican senators and finally governors. Georgia was the last state to do so, with Sonny Perdue taking the governorship in 2002. In addition to its middle class and business base, Republicans cultivated the religious right and attracted strong majorities from the evangelical or Fundamentalist vote, mostly Southern Baptists, which had not been a distinct political force prior to 1980.

Southern liberals were an essential part of the New Deal coalition - without them Roosevelt lacked majorities in Congress. Typical leaders were Lyndon B. Johnson in Texas, Jim Folsom and John Sparkman in Alabama, Claude Pepper in Florida, Earl Long and Hale Boggs in Louisiana, and Estes Kefauver in Tennessee. They promoted subsidies for small farmers, and supported the nascent labor union movement. An essential condition for this north-south coalition was for northern liberals to ignore the problem of racism throughout the South and elsewhere in the country. After 1945, however, northern liberals - led especially by young Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota - increasingly made civil rights a central issue. They convinced Truman to join them in 1948. The conservative Southern Democrats - the Dixiecrats - took control of the state parties in half the region and ran Strom Thurmond for president against Truman. Thurmond carried only the Deep South, but that threat was enough to guarantee the national Democratic Party in 1952 and 1956 would not make civil rights a major issue. In 1956, 101 of the 128 southern congressmen and senators signed the Southern Manifesto denouncing forced desegregation. The labor movement in the South was divided, and lost its political influence. Southern liberals were in a quandary - most of them kept quiet or moderated their liberalism, others switched sides, and the rest continued on the liberal path. One by one, the last group was defeated; historian Numan V. Bartley states, "Indeed, the very word 'liberal' gradually disappeared from the southern political lexicon, except as a term of opprobrium."

The South has produced various nationally known politicians and political movements. In 1948, a group of Democratic congressmen, led by Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, split from the Democrats in reaction to an anti-segregation speech given by Minneapolis mayor and future senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. They founded the States Rights Democratic or Dixiecrat Party. During that year's presidential election, the party ran Thurmond as its candidate and he carried four Deep South states.

In the 1968 Presidential election, Alabama Governor George C. Wallace ran for president on the American Independent Party ticket. Wallace ran a "law and order" campaign similar to that of Republican candidate, Richard Nixon. Nixon's Southern Strategy of gaining electoral votes downplayed race issues and focused on culturally conservative values, such as family issues, patriotism, and cultural issues that appealed to Southern Baptists.

In the 1994 mid-term elections, another Southern politician, Newt Gingrich, led the Republican Revolution, ushering in twelve years of GOP control of the House. Gingrich became Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in 1995 and served until his resignation in 1999. Tom DeLay was the most powerful Republican leader in Congress[citation needed ] until he was indicted under criminal charges in 2005 and was forced to step aside by Republican rules.[citation needed ] Apart from Bob Dole from Kansas (1985-96), the recent Republican Senate Leaders have been Southerners: Howard Baker (1981-1985) of Tennessee, Trent Lott (1996-2003) of Mississippi, Bill Frist (2003-2006) of Tennessee, and Mitch McConnell (2007-present) of Kentucky.

The Republicans candidates for president have won the South in elections since 1972, except for 1976. The region is not, however, entirely monolithic, and every successful Democratic candidate since 1976 has claimed at least three Southern states. Barack Obama won Florida, Maryland, Delaware, North Carolina, and Virginia in 2008 but did not repeat his victory in North Carolina during his 2012 reelection campaign. Joe Biden also performed well for a modern Democrat in the South, winning Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and Georgia, in the 2020 United States presidential election.

Native Americans had lived in what is the American South for nearly 12,000 years. They were defeated by settlers in a series of wars ending in the War of 1812 and the Seminole Wars, and most were removed west to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma and Kansas), but large numbers of Native Americans managed to stay behind by blending into the surrounding society. This was especially true of the wives of European American merchants and miners.[citation needed ]

The South witnessed two major events in the lives of 20th century African Americans: the Great Migration and the American Civil Rights Movement. The Great Migration began during World War I, hitting its high point during World War II. During this migration, Black people left the South to find work in Northern factories and other sectors of the economy.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the racial integration of all-white collegiate sports teams was high on the regional agenda. Involved in it were issues of racial equality, racism, and the alumni's demand for the top players who it needed to win high-profile games. The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) would take the lead. First they started to schedule integrated teams from the North. The wake-up call came in 1966, when Don Haskins's Texas Western College team with five black starters, upset the all-white University of Kentucky team to win the NCAA national basketball championship. That happened at a time when there were no black varsity basketball teams in either the Southeastern Conference or the Southwest Conference. Finally ACC schools, typically under pressure from boosters and civil rights groups, integrated their sports teams. With an alumni base that dominated local and state politics, society and business, the ACC flagship schools were successful in their endeavor - as historian Pamela Grundy argues, they had learned how to win:

The widespread admiration that athletic ability inspired would help transform athletic fields from grounds of symbolic play to forces for social change, places where a wide range of citizens could publicly and at times effectively challenge the assumptions that cast them as unworthy of full participation in U.S. society. While athletic successes would not rid society of prejudice or stereotype - black athletes would continue to confront racial slurs...[minority star players demonstrated] the discipline, intelligence, and poise to contend for position or influence in every arena of national life.

Congress ends segregation (1964) and guarantees voting rights (1965)

The decisive action ending segregation came when Congress in bipartisan fashion overcame Southern filibusters to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A complex interaction of factors came together unexpectedly in the period 1954-1965 to make the momentous changes possible. The Supreme Court had taken the first initiative in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) making segregation of public schools unconstitutional. Enforcement was rapid in the North and border states, but was deliberately stopped in the South by the movement called Massive Resistance, sponsored by rural segregationists who largely controlled the state legislatures. Southern liberals, who counseled moderation, were shouted down by both sides and have limited impact. Much more significant was the Civil Rights Movement, especially the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) headed by Martin Luther King Jr. It largely displaced the old, much more moderate NAACP in taking leadership roles. King organized massive demonstrations, that seized massive media attention in an era when network television news was an innovative and universally watched phenomenon. SCLC, student activists and smaller local organizations staged demonstrations across the South. National attention focused on Birmingham, Alabama, where protesters deliberately provoked Bull Connor and his police forces by using young teenagers as demonstrators - and Connor arrested 900 on one day alone. The next day Connor unleashed billy clubs, police dogs, and high-pressure water hoses to disperse and punish the young demonstrators with a brutality that horrified the nation. It was very bad for business, and for the image of a modernizing progressive urban South. President John F. Kennedy, who had been calling for moderation, threatened to use federal troops to restore order in Birmingham. The result in Birmingham was compromise by which the new mayor opened the library, golf courses, and other city facilities to both races, against the backdrop of church bombings and assassinations.

Confrontations continued to escalate. In summer 1963, there were 800 demonstrations in 200 southern cities and towns, with over 100,000 participants, and 15,000 arrests. In Alabama in June 1963, Governor George Wallace escalated the crisis by defying court orders to admit the first two black students to the University of Alabama. Kennedy responded by sending Congress a comprehensive civil rights bill, and ordered Attorney General Robert Kennedy to file federal lawsuits against segregated schools, and to deny funds for discriminatory programs. Doctor King launched a massive march on Washington in August 1963, bringing out 200,000 demonstrators in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the largest political assembly in the nation's history. The Kennedy administration now gave full-fledged support to the civil rights movement, but powerful southern congressmen blocked any legislation. After Kennedy was assassinated President Lyndon Johnson called for immediate passage of Kennedy civil rights legislation as a memorial to the martyred president. Johnson formed a coalition with Northern Republicans that led to passage in the House, and with the help of Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen with passage in the Senate early in 1964. For the first time in history, the southern filibuster was broken and The Senate finally passed its version on June 19 by vote of 73 to 27. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most powerful affirmation of equal rights ever made by Congress. It guaranteed access to public accommodations such as restaurants and places of amusement, authorized the Justice Department to bring suits does desegregate facilities in schools, gave new powers to the Civil Rights Commission; and allowed federal funds to be cut off in cases of discrimination. Furthermore, racial, religious and gender discrimination was outlawed for businesses with 25 or more employees, as well as apartment houses. The South resisted until the last moment, but as soon as the new law was signed by President Johnson on July 2, 1964, it was widely accepted across the nation. There was only a scattering of diehard opposition, typified by restaurant owner Lester Maddox in Georgia, who became governor, but the great majority of restaurants and hotels in Georgia followed the new law as the business community realized that peaceful integration was the only way forward.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s ended Jim Crow laws across the South and other areas of the United States. In recent decades, a second migration appears to be underway, this time with African Americans from the North moving to the South in record numbers. While race relations are still a contentious issue in the South and most of the U.S., the region surpasses the rest of the country in many areas of integration and racial equality. According to 2003 report by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Virginia Beach, Charlotte, Nashville-Davidson, and Jacksonville were the five most integrated of the nation's fifty largest cities, with Memphis at number six. Southern states tend to have a low disparity in incarceration rates between blacks and whites relative to the rest of the country.

Some Southerners use the Confederate battle flag to identify themselves with the South, states' rights and Southern tradition. Such groups as the League of the South have a high regard for the secession movement of 1860, citing a desire to protect and defend Southern heritage. Numerous political battles have erupted over flying the Confederate flag over state capitols, and the naming of public buildings or highways after Confederate leaders, the prominence of certain statues and monuments, and the everyday display of Confederate insignia.

Other symbols of the South include the Bonnie Blue Flag, magnolia trees, and the song " Dixie".

The South was predominately rural up until the 1940s. Since the mid-20th century, the population has increasingly grown in urban and metropolitan areas. The following tables show the twenty largest cities, counties, metropolitan and combined statistical areas in the South. Houston is the largest city in the Southern United States.

* Asterisk indicates part of the metropolitan area is outside the states classified as Southern by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Listed below are states that are defined by the Census Bureau as the Southern United States. Washington, D.C. is located in the Southern United States region as defined by the Census Bureau, but serves as the capital city of the United States, and is not a state.

Ayers, Edward L. What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (2005)

Cash, Wilbur J. The Mind of the South (1941),

Cooper, Christopher A. and H. Gibbs Knotts, eds. The New Politics of North Carolina (U. of North Carolina Press, 2008) ISBN 978-0-8078-5876-9

Davis, Donald, and Mark R. Stoll. Southern United States: An Environmental History (2006)

Edwards, Laura F. "Southern History as U.S. History," Journal of Southern History, 75 (Aug. 2009), 533-64.

Flynt, J. Wayne Dixie's Forgotten People: The South's Poor Whites (1979). deals with 20th century.

Frederickson, Kari. (2013). Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Grantham, Dewey W. The South in modern America (2001) survey covers 1877-2000.

Grantham, Dewey W. The life and death of the Solid South: A political history (1992).

Johnson, Charles S. Statistical atlas of southern counties: listing and analysis of socio-economic indices of 1104 southern counties (1941). excerpt

David M. Katzman (1996). "Black Migration". The Reader's Companion to American History. Houghton Mifflin Company.

Key, V.O. Southern Politics in State and Nation (1951) classic political analysis, state by state. online free to borrow

Kirby, Jack Temple. Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960 (LSU Press, 1986) major scholarly survey with detailed bibliography; online free to borrow.

Michael Kreyling (1998). Inventing Southern Literature. University Press of Mississippi. p. 66. ISBN 978-1-57806-045-0.

McWhiney, Grady. In Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (1988)

Mark, Rebecca, and Rob Vaughan. The South: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures (2004)

Morris, Christopher (2009). "A More Southern Environmental History". Journal of Southern History. 75 (3): 581-598.

Odem, Mary E. and Elaine Lacy, eds. Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South (U of Georgia Press, 2009).

Rabinowitz, Howard N. (September 1976). "From Exclusion to Segregation: Southern Race Relations, 1865-1890". Journal of American History. 43 (2): 325-350. doi:10.2307/1899640. JSTOR 1899640.

Rivers, Larry E., and Canter Brown, eds. The Varieties of Women's Experiences: Portraits of Southern Women in the Post-Civil War Century (UP of Florida, 2010).

Thornton III, J. Mills. Archipelagoes of My South: Episodes in the Shaping of a Region, 1830-1965 (2016) online

Tindall, George B. The emergence of the new South, 1913-1945 (1967) online free to borrow

Robert W. Twyman.; David C. Roller, eds. (1979). Encyclopedia of Southern History. LSU Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-0575-7.

Virts, Nancy (2006). "Change in the Plantation System: American South, 1910-1945". Explorations in Economic History. 43 (1): 153-176. doi:10.1016/j.eeh.2005.04.003.

Wells, Jonathan Daniel (2009). "The Southern Middle Class". Journal of Southern History. 75 (3): 651-.

Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913: A History of the South (1951)

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The Southern United States (sometimes Dixie, also referred to as the Southern States, the American South, the Southland, or simply the South) is a geographic and cultural region of the United States of America. It is between the Atlantic Ocean and the Western United States, with the Midwestern and Northeastern United States to its north and the Gulf of Mexico and Mexico to its south.

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Trail of Tears

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Trail of Tears

Part of Indian removal

Location

Southeastern United States and Indian Territory

Date

1830 to 1850

Forced displacement
Ethnic cleansing[1][2]

Deaths

Cherokee (4,000)
Creek
Seminole (3,000 in Second Seminole War - 1835-1842)
Chickasaw (3,500)
Choctaw (2,500-6,000)
Ponca (200)

Victims

" Five Civilized Tribes" of Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Ponca and Ho-Chunk/Winnebago nations

Perpetrators

U.S. Federal Government, U.S. Army, state militias

Motive

Acquisition of American Indian land east of the Mississippi River.

The Trail of Tears was a series of forced displacements of approximately 60,000 American Indians of the " Five Civilized Tribes" between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government. Part of the Indian removal, the ethnic cleansing was gradual, occurring over a period of nearly two decades. Members of the so-called " Five Civilized Tribes"-the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations (including thousands of their black slaves)-were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to areas west of the Mississippi River that had been designated Indian Territory. The forced relocations were carried out by government authorities after the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. The Cherokee removal in 1838 (the last forced removal east of the Mississippi) was brought on by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1828, resulting in the Georgia Gold Rush.

The relocated peoples suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation while en route to their newly designated Indian reserve. Thousands died from disease before reaching their destinations or shortly after. According to Native American activist Suzan Shown Harjo of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the event constituted a genocide, although this label has been rejected by historian Gary Clayton Anderson.

Historical context

In 1830, a group of Indian nations collectively referred to as the " Five Civilized Tribes" (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole nations), were living autonomously in what would later be termed the American Deep South. The process of cultural transformation from their traditional way of life towards a white American way of life as proposed by George Washington and Henry Knox was gaining momentum, especially among the Cherokee and Choctaw.

American settlers had been pressuring the federal government to remove Indians from the Southeast; many settlers were encroaching on Indian lands, while others wanted more land made available to the settlers. Although the effort was vehemently opposed by some, including U.S. Congressman Davy Crockett of Tennessee, President Andrew Jackson was able to gain Congressional passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the government to extinguish any Indian title to land claims in the Southeast.

In 1831, the Choctaw became the first Nation to be removed, and their removal served as the model for all future relocations. After two wars, many Seminoles were removed in 1832. The Creek removal followed in 1834, the Chickasaw in 1837, and lastly the Cherokee in 1838. Some managed to evade the removals, however, and remained in their ancestral homelands; some Choctaw still reside in Mississippi, Creek in Alabama and Florida, Cherokee in North Carolina, and Seminole in Florida. A small group of Seminole, fewer than 500, evaded forced removal; the modern Seminole Nation of Florida is descended from these individuals. A small number of non-Indians who lived with the nations, including some of African descent (including over 4,000 slaves, and others such as spouses or Freedmen), also accompanied the Indians on the trek westward. By 1837, 46,000 Indians from the southeastern states had been removed from their homelands, thereby opening 25 million acres (100,000 km ²) for white settlement. When the "Five Tribes" arrived in Indian Territory, "they followed their physical appropriation of Plains Indians' land with an erasure of their predecessor's history", and "perpetuated the idea that they had found an undeveloped 'wilderness" when they arrived" in an attempt to appeal to white American values by participating in the settler colonial process themselves. Other Indian nations, such as the Quapaws and Osages had moved to Indian Territory before the "Five Tribes" and saw them as intruders.

Before 1838, the fixed boundaries of these autonomous Indian nations, comprising large areas of the United States, were subject to continual cession and annexation, in part due to pressure from squatters and the threat of military force in the newly declared U.S. territories-federally administered regions whose boundaries supervened upon the Indian treaty claims. As these territories became U.S. states, state governments sought to dissolve the boundaries of the Indian nations within their borders, which were independent of state jurisdiction, and to expropriate the land therein. These pressures were exacerbated by U.S. population growth and the expansion of slavery in the South, with the rapid development of cotton cultivation in the uplands after the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney.

Jackson's role

Prior to Jackson's presidency, removal policy was already in place and helped along by the idea of the "vanishing Indian". The justification of land acquisition emerged in the form of the myth of the "vanishing Indian". Historian Jeffrey Ostler explains that "Scholars have exposed how the discourse of the vanishing Indian was an ideology that made declining Indigenous American populations seem to be an inevitable consequence of natural processes and so allowed Americans to evade moral responsibility for their destructive choices". Despite the common association of Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears, ideas for Removal began prior to Jackson's presidency. Ostler explains, "...A singular focus on Jackson obscures the fact that he did not invent the idea of removal...Months after the passage of the Removal Act, Jackson described the legislation as the 'happy consummation' of a policy 'pursued for nearly 30 years'". James Fenimore Cooper was also a key component of the maintenance of the "vanishing Indian" myth. This vanishing narrative can be seen as existing prior to the Trail of Tears through Cooper's novel " The Last of the Mohicans". Scholar and author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz shows that:

"Cooper has the last of the 'noble' and 'pure' Natives die off as nature would have it, with the 'last Mohican' handing the continent over to Hawkeye, the nativized settler, his adopted son... Cooper had much to do with creating the US origin myth to which generations of historians have dedicated themselves, fortifying what historian Francis Jennings has described as 'exclusion from the process of formation of American society and culture'".

The myth of the vanishing Indian was contributory to U.S. expansion by creating the narrative that would then be used to justify the removal policy and U.S. land claims.

Although Jackson was not the sole, or original, architect of Removal policy, his contributions were influential in its trajectory. Jackson's support for the removal of the Indians began at least a decade before his presidency. Indian removal was Jackson's top legislative priority upon taking office. After being elected president, he wrote in his first address to Congress: "The emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws. In return for their obedience as individuals they will without doubt be protected in the enjoyment of those possessions which they have improved by their industry". The prioritization of American Indian removal and his violent past created a sense of restlessness among U.S. territories. During his presidency, "...the United States made eighty-six treaties with twenty-six American Indian nations between New York and the Mississippi, all of them forcing land cessions, including removals".

The removals, conducted under both Presidents Jackson and Van Buren, followed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which provided the president with powers to exchange land with Indian nations and provide infrastructure improvements on the existing lands. The law also gave the president power to pay for transportation costs to the West, should the nations willingly choose to relocate. The law did not, however, allow the president to force Indian nations to move west without a mutually agreed-upon treaty. Referring to the Indian Removal Act, Martin Van Buren, Jackson's vice president and successor, is quoted as saying "There was no measure, in the whole course of [Jackson's] administration, of which he was more exclusively the author than this."

According to historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Jackson's intentions were outwardly violent. Dunbar-Ortiz claims that Jackson believed in "bleeding enemies to give them their senses" on his quest to "serve the goal of U.S. expansion". According to her, American Indians presented an obstacle to the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny, in his mind.[page needed ] Throughout his military career, according to historian Amy H. Sturgis, "Jackson earned and emphasized his reputation as an 'Indian fighter,' a man who believed creating fear in the native population was more desirable than cultivating friendship". In a message to Congress on the eve of Indian Removal, December 6, 1830, Jackson wrote that removal "will relieve the whole State of Mississippi and the western part of Alabama of Indian occupancy, and enable those States to advance rapidly in population, wealth, and power. It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites." In this way, Sturgis has argued that Jackson demarcated the Indian population as an "obstacle" to national success. Sturgis writes that Jackson's removal policies were met with pushback from respectable social figures and that "many leaders of 'Jacksonian reform movements were particularly disturbed by U.S policy toward American Indians". Among these opponents were women's advocate and founder of the American Woman's Educational Association Catherine Beecher and politician Davy Crockett.

Historian Francis Paul Prucha, on the other hand, writes that these assessments were put forward by Jackson's political opponents and that Jackson had benevolent intentions. According to him, Jackson's critics have been too harsh, if not wrong. He states that Jackson never developed a doctrinaire anti-Indian attitude and that his dominant goal was to preserve the security and well-being of the United States and its Indian and white inhabitants. Corrobating Prucha's interpretation, historian Robert V. Remini argues that Jackson never intended for the "monstrous result" of his policy. Remini argues further that had Jackson not orchestrated the removal of the " Five Civilized Tribes" from their ancestral homelands, they would have been totally wiped out.

Jackson chose to continue with Indian removal, and negotiated the Treaty of New Echota, on December 29, 1835, which granted the Cherokee two years to move to Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma). The Chickasaws and Choctaws had readily accepted and signed treaties with the U.S. government, while the Creeks did so under coercion. The negotiation of the Treaty of New Echota was largely encouraged by Jackson, and it was representative of a minority Cherokee political faction, the Treaty Party, led by Cherokee leader Elias Boudinot. However, the treaty was met with opposition from most of the Cherokee people, as it was not approved by the Cherokee National Council, and it was not signed by Principal Chief John Ross. The Cherokee National Council submitted a petition, signed by thousands of Cherokee citizens, urging Congress to void the agreement in February 1836. Despite this opposition, the Senate ratified the treaty on March 1836, and the Treaty of New Echota thus became the legal basis for the Trail of Tears. Only a fraction of the Cherokees left voluntarily. The U.S. government, with assistance from state militias, forced most of the remaining Cherokees west in 1838. The Cherokees were temporarily remanded in camps in eastern Tennessee. In November, the Cherokee were broken into groups of around 1,000 each and began the journey west. They endured heavy rains, snow, and freezing temperatures.

When the Cherokee negotiated the Treaty of New Echota, they exchanged all their land east of the Mississippi for land in modern Oklahoma and a $5 million payment from the federal government. Many Cherokee felt betrayed that their leadership accepted the deal, and over 16,000 Cherokee signed a petition to prevent the passage of the treaty. By the end of the decade in 1840, tens of thousands of Cherokee and other Indian nations had been removed from their land east of the Mississippi River. The Creek, Choctaw, Seminole, and Chicksaw were also relocated under the Indian Removal Act of 1830. One Choctaw leader portrayed the removal as "A Trail of Tears and Deaths", a devastating event that removed most of the Indian population of the southeastern United States from their traditional homelands.

Terminology

The forced relocations and ethnic cleansings of the Indian nations have sometimes been referred to as " death marches", in particular when referring to the Cherokee march across the Midwest in 1838, which occurred via a predominantly land route.

Indians who had the means initially provided for their own removal. Contingents that were led by conductors from the U.S. Army included those led by Edward Deas, who was claimed to be a sympathizer for the Cherokee plight.[citation needed ] The largest death toll from the Cherokee forced relocation comes from the period after the May 23, 1838 deadline. This was at the point when the remaining Cherokee were rounded up into camps and placed into large groups, often over 700 in size (larger than the populations of Little Rock or Memphis at that time). Communicable diseases spread quickly through these closely quartered groups, killing many. These groups were among the last to move, but following the same routes the others had taken; the areas they were going through had been depleted of supplies due to the vast numbers that had gone before them. The marchers were subject to extortion and violence along the route. In addition, these final contingents were forced to set out during the hottest and coldest months of the year, killing many. Exposure to the elements, disease, starvation, harassment by local frontiersmen, and insufficient rations similarly killed up to one-third of the Choctaw and other nations on the march.

There exists some debate among historians and the affected nations as to whether the term "Trail of Tears" should be used to refer to the entire history of forced relocations from the United States east of the Mississippi into Indian Territory (as was the stated U.S. policy), to the five Indian nations described above, to the route of the land march specifically, or to specific marches in which the remaining holdouts from each area were rounded up.

Legal background

The territorial boundaries claimed as sovereign and controlled by the Indian nations living in what were then known as the Indian Territories-the portion of the early United States west of the Mississippi River not yet claimed or allotted to become Oklahoma-were fixed and determined by national treaties with the United States federal government. These recognized the tribal governments as dependent but internally sovereign, or autonomous nations under the sole jurisdiction of the federal government.

While retaining their tribal governance, which included a constitution or official council in nations such as the Iroquois and Cherokee, many portions of the southeastern Indian nations had become partially or completely economically integrated into the economy of the region. This included the plantation economy in states such as Georgia, and the possession of slaves. These slaves were also forcibly relocated during the process of removal.

Under the history of U.S. treaty law, the territorial boundaries claimed by federally recognized Indian nations received the same status under which the Southeastern tribal claims were recognized; until the following establishment of reservations of land, determined by the federal government, which were ceded to the remaining Indian nations by treaty, in a process that often entailed forced relocation. The establishment of the Indian Territory and the extinguishment of Indian land claims east of the Mississippi anticipated the establishment of the U.S. Indian reservation system. It was imposed on remaining Indian lands later in the 19th century.

The statutory argument for Indian sovereignty persisted until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), that ( e.g.) the Cherokee were not a sovereign and independent nation, and therefore not entitled to a hearing before the court. However, in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the court re-established limited internal sovereignty under the sole jurisdiction of the federal government, in a ruling that both opposed the subsequent forced relocation and set the basis for modern U.S. case law.

In the years after the Act, the Cherokee filed several lawsuits regarding conflicts with the state of Georgia. Some of these cases reached the Supreme Court, the most influential being Worcester v. Georgia (1832). Samuel Worcester and other non-Indians were convicted by Georgia law for residing in Cherokee territory in the state of Georgia without a license. Worcester was sentenced to prison for four years and appealed the ruling, arguing that this sentence violated treaties made between Indian nations and the United States federal government by imposing state laws on Cherokee lands. The Court ruled in Worcester's favor, declaring that the Cherokee Nation was subject only to federal law and that the Supremacy Clause barred legislative interference by the state of Georgia. Chief Justice Marshall argued, "The Cherokee nation, then, is a distinct community occupying its own territory in which the laws of Georgia can have no force. The whole intercourse between the United States and this Nation, is, by our constitution and laws, vested in the government of the United States."

The Court did not ask federal marshals to carry out the decision. Worcester thus imposed no obligations on Jackson; there was nothing for him to enforce, although Jackson's' political enemies conspired to find evidence, to be used in the forthcoming political election, to claim that he would refuse to enforce the Worcester decision. He feared that enforcement would lead to open warfare between federal troops and the Georgia militia, which would compound the ongoing crisis in South Carolina and lead to a broader civil war. Instead, he vigorously negotiated a land exchange treaty with the Cherokee. After this, Jackson's political opponents Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, who supported the Worcester decision, became outraged by Jackson's alleged refusal to uphold Cherokee claims against the state of Georgia. Author and political activist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an account of Cherokee assimilation into the American culture, declaring his support of the Worcester decision.

Nevertheless, the actions of the Jackson administration were not isolated because state and federal officials had violated treaties without consequence, often attributed to military exigency, as the members of individual Indian nations were not automatically United States citizens and were rarely given standing in any U.S. court.[citation needed ]

Jackson's involvement in what became known as the Trail of Tears shaped what occurred immensely: in a speech regarding Indian removal, Jackson said,

It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers, and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.

According to Jackson, the move would be nothing but beneficial for all parties. His point of view garnered support from many Americans, many of whom would benefit economically from the forced removals.

This was compounded by the fact that while citizenship tests existed for Indians living in newly annexed areas before and after forced relocation, individual U.S. states did not recognize the Indian nations' land claims, only individual title under State law, and distinguished between the rights of white and non-white citizens, who often had limited standing in court; and Indian removal was carried out under U.S. military jurisdiction, often by state militias. As a result, individual Indians who could prove U.S. citizenship were nevertheless displaced from newly annexed areas. The military actions and subsequent treaties enacted by Jackson's and Martin Van Buren's administrations pursuant to the 1830 law, which Tennessee Congressman Davy Crockett had unsuccessfully voted against, are widely considered to have directly caused the expulsion or death of a substantial part of the Indian population then living in the southeastern United States.

Choctaw removal

The Choctaw nation resided in large portions of what are now the U.S. states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. After a series of treaties starting in 1801, the Choctaw nation was reduced to 11 million acres (45,000 km ²). The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek ceded the remaining country to the United States and was ratified in early 1831. The removals were only agreed to after a provision in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek allowed some Choctaw to remain. The chief of the Choctaw nation, George W. Harkins, wrote to the citizens of the United States before the removals were to commence:

It is with considerable diffidence that I attempt to address the American people, knowing and feeling sensibly my incompetency; and believing that your highly and well-improved minds would not be well entertained by the address of a Choctaw. But having determined to emigrate west of the Mississippi river this fall, I have thought proper in bidding you farewell to make a few remarks expressive of my views, and the feelings that actuate me on the subject of our removal... We as Choctaws rather chose to suffer and be free, than live under the degrading influence of laws, which our voice could not be heard in their formation.

-  George W. Harkins, George W. Harkins to the American People

United States Secretary of War Lewis Cass appointed George Gaines to manage the removals. Gaines decided to remove Choctaws in three phases starting in 1831 and ending in 1833. The first was to begin on November 1, 1831, with groups meeting at Memphis and Vicksburg. A harsh winter would batter the emigrants with flash floods, sleet, and snow. Initially, the Choctaws were to be transported by wagon but floods halted them. With food running out, the residents of Vicksburg and Memphis were concerned. Five steamboats (the Walter Scott, the Brandywine, the Reindeer, the Talma, and the Cleopatra) would ferry Choctaws to their river-based destinations. The Memphis group traveled up the Arkansas for about 60 miles (100 km) to Arkansas Post. There the temperature stayed below freezing for almost a week with the rivers clogged with ice, so there could be no travel for weeks. Food rationing consisted of a handful of boiled corn, one turnip, and two cups of heated water per day. Forty government wagons were sent to Arkansas Post to transport them to Little Rock. When they reached Little Rock, a Choctaw chief referred to their trek as a " trail of tears and death". The Vicksburg group was led by an incompetent guide and was lost in the Lake Providence swamps.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the French philosopher, witnessed the Choctaw removals while in Memphis, Tennessee in 1831:

In the whole scene there was an air of ruin and destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu; one couldn't watch without feeling one's heart wrung. The Indians were tranquil but somber and taciturn. There was one who could speak English and of whom I asked why the Chactas were leaving their country. "To be free," he answered, could never get any other reason out of him. We ... watch the expulsion ... of one of the most celebrated and ancient American peoples.

Nearly 17,000 Choctaws made the move to what would be called Indian Territory and then later Oklahoma. About 2,500-6,000 died along the trail of tears. Approximately 5,000-6,000 Choctaws remained in Mississippi in 1831 after the initial removal efforts. The Choctaws who chose to remain in newly formed Mississippi were subject to legal conflict, harassment, and intimidation. The Choctaws "have had our habitations torn down and burned, our fences destroyed, cattle turned into our fields and we ourselves have been scourged, manacled, fettered and otherwise personally abused, until by such treatment some of our best men have died". The Choctaws in Mississippi were later reformed as the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and the removed Choctaws became the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. The Choctaws were the first to sign a removal treaty presented by the federal government. President Andrew Jackson wanted strong negotiations with the Choctaws in Mississippi, and the Choctaws seemed much more cooperative than Andrew Jackson had imagined. When commissioners and Choctaws came to negotiation agreements it was said the United States would bear the expense of moving their homes and that they had to be removed within two and a half years of the signed treaty.

Seminole resistance

The U.S. acquired Florida from Spain via the Adams-Onís Treaty and took possession in 1821. In 1832 the Seminoles were called to a meeting at Payne's Landing on the Ocklawaha River. The Treaty of Payne's Landing called for the Seminoles to move west, if the land were found to be suitable. They were to be settled on the Creek reservation and become part of the Creek nation, who considered them deserters[full citation needed ]; some of the Seminoles had been derived from Creek bands but also from other Indian nations. Those among the nation who once were members of Creek bands did not wish to move west to where they were certain that they would meet death for leaving the main band of Creek Indians. The delegation of seven chiefs who were to inspect the new reservation did not leave Florida until October 1832. After touring the area for several months and conferring with the Creeks who had already settled there, the seven chiefs signed a statement on March 28, 1833, that the new land was acceptable. Upon their return to Florida, however, most of the chiefs renounced the statement, claiming that they had not signed it, or that they had been forced to sign it, and in any case, that they did not have the power to decide for all the Indian nations and bands that resided on the reservation. The villages in the area of the Apalachicola River were more easily persuaded, however, and went west in 1834. On December 28, 1835, a group of Seminoles and blacks ambushed a U.S. Army company marching from Fort Brooke in Tampa to Fort King in Ocala, killing all but three of the 110 army troops. This came to be known as the Dade Massacre.

As the realization that the Seminoles would resist relocation sank in, Florida began preparing for war. The St. Augustine Militia asked the War Department for the loan of 500 muskets. Five hundred volunteers were mobilized under Brig. Gen. Richard K. Call. Indian war parties raided farms and settlements, and families fled to forts, large towns, or out of the territory altogether. A war party led by Osceola captured a Florida militia supply train, killing eight of its guards and wounding six others. Most of the goods taken were recovered by the militia in another fight a few days later. Sugar plantations along the Atlantic coast south of St. Augustine were destroyed, with many of the slaves on the plantations joining the Seminoles.

Other war chiefs such as Halleck Tustenuggee, Jumper, and Black Seminoles Abraham and John Horse continued the Seminole resistance against the army. The war ended, after a full decade of fighting, in 1842. The U.S. government is estimated to have spent about $20,000,000 on the war, at the time an astronomical sum, and equal to $561,586,207 today. Many Indians were forcibly exiled to Creek lands west of the Mississippi; others retreated into the Everglades. In the end, the government gave up trying to subjugate the Seminole in their Everglades redoubts and left fewer than 500 Seminoles in peace. Other scholars state that at least several hundred Seminoles remained in the Everglades after the Seminole Wars.

As a result of the Seminole Wars, the surviving Seminole band of the Everglades claims to be the only federally recognized Indian nation which never relinquished sovereignty or signed a peace treaty with the United States.

In general the American people tended to view the Indian resistance as unwarranted. An article published by the Virginia Enquirer on January 26, 1836, called the "Hostilities of the Seminoles", assigned all the blame for the violence that came from the Seminole's resistance to the Seminoles themselves. The article accuses the Indians of not staying true to their word-the promises they supposedly made in the treaties and negotiations from the Indian Removal Act.

Creek dissolution

After the War of 1812, some Muscogee leaders such as William McIntosh signed treaties that ceded more land to Georgia. The 1814 signing of the Treaty of Fort Jackson signaled the end for the Creek Nation and for all Indians in the South. Friendly Creek leaders, like Selocta and Big Warrior, addressed Sharp Knife (the Indian nickname for Andrew Jackson) and reminded him that they keep the peace. Nevertheless, Jackson retorted that they did not "cut ( Tecumseh's) throat" when they had the chance, so they must now cede Creek lands. Jackson also ignored Article 9 of the Treaty of Ghent that restored sovereignty to Indians and their nations.

Jackson opened this first peace session by faintly acknowledging the help of the friendly Creeks. That done, he turned to the Red Sticks and admonished them for listening to evil counsel. For their crime, he said, the entire Creek Nation must pay. He demanded the equivalent of all expenses incurred by the United States in prosecuting the war, which by his calculation came to 23,000,000 acres (93,000 km ²) of land.

Eventually, the Creek Confederacy enacted a law that made further land cessions a capital offense. Nevertheless, on February 12, 1825, McIntosh and other chiefs signed the Treaty of Indian Springs, which gave up most of the remaining Creek lands in Georgia. After the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty, McIntosh was assassinated on April 30, 1825, by Creeks led by Menawa.

The Creek National Council, led by Opothle Yohola, protested to the United States that the Treaty of Indian Springs was fraudulent. President John Quincy Adams was sympathetic, and eventually, the treaty was nullified in a new agreement, the Treaty of Washington (1826). The historian R. Douglas Hurt wrote: "The Creeks had accomplished what no Indian nation had ever done or would do again-achieve the annulment of a ratified treaty." However, Governor George Troup of Georgia ignored the new treaty and began to forcibly remove the Indians under the terms of the earlier treaty. At first, President Adams attempted to intervene with federal troops, but Troup called out the militia, and Adams, fearful of a civil war, conceded. As he explained to his intimates, "The Indians are not worth going to war over."

Although the Creeks had been forced from Georgia, with many Lower Creeks moving to the Indian Territory, there were still about 20,000 Upper Creeks living in Alabama. However, the state moved to abolish tribal governments and extend state laws over the Creeks. Opothle Yohola appealed to the administration of President Andrew Jackson for protection from Alabama; when none was forthcoming, the Treaty of Cusseta was signed on March 24, 1832, which divided up Creek lands into individual allotments. Creeks could either sell their allotments and receive funds to remove to the west, or stay in Alabama and submit to state laws. The Creeks were never given a fair chance to comply with the terms of the treaty, however. Rampant illegal settlement of their lands by Americans continued unabated with federal and state authorities unable or unwilling to do much to halt it. Further, as recently detailed by historian Billy Winn in his thorough chronicle of the events leading to removal, a variety of fraudulent schemes designed to cheat the Creeks out of their allotments, many of them organized by speculators operating out of Columbus, Georgia and Montgomery, Alabama, were perpetrated after the signing of the Treaty of Cusseta. A portion of the beleaguered Creeks, many desperately poor and feeling abused and oppressed by their American neighbors, struck back by carrying out occasional raids on area farms and committing other isolated acts of violence. Escalating tensions erupted into open war with the United States after the destruction of the village of Roanoke, Georgia, located along the Chattahoochee River on the boundary between Creek and American territory, in May 1836. During the so-called " Creek War of 1836" Secretary of War Lewis Cass dispatched General Winfield Scott to end the violence by forcibly removing the Creeks to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. With the Indian Removal Act of 1830 it continued into 1835 and after as in 1836 over 15,000 Creeks were driven from their land for the last time. 3,500 of those 15,000 Creeks did not survive the trip to Oklahoma where they eventually settled.

Chickasaw monetary removal

The Chickasaw received financial compensation from the United States for their lands east of the Mississippi River. In 1836, the Chickasaws had reached an agreement to purchase land from the previously removed Choctaws after a bitter five-year debate. They paid the Choctaws $530,000 (equal to $13,078,152 today) for the westernmost part of the Choctaw land. The first group of Chickasaws moved in 1836 and was led by John M. Millard. The Chickasaws gathered at Memphis on July 4, 1836, with all of their assets-belongings, livestock, and slaves. Once across the Mississippi River, they followed routes previously established by the Choctaws and the Creeks. Once in Indian Territory, the Chickasaws merged with the Choctaw nation.

Cherokee forced relocation

By 1838, about 2,000 Cherokee had voluntarily relocated from Georgia to Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma). Forcible removals began in May 1838 when General Winfield Scott received a final order from President Martin Van Buren to relocate the remaining Cherokees. Approximately 4,000 Cherokees died in the ensuing trek to Oklahoma. In the Cherokee language, the event is called nu na da ul tsun yi ("the place where they cried") or nu na hi du na tlo hi lu i (the trail where they cried). The Cherokee Trail of Tears resulted from the enforcement of the Treaty of New Echota, an agreement signed under the provisions of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which exchanged Indian land in the East for lands west of the Mississippi River, but which was never accepted by the elected tribal leadership or a majority of the Cherokee people.

There were significant changes in gender relations within the Cherokee Nation during the implementation of the Indian Removal Act during the 1830s. Cherokee historically operated on a matrilineal kinship system, where children belonged to the clan of their mother and their only relatives were those who could be traced through her. In addition to being matrilineal, Cherokees were also matrilocal. According to the naturalist William Bartram, "Marriage gives no right to the husband over the property of his wife; and when they part, she keeps the children and property belonging to them." In this way, the typical Cherokee family was structured in a way where the wife held possession to the property, house, and children. However, during the 1820s and 1830s, "Cherokees [began adopting] the Anglo-American concept of power-a political system dominated by wealthy, highly acculturated men and supported by an ideology that made women ... subordinate".

The Treaty of New Echota was largely signed by men. While women were present at the rump council negotiating the treaty, they did not have a seat at the table to participate in the proceedings. Historian Theda Perdue explains that "Cherokee women met in their own councils to discuss their own opinions" despite not being able to participate. The inability for women to join in on the negotiation and signing of the Treaty of New Echota shows how the role of women changed dramatically within Cherokee Nation following colonial encroachment. For instance, Cherokee women played a significant role in the negotiation of land transactions as late as 1785, where they spoke at a treaty conference held at Hopewell, South Carolina to clarify and extend land cessions stemming from Cherokee support of the British in the American Revolution.

The sparsely inhabited Cherokee lands were highly attractive to Georgian farmers experiencing population pressure, and illegal settlements resulted. Long-simmering tensions between Georgia and the Cherokee Nation were brought to a crisis by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1829, resulting in the Georgia Gold Rush, the second gold rush in U.S. history. Hopeful gold speculators began trespassing on Cherokee lands, and pressure mounted to fulfill the Compact of 1802 in which the US Government promised to extinguish Indian land claims in the state of Georgia.

When Georgia moved to extend state laws over Cherokee lands in 1830, the matter went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the Marshall court ruled that the Cherokee Nation was not a sovereign and independent nation, and therefore refused to hear the case. However, in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the Court ruled that Georgia could not impose laws in Cherokee territory, since only the national government-not state governments-had authority in Indian affairs. Worcester v Georgia is associated with Andrew Jackson's famous, though apocryphal, quote "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" In reality, this quote did not appear until 30 years after the incident and was first printed in a textbook authored by Jackson critic Horace Greeley.

Fearing open warfare between federal troops and the Georgia militia, Jackson decided not to enforce Cherokee claims against the state of Georgia. He was already embroiled in a constitutional crisis with South Carolina (i.e. the nullification crisis) and favored Cherokee relocation over civil war. With the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the U.S. Congress had given Jackson authority to negotiate removal treaties, exchanging Indian land in the East for land west of the Mississippi River. Jackson used the dispute with Georgia to put pressure on the Cherokees to sign a removal treaty.

The final treaty, passed in Congress by a single vote, and signed by President Andrew Jackson, was imposed by his successor President Martin Van Buren. Van Buren allowed Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama an armed force of 7,000 militiamen, army regulars, and volunteers under General Winfield Scott to relocate about 13,000 Cherokees to Cleveland, Tennessee. After the initial roundup, the U.S. military oversaw the emigration to Oklahoma. Former Cherokee lands were immediately opened to settlement. Most of the deaths during the journey were caused by disease, malnutrition, and exposure during an unusually cold winter.

In the winter of 1838 the Cherokee began the 1,000-mile (1,600 km) march with scant clothing and most on foot without shoes or moccasins. The march began in Red Clay, Tennessee, the location of the last Eastern capital of the Cherokee Nation. Because of the diseases, the Indians were not allowed to go into any towns or villages along the way; many times this meant traveling much farther to go around them. After crossing Tennessee and Kentucky, they arrived at the Ohio River across from Golconda in southern Illinois about the 3rd of December 1838. Here the starving Indians were charged a dollar a head (equal to $25.45 today) to cross the river on "Berry's Ferry" which typically charged twelve cents, equal to $3.05 today. They were not allowed passage until the ferry had serviced all others wishing to cross and were forced to take shelter under "Mantle Rock", a shelter bluff on the Kentucky side, until "Berry had nothing better to do". Many died huddled together at Mantle Rock waiting to cross. Several Cherokee were murdered by locals. The Cherokee filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Government through the courthouse in Vienna, suing the government for $35 a head (equal to $890.64 today) to bury the murdered Cherokee.

As they crossed southern Illinois, on December 26, Martin Davis, commissary agent for Moses Daniel's detachment, wrote:

There is the coldest weather in Illinois I ever experienced anywhere. The streams are all frozen over something like 8 or 12 inches [20 or 30 cm] thick. We are compelled to cut through the ice to get water for ourselves and animals. It snows here every two or three days at the fartherest. We are now camped in Mississippi [River] swamp 4 miles (6 km) from the river, and there is no possible chance of crossing the river for the numerous quantity of ice that comes floating down the river every day. We have only traveled 65 miles (105 km) on the last month, including the time spent at this place, which has been about three weeks. It is unknown when we shall cross the river....

A volunteer soldier from Georgia who participated in the removal recounted:

I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.

It eventually took almost three months to cross the 60 miles (97 kilometres) on land between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The trek through southern Illinois is where the Cherokee suffered most of their deaths. However a few years before forced removal, some Cherokee who opted to leave their homes voluntarily chose a water-based route through the Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi rivers. It took only 21 days, but the Cherokee who were forcibly relocated were wary of water travel.

Environmental researchers David Gaines and Jere Krakow outline the "context of the tragic Cherokee relocation" as one predicated on the difference between "Indian regard for the land, and its contrast with the Euro-Americans view of land as property". This divergence in perspective on land, according to sociologists Gregory Hooks and Chad L. Smith, led to the homes of American Indian people "being donated and sold off" by the United States government to "promote the settlement and development of the West," with railroad developers, white settlers, land developers, and mining companies assuming ownership. In American Indian society, according to Colville scholar Dina Gilio-Whitaker, it caused "the loss of ancient connections to homelands and sacred sites," "the deaths of upward of 25 percent of those on the trail" and "the loss of life-sustaining livestock and crops."

Dina Gilio-Whitaker draws on research by Choctaw and Chippewa historian Clara Sue Kidwell to show the relationship between the Trail of Tears and a negative impact on the environment. In tracking the environmental changes of the southeastern tribes who relocated to new lands across the Trail of Tears, Kidwell finds that "prior to removal the tribes had already begun adapting to a cash-based, private property economic system with their adoption of many European customs (including the practice of slave owning), after their move west they had become more deeply entrenched into the American economic system with the discovery of coal deposits and the western expansion of the railroads on and through their lands. So while they adapted to their new environments, their relationship to land would change to fit the needs of an imposed capitalist system". Cherokee ethnobotanist Clint Carroll illustrates how this imposed capitalist system altered Cherokee efforts to protect traditional medicinal plants during relocation, saying that "these changes have resulted in contrasting land management paradigms, rooted in the language of 'resource-based' versus 'relationship-based' approaches, a binary imposed on tribal governments by the Bureau of Indian Affairs through their historically paternalistic relationship". This shift in land management as a function of removal had negative environmental ramifications such as solidifying "a deeply entrenched bureaucratic structure that still drives much of the federal-tribal relationship and determines how tribal governments use their lands, sometimes in ways that contribute to climate change and, in extreme cases, ways that lead to human rights abuses".

In addition to a physical relocation, American Indian removal and the Trail of Tears had social and cultural effects as American Indians were forced "to contemplate abandonment of their native land. To the Cherokees life was a part of the land. Every rock, every tree, every place had a spirit. And the spirit was central to the tribal lifeway. To many, the thought of loss of place was a thought of loss of self, loss of Cherokeeness, and a loss of life- way". This cultural shift is characterized by Gilio-Whitaker as "environmental deprivation," a concept that "relates to historical processes of land and resource dispossession calculated to bring about the destruction of Indigenous Americans' lives and cultures. Environmental deprivation in this sense refers to actions by settlers and settler governments that are designed to block Native peoples' access to life-giving and culture-affirming resources". The separation of American Indian people from their land lead to the loss of cultural knowledge and practices, as described by scholar Rachel Robison-Greene, who finds the "legacy of fifteenth-century European colonial domination" led to "Indigenous knowledge and perspectives" being "ignored and denigrated by the vast majority of social, physical, biological and agricultural scientists, and governments using colonial powers to exploit Indigenous resources". Indigenous cultural and intellectual contribution to "environmental issues" in the form of a "rich history, cultural customs, and practical wisdom regarding sustainable environmental practices" can be lost because of Indigenous removal and the Trail of Tears, according to Greene.

Removed Cherokees initially settled near Tahlequah, Oklahoma. When signing the Treaty of New Echota in 1835 Major Ridge said "I have signed my death warrant." The resulting political turmoil led to the killings of Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot; of the leaders of the Treaty Party, only Stand Watie escaped death. The population of the Cherokee Nation eventually rebounded, and today the Cherokees are the largest American Indian group in the United States.

There were some exceptions to removal. Approximately 100 Cherokees evaded the U.S. soldiers and lived off the land in Georgia and other states. Those Cherokees who lived on private, individually owned lands (rather than communally owned tribal land) were not subject to removal. In North Carolina, about 400 Cherokees, sometimes referred to as the Oconaluftee Cherokee due to their settlement near to the river of the same name, lived on land in the Great Smoky Mountains owned by a white man named William Holland Thomas (who had been adopted by Cherokees as a boy), and were thus not subject to removal. Added to this were some 200 Cherokee from the Nantahala area allowed to stay in the Qualla Boundary after assisting the U.S. Army in hunting down and capturing the family of the old prophet, Tsali (who faced a firing squad after capture). These North Carolina Cherokees became the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation.

A local newspaper, the Highland Messenger, said July 24, 1840, "that between nine hundred and a thousand of these deluded beings ... are still hovering about the homes of their fathers, in the counties of Macon and Cherokee" and "that they are a great annoyance to the citizens" who wanted to buy land there believing the Cherokee were gone; the newspaper reported that President Martin Van Buren said "they ... are, in his opinion, free to go or stay.'

There were a number of Cherokee speakers throughout history who offered first-hand accounts of the events of the Trail of Tears as well as provided insight into its lasting effects. Elias Budinot, Major Ridge, Speckled Snake, John Ross, and Richard Taylor were all notable Cherokee orators during the 19th century who used speech as a form of resistance against the U.S. government. John Ross, the Cherokee Chief from 1828 to 1866, and Major Ridge embarked on a speaking tour within the Cherokee Nation itself in hopes of strengthening a sense of unity amongst the tribal members. Tribal unity was a central tenet to Cherokee resistance, with Ross stating in his council address: "'Much...depends on our unity of sentiment and firmness of action, in maintaining those sacred rights which we have ever enjoyed'". Cherokee speeches like this were made even more important because the state of Georgia made it illegal for both members of American Indian tribes to speak to an all-white court and to convince other Indian tribal members not to move.

Another influential Cherokee figure was Cherokee writer John Ridge, son of Major Ridge, who wrote four articles using the pseudonym "Socrates". His works were published in the Cherokee Phoenix, the nation's newspaper. The choice of pseudonym, according to literary scholar Kelly Wisecup, "...facilitated a rhetorical structure that created not only a public persona recognizable to the Phoenix's multiple readerships but also a public character who argued forcefully that white readers should respect Cherokee rights and claims". The main focal points of Ridge's articles critiqued the perceived hypocrisy of the U.S. government, colonial history, and the events leading up to the Trail of Tears, using excerpts from American and European history and literature.

Eastern Cherokee Restitution

The United States Court of Claims ruled in favor of the Eastern Cherokee Nation's claim against the U.S. on May 18, 1905. This resulted in the appropriation of $1 million (equal to $27,438,023.04 today) to the Nation's eligible individuals and families. Interior Department employee Guion Miller created a list using several rolls and applications to verify tribal enrollment for the distribution of funds, known as the Guion Miller Roll. The applications received documented over 125,000 individuals; the court approved more than 30,000 individuals to share in the funds.[page needed ]

Statistics

Landmarks and commemorations

In 1987, about 2,200 miles (3,500 km) of trails were authorized by federal law to mark the removal of 17 detachments of the Cherokee people. Called the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, it traverses portions of nine states and includes land and water routes.

Trail of Tears outdoor historical drama, Unto These Hills

A historical drama based on the Trail of Tears, Unto These Hills written by Kermit Hunter, has sold over five million tickets for its performances since its opening on July 1, 1950, both touring and at the outdoor Mountainside Theater of the Cherokee Historical Association in Cherokee, North Carolina.

Remember the Removal bike ride

A regular event, the "Remember the Removal Bike Ride," allows six cyclists from the Cherokee Nation to ride over 950 miles while retracing the same path that their ancestors took. The cyclists, who average about 60 miles a day, start their journey in the former capital of the Cherokee Nation, New Echota, Georgia, and finish in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

Commemorative medallion

Cherokee artist Troy Anderson was commissioned to design the Cherokee Trail of Tears Sesquicentennial Commemorative Medallion. The falling-tear medallion shows a seven-pointed star, the symbol of the seven clans of the Cherokees.

In literature and oral history

Family Stories From the Trail of Tears is a collection edited by Lorrie Montiero and transcribed by Grant Foreman, taken from the Indian-Pioneer History Collection

Walking the Trail (1991) is a book by Jerry Ellis describing his 900-mile walk retracing of the Trail of Tears in reverse

Ruth Muskrat Bronson, a Cherokee scholar and poet, was a more contemporary figure who wrote a poem titled "Trail of Tears" that enshrined the devastation faced by the Cherokee nation that still permeates Indigenous conscience today:

From the homes their fathers made // From the graves the tall trees shade // For the sake of greed and gold, // The Cherokees were forced to go // To a land they did not know; // And Father Time or wisdom old // Cannot erase, through endless years // The memory of the trail of tears.

References

Bibliography

Bealer, Alex W. (1996) [1972]. Only the Names Remain: The Cherokees and The Trail of Tears. Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0-316-08519-9.

Carter, Samuel (1976). Cherokee Sunset: A Nation Betrayed. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-06735-6.

Ehle, John (1989) [1988]. Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. New York: Anchor Books. ISBN 0-385-23954-8.

Gregg, Matthew T. and David M. Wishart. "The price of Cherokee removal". Explorations in Economic History Volume 49, Issue 4, October 2012, Pages 423-442

Jahoda, Gloria (1995) [1975]. Trail of Tears: The Story of the American Indian Removal 1813-1855. Henry Holt & Co. ISBN 978-0-517-14677-4.

Mooney, James (2007) [1888]. King, Duane (ed.). Myths of the Cherokee. New York: Barnes & Noble. ISBN 978-0-7607-8340-5.

Prucha, Francis (1984). The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. Lincoln, Nebraska: Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-3668-9.

Remini, Robert (2001). Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-91025-2.

Wallace, Anthony (1993). The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (Hardback ed.). New York: Hill and Wang. ISBN 0-8090-6631-9.

Winn, William W. (2015). The Triumph of the Ecunnau-Nuxulgee: Land Speculators, George M. Troup, State Rights, and the Removal of the Creek Indians from Georgia and Alabama, 1825-38. Macon: Mercer University Press. 9780881465228.

External links

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Trail of Tears Part of Indian removal Location Southeastern United States and Indian Territory Date 1830 to 1850 Forced displacement Ethnic cleansing [1] [2] Deaths Cherokee (4,000) Creek Seminole (3,000 in Second Seminole War - 1835-1842) Chickasaw (3,500) Choctaw (2,500-6,000) Ponca (200) Victims " Five Civilized Tribes" of Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Ponca and Ho-Chunk/Winnebago nations Perpetrators U.S.

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Who Was Harper Lee?

In 1959, Harper Lee finished the manuscript for her Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller To Kill a Mockingbird. Soon after, she helped fellow writer and friend Truman Capote compose an article for The New Yorker which would evolve into his nonfiction masterpiece, In Cold Blood.

In July 2015, Lee published her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, which was written before To Kill a Mockingbird and portrays the later lives of the characters from her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Early Life

Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama. The youngest of four children, she grew up as a tomboy in a small town.

Her father was a lawyer, a member of the Alabama state legislature and also owned part of the local newspaper. For most of Lee's life, her mother suffered from mental illness, rarely leaving the house. It is believed that she may have had bipolar disorder.

Education

In high school, Lee developed an interest in English literature. After graduating in 1944, she attended the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery. Lee stood apart from the other students-she couldn't have cared less about fashion, makeup or dating. Instead, she focused on her studies and writing. Lee was a member of the literary honor society and the glee club.

Transferring to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, Lee was known for being a loner and an individualist. She did make a greater attempt at a social life there, joining a sorority for a while.

Pursuing her interest in writing, Lee contributed to the school's newspaper and its humor magazine, the Rammer Jammer, eventually becoming the publication's editor.

In her junior year, Lee was accepted into the university's law school, which allowed students to work on law degrees while still undergraduates. The demands of her law studies forced her to leave her post as Rammer Jammer editor.

After her first year in the program, Lee began expressing to her family that writing-not the law-was her true calling. She went to the University of Oxford in England that summer as an exchange student.

Returning to her law studies that fall, Lee dropped out after the first semester. She soon moved north to follow her dreams to become a writer.

Photo: Donald Uhrbrock/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images

Early Writing Career

In 1949, a 23-year-old Lee arrived in New York City. She struggled for several years, working as a ticket agent for Eastern Airlines and for the British Overseas Air Corp (BOAC).

While in the city, Lee befriended Broadway composer and lyricist Michael Martin Brown and his wife Joy. In 1956, the Browns gave Lee an impressive Christmas present-to support her for a year so that she could write full time. She quit her job and devoted herself to her craft.

The Browns also helped her find an agent, Maurice Crain. He, in turn, was able to get publisher J.B. Lippincott Company interested in her work. Working with editor Tay Hohoff, Lee worked on a manuscript set in a small Alabama town, which eventually became her novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

Friendship With Truman Capote

One of Lee's closest childhood friends was another writer-to-be, Truman Capote (then known as Truman Persons). Tougher than many of the boys, Lee often stepped up to serve as Truman's childhood protector.

Truman, who shared few interests with boys his age, was picked on for being sensitive and for the fancy clothes he wore. While the two friends were very different, they both had difficult home lives. Truman was living with his mother's relatives in town after largely being abandoned by his own parents.

While in New York City in the 1950s, Lee was reunited with her old friend Capote, who was by then one of the literary rising stars of the time.

In 1956, Lee joined forces with Capote to assist him with an article he was writing for The New Yorker. Capote was writing about the impact of the murder of four members of the Clutter family on their small Kansas farming community.

The two traveled to Kansas to interview townspeople, friends and family of the deceased and the investigators working to solve the crime.

Serving as his research assistant, Lee helped with the interviews, eventually winning over some of the locals with her easygoing, unpretentious manner. Truman, with his flamboyant personality and style, had a hard time initially getting himself into his subjects' good graces.

During their time in Kansas, the Clutters' suspected killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, were caught in Las Vegas and brought back for questioning. Lee and Capote got a chance to interview the suspects not long after their arraignment in January 1960.

Soon after, Lee and Capote returned to New York. She worked on the galleys for her forthcoming first novel while he started working on his article, which would evolve into the nonfiction masterpiece In Cold Blood.

The pair returned to Kansas for the murder trial. Lee gave Capote all of her notes on the crime, the victims, the killers, the local communities and much more.

Lee worked with Capote on and off on In Cold Blood. She had been invited by Smith and Hickock to witness their execution in 1965, but she declined. When Capote's book was finally published in 1966, a rift developed between the two collaborators for a time.

Capote dedicated the book to Lee and his longtime lover, Jack Dunphy, but failed to acknowledge her contributions to the work. While Lee was very angry and hurt by this betrayal, she remained friends with Capote for the rest of his life.
READ MORE: Harper Lee and Truman Capote Were Childhood Friends Until Jealously Tore Them Apart
DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S HARPER LEE FACT CARD

Books

Lee published two books in her lifetime: To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Go Set a Watchman (2015). She also worked on and off with her friend Capote on his famed book, In Cold Blood (1966).

'To Kill a Mockingbird'

In July 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was published and picked up by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild. A condensed version of the story appeared in Reader's Digest magazine. The following year, the novel won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize and several other literary awards. A classic of American literature, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than 40 languages with more than a million copies sold each year.

The work's central character, a young girl nicknamed Scout, was not unlike Lee in her youth. In one of the book's major plotlines, Scout and her brother Jem and their friend Dill explore their fascination with a mysterious and somewhat infamous neighborhood character named Boo Radley.

The work was more than a coming-of-age story: another part of the novel reflected racial prejudices in the South. Their attorney father, Atticus Finch, tries to help a Black man who has been charged with raping a white woman to get a fair trial and to prevent him from being lynched by angry white people in a small town.

'Go Set a Watchman'

Lee published her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, in July 2015. The story was essentially a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird and followed the later lives of the novel's characters.

Go Set a Watchman was submitted to a publisher in 1957. When the book wasn't accepted, Lee's editor asked her to revise the story and make her main character Scout a child. The author worked on the story for two years and it eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird.

Lee's Go Set a Watchman was thought to be lost until it was discovered by her lawyer Tonja Carter in a safe deposit box. In February 2015, it was announced that HarperCollins would publish the manuscript on July 14, 2015.

Go Set a Watchman features Mockingbird's Scout as a 26-year-old woman on her way back home to Maycomb, Alabama, from New York City. Scout's father Atticus, the upstanding moral conscience of To Kill a Mockingbird, is portrayed as a racist with bigoted views and ties to the Ku Klux Klan.

In Watchman, Atticus tells Scout: "Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?"

The controversial novel and shocking portrayal of a beloved character sparked debates among fans, and offered literary scholars and students fodder for analyzing the author's creative process. Lee's second novel also broke pre-sale records for HarperCollins.

With reports of 88-year-old Lee's faltering health, questions arose about whether the publication was the author's decision. Lee issued a statement through Carter: "I'm alive and kicking and happy as hell with the reactions to Watchman."

But even that message didn't put an end to questions: In a 2011 letter, Lee's sister Alice had written that Lee would "sign anything put before her by any one in whom she has confidence." However, others who had met with Lee stated that she was behind the decision to publish. Alabama officials investigated and found no evidence that she was a victim of coercion.

'To Kill a Mockingbird' Movie

Playwright Horton Foote wrote a screenplay based on the book and used the same title for a 1962 To Kill a Mockingbird movie adaptation. Lee visited the set during filming and did a lot of interviews to support the project.

The movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird earning eight Academy Award nominations and won three awards, including best actor for Gregory Peck's portrayal of Finch. The character is said to have been based on Lee's father.

Later Years

In the mid-1960s, Lee was reportedly working on another novel, but it was never published.

In 1966, Lee had an operation on her hand to repair the damage done by a bad burn. She also accepted a post on the National Council of the Arts at the request of President Lyndon B. Johnson. During the 1970s and '80s, Lee largely retreated from public life.

Lee spent some of her time on a nonfiction book project about an Alabama serial killer which had the working title The Reverend. This work, however, was never published.

Lee generally lived a quiet, private life, splitting her time between New York City and her hometown of Monroeville. In Monroeville, she lived with her older sister Alice Lee, a lawyer who the author called "Atticus in a skirt." Lee's sister was a close confidante who often took care of the author's legal and financial affairs.

Active in her church and community, Lee became famous for avoiding the spotlight of her celebrity. She would often use the wealth she had accumulated from her success to make anonymous philanthropic donations to various charitable causes.

In November 2007, President George W. Bush presented Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her "outstanding contribution to America's literary tradition" at a ceremony at the White House.

Her sister Alice once said about Lee, "Books are the things she cares about." With the assistance of a magnifying device-necessary due to her macular degeneration-Lee was able to keep reading despite her ailments.

Lawsuits and E-Publishing Deal

In May 2013, Lee filed a lawsuit in federal court against literary agent Samuel Pinkus. Lee charged that, in 2007, Pinkus "engaged in a scheme to dupe" her out of the copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird, later diverting royalties from the work. In September 2013, a settlement was reached in the lawsuit.

Later that year, Lee's legal team filed suit against the Monroe County Heritage Museum located in Monroeville for trying "to capitalize on the fame" of To Kill a Mockingbird andfor selling unauthorized merchandise related to the novel. Lawyers for the author and the museum later filed a joint motion to end the suit, and the case was dismissed by a federal judge in February 2014.

That same year, Lee allowed her famous work to be released as an e-book. She signed a deal with HarperCollins for the company to release To Kill a Mockingbird as an e-book and digital audio editions.

In a release shared by the publisher, Lee explained: "I'm still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries. I am amazed and humbled that Mockingbird has survived this long. This is Mockingbird for a new generation."

Death

Lee died on February 19, 2016, at the age of 89. Her nephew, Hank Connor, said the author died in her sleep.

In 2007, Lee suffered a stroke and struggled with various ongoing health issues, including hearing loss, limited vision and problems with her short-term memory. After the stroke, Lee moved into an assisted living facility in Monroeville.

Around the time of Lee's death in 2016, it was announced that producer Scott Rudin had hired Aaron Sorkin to write a stage version of To Kill a Mockingbird. In March 2018, several months before the production's scheduled Broadway debut, Lee's estate filed a lawsuit on the grounds that Sorkin's adaptation significantly deviated from the original material.

A main point of contention was the play's portrayal of Finch, which reportedly showed him in early scenes as more in step with the oppressive racial feelings of the time, as opposed to the heroic crusader of the novel.

Rudin pushed back against the assertion that the characters were significantly altered, though he insisted he had leeway to adapt them to contemporary times. "I can't and won't present a play that feels like it was written in the year the book was written in terms of its racial politics: It wouldn't be of interest," he said. "The world has changed since then."

The portrayal of Atticus Finch was reportedly softened from someone "who drinks alcohol, keeps a gun and curses mildly" to an "honest and decent person." The play hit Broadway in December 2018.

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In 1959, Harper Lee finished the manuscript for her Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller To Kill a Mockingbird. Soon after, she helped fellow writer and friend Truman Capote compose an article for The New Yorker which would evolve into his nonfiction masterpiece, In Cold Blood.

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Gordon Allport

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Inflammatory in modern culture?

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Hi. I'm a teacher in a an almost equally mixed white black and Hispanic population. I hear the [n-word] said and often yelled many times a day in the halls of this 2000 plus student school. White , black and Hispanic students use this word among friends and it seems to have become excepted in the school subculture - to the extent that teachers feel unwilling to deal with it. Today, a black student yelled "what's up [n-word]" to a friend so loudly within q few feet of me that I said "Don't say that." He said "I'm black. i can say it." I said "nobody can say it!" He said "Shut the f__up!" and walked away. I feel like people can say what they want in their own homes and on the street, but this is unacceptable in school, regardless of re-appropriation. How do I deal with this. Am I wrong? I can't tackle this issue alone in a school this size.

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Hi. I'm a teacher in a an almost equally mixed white black and Hispanic population. I hear the [n-word] said and often yelled many times a day in the halls of this 2000 plus student school.

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Huck Finn Teachers Guide: Controversy at Cherry Hill

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In 1995, several African American high school students in Cherry Hill complained to their parents about having to read Huck Finn in class. Before assigning it, some teachers had not mentioned that the book was controversial, nor had they noted the more than two hundred instances of the word "nigger" in the novel.

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African American Registry

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African American Registry / Inspiring the Young Minds of Our Future

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The most comprehensive on-line database resource of African American history in the world. Our Mission: Inspiring the Young Minds of Our Future. Our Method: Teacher Preparation, Technology, Youth Programs. Our Goal: Curriculum Reform & Giving Youth a Guided Voice.