Deep Souths

This book tells the stories of three southern regions from Reconstruction to World War II: the Georgia Sea Islands and the Atlantic coast, the eastern Piedmont of Georgia, and the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta. Based on more than a decade of research in a range of sources, from census records to oral histories, these stories of regional change emerge through the cumulative and compelling 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; and Benton Miller, a crippled Civil War veteran who led the Populist Party in his Georgia county. The author presents the stories of other figures, including Lucy Craft 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; and 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. This book presents a comparative 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, changes in these regions had prepared the way for the civil rights movement and the end of segregation.--adapted from jacket.