By Christopher Young,
Contributing Writer,
In September 2021, following the 2020 Census, the Brookings Institution reported that 58% of our nation’s African-American population resided in the South. More granular Census data reveals that between 35.9% and 44% of the population in the Deep South is non-white. Most sources agree that the Deep South, a significant portion of the Bible Belt, sprawls across five states – Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina and Georgia. A few sources would like to amend that long-held belief and include Texas and Florida, and a few more like to include western Tennessee and western North Carolina, as well.
Researching the Deep South is exhausting as there are hundreds of thousands of citations with a multitude of perspectives being highlighted. For simplicity as much as anything else – let’s just state the obvious.
What defines the Deep South for the most of us? How about slavery, Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement? These rivers of soul-numbing horror, the fight to maintain the horror, and the march toward justice, as well as their many tributaries, define the Deep South to the present day.
Writing for the Facing South Organization in 2015, Alyson Zandt’s article titled, “What went wrong with the South,” says in part, “What went wrong is centuries of enslavement and systemic discrimination that resulted in the immense disparities we see today – but most news stories don’t capture that context. What went wrong with the Deep South is, in many ways, what went wrong with America.
In the South, the effects of our nation’s enduring racism are most apparent, and it’s hard to overstate the continued legacy of slavery. The American economy was built on the wealth created by a violent system of free labor. The economic motivation for that system was most apparent in the agricultural South, and so people in this region went to increasingly great lengths over time to preserve it in spite of contradictions with American ideals of equality. The narrative of racial difference that was created to justify that system is still with us.”
This touchstone, in what is the poorest and least progressive region of the nation, manifests most crushingly as lack of equity. There is a stubborn willful mindset in the Deep South that prevents all its people from thriving. All minorities, but especially African Americans, suffer chronically, decade after decade, and certainly poor European Americans are not immune.
In the Deep South especially, where change is needed the most, one of the many tools used to maintain white supremacy is incarceration. Just one example, in September 2022, National Public Radio reported that “Black people nationwide are 7.5 times higher than whites to be wrongfully convicted of murder, and 80% more likely to be innocent, than others convicted of murder.”
Table 1, provides racial population data from the 2020 Census, compared to prison populations in the Deep South. In every Deep South state African Americans are imprisoned at a far greater rate than is their percentage of the states’ population, and conversely, white’s or European Americans are imprisoned at a far lesser rate than is their percentage of the states’ population. Many of these imprisonments are reviewed by each states’ Supreme Court. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, there have been 210 exonerations in the five Deep South states to date, but not before a total of 2,758 years of freedom had been wrongfully taken.
One of the many institutional aspects that has not moved forward with the times in the Deep South is the racial composition of the Deep South’s Supreme Courts. Their justices overrepresent the white population and underrepresent the non-white population. In a democracy, the rule of law is essential to its proper functioning.
Again, stating the obvious conditions in the Deep South today, Lady Justice certainly holds scales, and certainly holds a sword, but her blindfold is missing – at least in terms of true justice. Legal justice is painfully different.
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