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To our families who taught us to be proud of where we’re from; to our friends who gave us their unending support, critique, advice, and patience; to all those who wear the mask, and those with whom we’ve shared the streets and occupations of the last few years; to all the lives who filled these pages with their words and deeds and passion for freedom, who are the very reason we took pause to write and the reason we still fight. This book belongs to y’all.
Contents
An Introduction 1
Interlude I 14
A Subtle yet Restless Fire 17
Attacking Slavery from the Dark Fens of the Great Dismal
Interlude II 50
Ogeechee Till Death 53
Expropriation and Communization
in Low-country Georgia
Interlude III 87
The Lowry Wars 89
Attacking Reconstruction and
Reaction in Robeson County, North Carolina
Interlude IV 119
The Stockade Stood Burning 121
Rebellion and the Convict Lease in Tennessee’s Coalfields
Interlude V 144
Wild Hearts in the Southern Mills 147
Women in the Strike Wave
against the Textile Industry, 1929–1930
Interlude VI 177
From Rebel to Citizen and Back Again 179
Civil Rights, Black Power,
and Urban Riots in the New South
Interlude VII 216
“We Asked For Life!” 219
On the 1975 Revolt at the
North Carolina Correctional Center for Women
Interlude VIII 248
Conclusion 253
Preliminary Notes for an
Anarchist Historiography of the American South
Bibliography 271
Index 281
If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement.… A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point. As it is, though, I’ll do what little I can in writing. Only it will be very little. I’m not capable of it; and if I were, you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you would hardly bear to live.
—James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
An Introduction
This book is the product of several years of loving labor and two lifetimes’ worth of conversations and reflections. It was written in the spaces between. Between debates over interpretation and research; between assemblies, marches, and riots; between work shifts and too little sleep; between bouts of crisis and caring for those we love; between fights and healing; between prison visits and noise demos; between the world we live in and the anger we feel toward that world. We are neither professional authors or academics, nor professionals of any other kind; in all of these endeavors we take solace in the creative power of experimentation and the slowly acquired knowledge that comes with it. This book has been no different.
Dixie Be Damned is not a “people’s history” of the South or a compilation of politically removed academic articles about rebellions in the region. This is an experiment in reading and writing history from the perspective of two anarchists who grew up in this region. We wanted to see if sharing these stories would help illuminate why the past feels so inextricably present when we find ourselves in conflict with forces that would have us forget our histories.
While this project has been deeply researched, edited, and toiled over, it is anything but objective. Objectivity is a myth, designed to attract readers with the allure of a linear and clean narrative that presents itself as an authoritative and authentic past. This objectivity protects the status quo by presenting it as natural and inevitable. Yet it has not been easy for historians to craft a story of the South that accomplishes this task of sanitizing our past. When a storyteller’s reverence for the Old South and “southern heritage” cannot avoid the obvious stains of racism and misogyny, the story switches to a carefully crafted narrative of progress—one that omits any thread of liberatory violence or conflict that challenges the social peace.
We fully admit that we too are storytellers. We wrote this book not to present Truth to the reader but to highlight those moments of revolt in which we have found inspiration and courage, from which we draw the possibility for a different historical understanding, and consequently a different understanding of our current struggles. The selected narratives that emerge in these pages are not an attempt to paint the entire history of this vast region in one new, singular light—that would be a dogmatic, futile, and ultimately authoritarian project. It is always the danger of writing history that, in the inevitable selection of certain episodes that highlight a specific perspective, one risks imposing a vulgar and one-dimensional view of the world. We are open to the possibility that the “historical project” is an inherently authoritarian endeavor but remain committed to digesting and learning from the many revolts and struggles that have been hidden from us. We grow tired of reading the historical analyses of those whose desires differ so starkly from our own.
We are indeed partisans, but of revolt and freedom, not of a specific cause or group or ideology per se, and we have no intention of deifying the protagonists of this book. Like our comrades today, the rebels and insurrectionaries in these pages were not heroes or villains but humans, and while we choose to focus on their liberatory practices in this text, we would remind the reader that many of the people within held attitudes that we would now find contemptuous. In many of the struggles we discuss, from slave rebellions to wildcats and prison riots, terrible things were done by people with whom we would likely have claimed affinity. For us, the center of gravity in this text is not the character of the individuals involved but the moments of rebellion and rupture, and what we can learn from them.
Writing and Reading This Book
Each of this book’s seven chapters highlights a unique conflict or tension in a specific region and time period of the American South. These episodes were chosen both spontaneously and strategically. In part they represent to us a set of dynamics and responses to conditions that illuminate larger transitions in history that we found relevant to the anarchist project, as well as the broader desire to read history unconstrained from professionalism and political platforms. Mostly, though, these episodes were chosen because they found us. Our writing process was
