![]() ![]() ![]() What it means to be Black in the South, Perry shows, is not just a question of being Black in the South it is also a question of what it means to be Black in the United States-to be Black in a nation whose traditional narrative of itself shifts the blame for racism, white supremacy, and segregation onto one region instead of confronting the ways in which these maladies were and still are national. With it, Perry enters a long tradition of considering Southern identity-the South of Black freedom and of Black oppression. The different Souths that many Black Americans carry with them is the central theme of a new book by Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. ![]() It was where the historic struggles against inequality and discrimination had taken place, but it was also a region that had cast an ominous shadow over the rest of the country. For many Black Americans, the South was an ancestral home as well as a place of present warning and future promise. Johnson, wrote: “Long before there was a United States of America, there was a Southland.” For many in his generation who had participated in the civil rights movement, the South was a zone of both oppression and liberation-it was the country they knew even if they lived in the North. In a 1971 issue of Ebony magazine dedicated to exploring “The South Today,” its publisher, John H. ![]()
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