Southern Politics

Colombia's recent past has been characterized by what its Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez once called "a biblical holocaust" of human savagery. Along with the scourge of drug-related massacres facing the country, politically-motivated assassinations (averaging 30 per day in the 1990s), widespread disappearances, rapes, and kidnappings have run rampant through the country for decades.

We long for heroes and have too few. Nelson Mandela, who recently celebrated his 91st birthday, is the closest thing the world has to a secular saint. He liberated a country from a system of violent prejudice and helped unite oppressor and oppressed in a way that had never been done before.

The 2020 Presidential Election is undoubtedly, the most important election of the century. Amid an onslought of senseless killings among unarmed African Americans by vigilante civilians and trigger-happy police and a pandemic which unveiled an enormous disparity in health care for African Americans, the country is being led by an incumbent Commander in Chief who appears “unbothered” by it all. In November, America is tasked with choosing its next leader - one who will be charged with salvaging what’s left of its democracy.

Why has land reform been such a failure in South Africa? Will expropriation without compensation solve the problem? What can be done to get the land programme back on track? Tembeka Ngcukaitobi tackles these questions and more. Going back in history, he shows how Africans’ communal land ownership was used by colonial rulers to deny that Africans owned the land at all. He explores the effect of the Land Acts, Bantustans and forced removals. And he considers the ANC’s policies on land throughout the 20th century, during the negotiations of the 1990s, and in government.

In 1892, investigative journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett published a pamphlet with unflinching and honest descriptions of the cruelties being enacted against Black Americans in the South by their White neighbors. Wells’ poignant and raw reporting of the horrors of lynching scandalized many of her readers outside the South, yet the practice continued unimpeded for more than half a century after. Today, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases is a sobering reminder that American racism and inequality did not simply end with emancipation.

One of the most celebrated political leaders of a century, Nelson Mandela has been written about by many biographers and historians. But in one crucial area, his life remains largely untold: his marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. During his years in prison, Nelson grew ever more in love with an idealized version of his wife, courting her in his letters as if they were young lovers frozen in time. But Winnie, every bit his political equal, found herself increasingly estranged from her jailed husband’s politics.

My book is a compilation of 36 newspaper columns published over the past few years. I write about uncomfortable truths that we as South Africans shy away from, such as the persistence of white power and privilege, structural racism and the glaring lack of social and economic transformation and justice. I unmask the Rainbow Nation as a palace of white power, where whiteness reigns supreme, even though the governing party, the ANC, is black.

As Russian forces closed in on Berlin and Hitler’s premiership drew to a close, many Nazi officials fled Germany. In this startling, meticulously researched account, acclaimed journalist Uki Goñi unravels the complex network that led them to Argentina. Relying on international support—in Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Italy—and the enthusiasm of the Vatican and President Juan Perón, Goñi shows how this ratline allowed Adolf Eichmann—the architect of the Final Solution—Josef Mengele, Eric Priebke, and many more, into the country.

In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a Black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a White businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge.

Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies—vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire.

Writer John Howard Griffin (1920-1980) decided to perform an experiment in order to learn from the inside out how one race could withstand the second class citizenship imposed on it by another race. Through medication, he dyed his skin dark and left his family and home in Texas to find out.

This collection features such stories as "Passenger Train Number 9"; "The Little People"; "The Phantom Rider of the Confederacy"; "The Demon of Wizard Clip"; "Room for One More"; "Tavern of Terror"; "The Surrency Ghost"; "The King's Messengers"; "The Haunted Gold Mine"; "The Singing River"; "The Gray Lady"; "Railroad Bill"; and "The Haunted Car".

Roberts writes stories from a wide variety of locations: "Night of the Hunt" in Hendersonville, North Carolina; "Return of the Bell Witch" in Adams, Tennessee; "The Shenandoah Stage" in New Market, Virginia; "Chain Gang Man" in Decatur, Alabama; "Fort Mountain" in Fort Mountain, Georgia; "Laura" in Campbellsville, Kentucky; and "The Coming of the Demon" in Middleway, West Virginia.

This riveting historical narrative reconstructs the armed resistance of Black activists, their challenge of racist terrorism, and their fight for human rights.

For proslavery leaders like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the 19th-century world was torn between two hostile forces: a rising movement against bondage and an Atlantic plantation system that was larger and more productive than ever before. In this great struggle, Southern statesmen saw the United States as slavery's most powerful champion. Overcoming traditional qualms about a strong central government, slaveholding leaders harnessed the power of the state to defend slavery abroad.

A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies is the story of the Spanish Dominican priest Bartolome de las Casas, who came to the Americas in the 16th century. Immediately he was struck by the inhumane ways in which the native peoples were treated by the European explorers and conquerors, Las Casas went on to be a leading opponent of slavery, torture, and genocide of the Native Americans by the Spanish colonists.

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Douglas Rogers is the son of White farmers living through that country's long and tense transition from postcolonial rule. He escaped the dull future mapped out for him by his parents for one of adventure and excitement in Europe and the United States. But when Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe launched his violent program to reclaim White-owned land and Rogers' parents were caught in the cross fire, everything changed.

In this reappraisal of racial politics in modern America, Kevin Kruse explains the causes and consequences of "white flight" in Atlanta and elsewhere. Seeking to understand segregationists on their own terms, White Flight moves past simple stereotypes to explore the meaning of white resistance. In the end, Kruse finds that segregationist resistance, which failed to stop the civil rights movement, nevertheless managed to preserve the world of segregation and even perfect it in subtler and stronger forms.

The notorious conflict between the Hatfield and the McCoy families of West Virginia and Kentucky is often remembered as America's most famous feud, but it was relatively brief and subdued compared to the violence in Breathitt County, Kentucky. From the Reconstruction period until the early 20th century, Breathitt's 500 square miles of rugged upcountry land was known as "the darkest and bloodiest of all the dark and bloody feud counties" due to its considerable number of homicides, which were not always related to the factional conflicts that swept the region.

At a time when most of the public discourse was dominated by men, Anna Julia Cooper’s writings offered a blistering rebuke to that status quo. The essays and speeches collected here anticipated the debates about racism, sexism, and intersectionality that we are still having today. Cooper argues in particular for the importance of Black women’s participation in identifying and combating the structures of oppression that surrounded them - and that made life so much more difficult for many other groups as well.