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

South to America is an essay collection by Imani Perry, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. The book blends memoir and travelogue with the history and analysis of modern American politics and bigotry, primarily racism. Perry also addresses classism, anti-gay and anti-transgender biases, and misogyny. The author draws on personal experience, history, literature, the arts, and politics to assess the South’s place in the history of the US and its role in contemporary America. As Perry visits Southern states and the South’s subregions, including its cities, she reflects on her personal and family history as a Black American, which she contextualizes within the discussion of larger historical forces, contemporary American issues, and the US’s global position.

The New Yorker listed South to America as one of the best books of 2022, and former President Barack Obama listed it among his favorite books of 2022. The monograph was awarded the National Book Foundation’s highly competitive National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2022.

Content Warning: The book references and describes racist violence and language throughout.

Summary

Perry argues that the South’s role in shaping the modern US is largely overlooked or misunderstood. To understand the nation’s history, present, and future, one must look to the South. Many revile the region as a bastion of racism and backwardness, but doing so is “a mis-narration of history and American identity” and “a misapprehension of its power in American history” (xix). Black Southerners play an integral role in the making of the US.

Beginning in the Upper South with Appalachia, Perry gradually works her way south, ending in the Caribbean. Her narrative and analysis highlight the nuanced and diverse nature of the South. It is neither a monolith nor homogenous, yet shared experiences—both good and bad—and common cultural practices also unite the region. These commonalities are especially significant for Black Americans.

Despite the terrors of the Jim Crow era and the persistence of modern racism and violence, Black Americans’ joy, hope, and aspirations endured and continue to survive through the creation of art, literature, music, and architecture and the establishment of such communal institutions as grammar schools, churches, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Perry draws on this diversity of cultural and intellectual production in her memoir, history, and travelogue because it attests to the significance of Black contributions to not only local Black communities but also to the South as a region, the US, and the African diaspora beyond US borders. In this discussion, Perry centers the Bahamas and Cuba, locations to which Black Southerners migrated and from which Black people arrived in the US.

Perry provides numerous examples to support her positions. Black musicians, for instance, invented the genre of rock and roll, which reached popular heights in the US with Elvis Presley’s rise. Presley was an impoverished Tennessean who drew influence from the music and fashion of Memphis’s Beale Street, a historically Black section of the city in the Jim Crow era. Though Presley acknowledged Black musicians’ influence, the extent of their impact and their contributions to the style that made him a worldwide star and wealthy celebrity remain largely uncredited. Shields Green also stands as an example of the erasure of Black people’s roles in historical events. Though Green faced execution for his part in John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, his historical significance is often overlooked; this reflects a common pattern in American history. Finally, Americans view coal miners as “Appalachia’s heroic archetype” (18), but Black miners in West Virginia died of silicosis after they were recruited to blast through Gauley Mountain. They were buried in an open field and forgotten for decades. Today, migrants from Latin America face similar exploitation, and Black Americans such as the congregants of Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church who were murdered by neo-Nazi Dylann Roof in 2015 and George Floyd, who was killed by police violence in Minneapolis in 2020, continue to suffer the consequences of white supremacy.

Perry demonstrates that white supremacy is inherent in the South and, thus, in the US, but she frequently points to the potential for positive change. That change, however, requires truth-telling and acceptance of accurate history, rather than mythmaking. Acknowledging and making this history visible often creates discomfort for white Americans, but confronting reality is essential to progress. Perry considers the South America’s imperfect and contradictory soul.