DIXIE BE DAMNED 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
DIXIE BE DAMNED 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South DIXIE BE DAMNED 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South Saralee Stafford and Neal Shirley Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South Text anti-copyright @ 2015 Saralee Staford and Neal Shirley. Tis text may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes. Please inform the authors and publisher at the address below of any such use. Tis edition © 2015 AK Press (Oakland, Edinburgh, Baltimore). ISBN: 978-1-84935-207-9 | eBook ISBN: 978-1-84935-208-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2014958842 AK Press AK Press 674-A 23rd Street PO Box 12766 Oakland, CA 94612 Edinburgh EH8 9YE USA Scotland www.akpress.org www.akuk.com [email protected] [email protected] Te above addresses would be delighted to provide you with the latest AK Press distribution catalog, which features the several thousand books, pamphlets, zines, audio and video prod- ucts, and stylish apparel published and/or distributed by AK Press. Alternatively, visit our websites for the complete catalog, latest news, and secure ordering. Cover design by Neal Shirley Interior Design by Margaret Killjoy | birdsbeforethestorm.net Printed in the USA on acid-free paper. 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 Te Lowry Wars ...........................89 Attacking Reconstruction and Reaction in Robeson County, North Carolina INTERLUDE IV.............................119 Te Stockade Stood Burning ................121 Rebellion and the Convict Lease in Tennessee’s Coalfelds 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 “Living in the South often means slipping out of temporal joint, a peculiar phenomenon that I fnd both nourishes and wounds. To identify a person as a south- erner suggests not only that her history is inescapable and formative but that it is also impossibly present. Southerners live uneasily at the nexus between myth and reality, watching the mishmash amalgam of sor- row, humility, honor, graciousness, and renegade def- ance play out against a backdrop of profigate physical beauty.” —Sally Mann, Deep South “Social Democracy thought ft to assign to the work- ing class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. Tis training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifce, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.” —Walter Benjamin, Teses on the Philosophy of History “I would like to write the history of this prison, with all the political investments of the body that it gathers together in its closed architecture. Why? Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing a history of the present.” —Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish AN INTRODUCTION This book is the product of several years of loving labor and two lifetimes’ worth of conversations and refections. It was written in the spaces between. Between debates over interpretation and research; be- tween assemblies, marches, and riots; between work shifts and too little sleep; between bouts of crisis and caring for those we love; between fghts 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. Tis book has been no diferent. Dixie Be Damned is not a “people’s history” of the South or a com- pilation of politically removed academic articles about rebellions in the region. Tis is an experiment in reading and writing history from the per- spective 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 inextrica- bly present when we fnd ourselves in confict 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 read- ers with the allure of a linear and clean narrative that presents itself as an authoritative and authentic past. Tis objectivity protects the status quo by presenting it as natural and inevitable. Yet it has not been easy for histo- rians to craft a story of the South that accomplishes this task of sanitizing 2 | Dixie Be Damned our past. When a storyteller’s reverence for the Old South and “southern heritage” cannot avoid the obvious stains of racism and misogyny, the sto- ry switches to a carefully crafted narrative of progress—one that omits any thread of liberatory violence or confict 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 diferent historical understanding, and consequently a dif- ferent understanding of our current struggles. Te 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 specifc 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 difer so starkly from our own. We are indeed partisans, but of revolt and freedom, not of a specifc 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 fnd contemptuous. In many of the struggles we dis- cuss, from slave rebellions to wildcats and prison riots, terrible things were done by people with whom we would likely have claimed afnity. For us, the center of gravity in this text is not the character of the individuals in- volved 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 confict or tension in a specifc region and time period of the American South. Tese 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 An Introduction | 3 well as the broader desire to read history unconstrained from profession- alism and political platforms. Mostly, though, these episodes were chosen because they found us. Our writing process was not solely spent research- ing in historical archives and online databases: this project was a part of our lives long before we began writing three years ago. Te methodology of our research fought with the alchemy of our memories; we might come across a story in a book, but it is the ways in which it weaved itself with our own experience and knowledge of place that brought it to these pages. We’d like to share one example of the kind of family stories that moti- vated this book: One of our great-great-great grandfathers, Hugh Sprin- kle, was an established moonshiner and distributor before the Civil War in Yadkin County, North Carolina. When conscription came to the Yad- kin Valley—the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains—Hugh Sprinkle, along with many other non-slaveholding small farmers, chose to go un- derground rather than fght for the Confederacy. Tey left their families, friends, and homes, and hoped to return at the end of the war.