Table Of ContentDI X IE BE
DAMNED
300 Years of Insurrection in the American South
DI X IE BE
DAMNED
300 Years of Insurrection in the American South
Saralee Stafford and Neal Shirley
Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South
Text anti-copyright @ 2015 Saralee Stafford and Neal Shirley. This text may be freely
reproduced for non-commercial purposes. Please inform the authors and publisher at the
address below of any such use.
This edition © 2015 AK Press (Oakland, Edinburgh, Baltimore).
ISBN: 978-1-84935-207-9 | eBook ISBN: 978-1-84935-208-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014958842
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CONTENTS
An Introduction ............................ 1
INTERLUDE I ............................... 14
A Subtle yet Restless Fire .................... 17
Attacking Slavery from the Dark Fens of the Great Dismal
INTERLUDE II .............................. 50
Ogeechee Till Death........................ 53
Expropriation and Communization
in Low-country Georgia
INTERLUDE III.............................. 87
The Lowry Wars ........................... 89
Attacking Reconstruction and
Reaction in Robeson County, North Carolina
INTERLUDE IV............................. 119
The Stockade Stood Burning ................ 121
Rebellion and the Convict Lease in Tennessee’s Coalfields
INTERLUDE V.............................. 144
Wild Hearts in the Southern Mills............ 147
Women in the Strike Wave
against the Textile Industry, 1929–1930
INTERLUDE VI............................. 177
From Rebel to Citizen and Back Again ........ 179
Civil Rights, Black Power,
and Urban Riots in the New South
INTERLUDE VII ............................ 216
“We Asked For Life!” ...................... 219
On the 1975 Revolt at the
North Carolina Correctional Center for Women
INTERLUDE VIII ........................... 248
Conclusion .............................. 253
Preliminary Notes for an
Anarchist Historiography of the American South
Bibliography............................. 271
Index................................... 281
If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be
photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of
cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood
and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement.…
A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to
the point. As it is, though, I’ll do what little I can in writing.
Only it will be very little. I’m not capable of it; and if I were,
you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you would
hardly bear to live.
—James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
“Living in the South often means slipping out of
temporal joint, a peculiar phenomenon that I find both
nourishes and wounds. To identify a person as a south-
erner suggests not only that her history is inescapable
and formative but that it is also impossibly present.
Southerners live uneasily at the nexus between myth
and reality, watching the mishmash amalgam of sor-
row, humility, honor, graciousness, and renegade defi-
ance play out against a backdrop of profligate physical
beauty.”
—Sally Mann, Deep South
“Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the work-
ing class the role of the redeemer of future generations,
in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength.
This training made the working class forget both its
hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished
by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of
liberated grandchildren.”
—Walter Benjamin,
Theses on the Philosophy of History
“I would like to write the history of this prison, with
all the political investments of the body that it gathers
together in its closed architecture. Why? Simply because
I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that
writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes,
if one means writing a history of the present.”
—Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
A I
N NTRODUCTION
This book is the product of several years of loving labor and two
lifetimes’ worth of conversations and reflections. It was written in the
spaces between. Between debates over interpretation and research; be-
tween assemblies, marches, and riots; between work shifts and too little
sleep; between bouts of crisis and caring for those we love; between fights
and healing; between prison visits and noise demos; between the world we
live in and the anger we feel toward that world. We are neither professional
authors or academics, nor professionals of any other kind; in all of these
endeavors we take solace in the creative power of experimentation and
the slowly acquired knowledge that comes with it. This book has been no
different.
Dixie Be Damned is not a “people’s history” of the South or a com-
pilation of politically removed academic articles about rebellions in the
region. This is an experiment in reading and writing history from the per-
spective of two anarchists who grew up in this region. We wanted to see if
sharing these stories would help illuminate why the past feels so inextrica-
bly present when we find ourselves in conflict with forces that would have
us forget our histories.
While this project has been deeply researched, edited, and toiled over,
it is anything but objective. Objectivity is a myth, designed to attract read-
ers with the allure of a linear and clean narrative that presents itself as an
authoritative and authentic past. This objectivity protects the status quo
by presenting it as natural and inevitable. Yet it has not been easy for histo-
rians to craft a story of the South that accomplishes this task of sanitizing
