LITERATURE IN REVIEW dizzyingly rapid and unrelenting , and the stench of diseased flesh seeps into the workers ’ pores .” Nor , for all my awareness of Black prison levels did I know that “ Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration in the world .”
Citing the events of last year , Perry notes that “ On January 6 , 2021 , the Confederate flag was raised aloft in Senate chambers , a potent event ” that demonstrates the white southerner William Faulkner ’ s claim that “ The past is never dead . It ’ s not even past .” Nor does she limit her analysis to a Black / White dichotomy : “ the South ,” she says , “ like every region of the United States , has never been a place where there are only two ‘ races .’ Others have always been there .” As she notes , “ Chinese Mississippians have been making a home in the Deep South for 150 years ,” and even early in the last century “ South Asians , East Asians , and Middle Eastern Asians could not be classified as White , nor become citizens .”
Yet the South also had , and has , its positives , from the Niagara Movement , predecessor to the NAACP , which met for the first time on U . S . soil at Harpers Ferry , to the creation of Black colleges and universities — from 1867 ’ s Storer College , to today ’ s over 100 Historically Black Colleges and Universities , 85 % of which are in former slave states — to the work of the Equal Justice Initiative and Montgomery ’ s National Lynching Memorial . On the other hand , she points out that James Agee and Walker Evans ’ historic 1941 work on Southern poverty , Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , looked exclusively at white families . As Perry says , “ It was odd ... to depict the life of the poor in the Black Belt without Black people at all , where Black people were a supermajority .” Much of her book aims to correct the absence of the Black South from our collective image of America .
A graduate of Yale and Harvard , now a Princeton professor , Perry describes her aims this way : “ If I can show you how I owe my purpose not to an elite university ( or two or three ) but to the fabric ... whence I come , I think you might see why I see fit to tell stories that haven ’ t been told , of the people who clean the toilets and those who fill the vending machines and what keeps them from standing alongside one another . Then I will have produced something useful .” She certainly has . •
Richard ( Dick ) Barbieri continues to write for CSEE , NAIS , and a number of online publications . He serves as Chair of the Development Committee of Freedom House , a Boston area program that supports underserved students of color and new immigrants through high school and onward to college .
CSEE Connections Summer 2022 Page 29