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The "South" is virtually inconceivable without sustained attention to race, yet most scholarly examinations of southern identity have focused almost exclusively on the experiences of white southerners, ignoring the experiences of other racial groups in the region, most particularly black southerners. A similar phenomenon occurs in everyday conversations about the South, evidenced by the well-worn habit of talking about "southerners" when actually referring to white southerners. For example, most of us, at one time or another, have heard, or perhaps even said, that "southerners are racist" or "southerners owned slaves." Such statements implicitly connect being southern with being white.1
The lay and academic tendency to equate southernness and whiteness is troubling when one considers that, in today's South, black southerners living in the region are slightly more likely to claim a southern identity than whites are. According to polls conducted throughout the 1990s, about 78 percent of African Americans living in the region claimed to be southern, compared to 75 percent of whites. Many scholars of the South have asserted that African Americans are now starting to reclaim their southern identity after the demise of Jim Crow. Noting that African Americans are returning to the South in large numbers, historian Edward Ayers argues that for some black Americans the South may be seen as a homeland. Even so, Ayers argues that there is a different "moral geography" for blacks and whites in the South. Writing in 1996, he noted that black southerners did not have flags or monuments to connect them with the "official South," but they were connected to the region by their own "sweat and sacrifice" and by places of personal meaning-"certain farms, houses, and streets."2
Today, the region's African Americans still have few monuments dedicated to the memory of their cultural contributions and sacrifices, yet black southerners' labor, and often their blood, played an important and essential role in the development of the region. In an environment characterized by brutal racial oppression, white supremacy, slavery, segregation, and violence, black southerners raised crops, built roads, labored in coal mines, raised white children, and were vital in creating an infrastructure and a way of life that supported and enabled the prosperity of many whites. The recent work by journalist Douglas A. Blackmon on the...