Illustrations from Dixie Be Damned

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Max Hunt



... We tend to think of older generations as being terribly serious, but in all these insurrections, there was a staggering amount of fun and humanity. I’m thinking of Lowry’s insistence on playing fiddle before negotiations or the wacky antics of the Elizabethton strikers: These folks were in life-and-death situations, and yet they were playing music, being joyous and even wonderfully silly in ways that are hard for modern folks to imagine. In almost every insurrection covered in the book, there is an insistence, even amongst desperately poor people, that life not be mere survival ...

... We’re all living with the outcomes, the shortcomings and the repression of these uprisings. For those of us actively involved in social movements, this is absolutely apparent. The modern prison system emerges as an outgrowth of, as well as a response to, struggle against the convict lease system, which was itself a solution to the problem of figuring out how to keep controlling and exploiting black people after the Civil War. The story is similar with modern police forces, which in the South stem directly from early fugitive slave-hunting posses ...

We grew up being told that the South is a passive, conservative place, a land that time forgot, and that the only antidote to this is a certain kind of liberal, capitalist “progress”. Those are two false narratives. We actually have this incredible inspiring history of resistance in the South that rejects and challenges both those stories. This is where whiteness, as a marker and producer of political and economic domination, originates, and (not coincidentally) this region is, in some ways, the historical heart of global capitalism. But it is also a place of creative resistance and resilience against oppression ...

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