Deep Souths

From AwardAnnals

Book:	Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation
Author:	J. William Harris
Honors:	2002 Pulitzer–History finalist Score: 6.52
Genres:	History books Nonfiction books
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press

Deep Souths tells the stories of three southern regions from Reconstruction to World War II: the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, the eastern Piedmont of Georgia, and the Georgia Sea Islands and Atlantic coast. Though these regions initially shared the histories and populations we associate with the idea of a “Deep South”—all had economies based on slave plantation labor in 1860—their histories diverged sharply during the three generations after Reconstruction. Along the Georgia coast, thousands of former slaves became landowning peasant farmers and African Americans conserved traditions that had largely disappeared elsewhere. In the Georgia Piedmont, plantation agriculture revived with the use of black and white tenant labor, and the region became a Populist Party stronghold in the 1890s. In the Delta, still largely a wilderness in 1860, huge public works and land-clearing made possible the creation of cotton plantations on a scale unknown before the war. The Delta drew ! tens of thousands of black migrants who nurtured the growth of a radically new musical form, the blues. In cities and towns in all three regions, members of a new African American middle class repeatedly sought to claim their rights of citizenship even as they built a fragile prosperity based, ironically, on the opportunities opened up by segregation.

Based on more than a decade of research in a wide range of sources, from census records to oral histories, these stories of regional change emerge through the cumulative stories of individuals. Some were planters: James Monroe Smith, who built up a huge Georgia cotton plantation based on convict labor; LeRoy Percy, a Mississippi planter, U.S. senator, and friend of Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Manigault, a rice planter who saw his dreams as well as his prosperity ruined by a flood. Others worked as sharecroppers or small farmers: Peter Brown, who managed a plantation for his absentee owner; Tom Smith, who was lynched after a crop dispute with his landlord; Benton Miller, a crippled Civil War veteran who led the Populist Party in his Georgia county. Still others represented new worlds, slowly being born: Lucy Laney, the daughter of a slave, who founded one of the best African American high schools in the nation; Nellie Nugent Somerville, who became a Mississippi suffragist and ! legislator; Charley Patton, the “king” of the Delta blues; Arthur Raper, a white liberal New Dealer, who was hauled before a grand jury in Georgia for using “Mr.” and “Mrs.” to refer to his African American co-workers. Deep Souths presents a comparative and ground-level view of history that challenges the idea that the lower South was either uniform or static in the era of segregation. By the end of the New Deal era, changes in these regions had prepared the way for the civil rights movement and the end of segregation.

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