South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

Perry’s grandmother was from Upper Alabama, so the author’s connection to this area of the state is ancestral and personal. Starting in Huntsville on the Tennessee River, Perry notes Alabama’s Nazi connection. Wernher von Braun’s fascist past did not stop the US from bringing him to work as a rocket scientist for NASA post-World War II, and institutions in Alabama today are named for him. The imperialism of the US justified overlooking this man’s Nazi past. Perry writes, “It is bad enough that Nazi Germany adopted racist ideologies from the United States, but it seems worse still that after they committed genocide, their scientists were invited to Jim Crow Alabama, to plot their way to the sky” (102).

Alabama is also the home of Dred Scott, an enslaved man who sued for his family’s freedom after being taken to a free part of the nation. His case made it to the Supreme Court, which denied the Scotts their freedom. Today, Oakwood University sits on the land where Dred Scott once lived. It is a Seventh Day Adventist HBCU that was the site of protests in 1931 when nine Black men were falsely accused of raping a white woman.