Why I moved to the Old South after a racially volatile election

It was as if Blackness was a clear indication of enemy status, and we would soon be used for America’s capitalistic gain, again. I went to sleep half-afraid I’d wake up to a 21st century Civil War.

As a descendant of enslaved Africans in the U.S., I already live in a world where I’m regularly reminded of the country’s ancestral hierarchical system. My brother and I, the first generation in our lineage born outside of Jim Crow, have been able to set forth realities our grandparents would have been shamed for dreaming. We had been freed from our predestined futures as a potential coal miner and maid.

But those ambitions were emotionally set on pause Nov. 6, when an eerie silence echoed throughout the streets, even in a congested city like New York. The boroughs hadn’t been that quiet since March 2020.

Once again, I felt, the U.S. couldn’t atone for its perpetual racism — both subconscious and overt — and its blatant misogyny. It was all masked under the guise of economics and other emotionally manipulative excuses voters (and those who chose to abstain from voting) made about a Black and South Asian woman candidate.

Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance won both the electorate and popular vote, a week before I was set to relocate from New York City to Atlanta for a new job opportunity reporting on Black culture. The professional change couldn’t have been timelier, but the transition from the North to below the Mason-Dixon Line, after a racially contentious election, was not lost on me.

During the campaign, Trump and his sycophants railed against various ethnic and religious American communities: Black people, groups of Latinos, Jews, Middle Easterners, Asians and Pacific Islanders, and other immigrants. He also seemed combative to anyone opposing the oncoming MAGA regime and appeared to have plans to further marginalize those dissenters.

Now here I was, preparing to drive into the alleged belly of the beast of cultural and intellectual xenophobia, alone.

Ahead of my 14-hour drive, I was beyond anxious leaving Harlem, a historic and ethnically diverse neighborhood in Manhattan. I’d grown accustomed to feeling safe in my skin, being part of a community of people who shared similar lived experiences and could empathize with my Appalachian roots, even if they had never set foot near a coal mine.

For the first time in more than a decade, I would be living outside a metropolitan area that always felt crowded, no matter where I was. I’d have enough fresh air and space to really catch my breath, but I’d also leave behind a city where neighbors abundantly held compassion for cultures unlike their own.

New Yorkers understood the power of an American melting pot. We celebrated differences and championed for variety. Together, we had reclaimed the American dream.

With the exception of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, every other Southern state voted in favor of Trump’s divisive rhetoric. In Georgia, a state in the Deep South and my soon-to-be new home — a region in which I’ve never lived — 83% of statewide counties either agreed with or were willing to overlook Trump’s tyrannical, white nationalist speech.

“Maybe you don’t like what Donald Trump says sometimes; maybe you don’t agree with it. But you know what, you always know what he’s thinking,” former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said during a Trump-Vance campaign rally in October.

Delaying the trip wouldn’t work in my favor. It would only add to my angst and trepidation of possibly making some wild discovery of anti-Black behavior or propaganda, especially after a campaign in which hateful rhetoric was consistently spewed at those not deemed American enough.

Specifically, I’d be settling into Spalding County, where the median family income in 2022 was around $57,000, 19% of the population lived in poverty (the national poverty rate that year was 11.5%), and less than 20% had anything above a high school education.

Opting for a route that would avoid traffic and offer scenic views after crossing the bridge from New York into New Jersey, I took Interstate 81 through Pennsylvania, where I was immediately greeted with my first Trump-Vance bumper sticker. It wasn’t the South, but Stroudsburg seemingly echoed MAGA talking points geared towards small-town folks who perhaps felt cast aside by so-called elites.

I felt eyes linger on me when I stopped for gas, but I felt an entire culture shift when a Black father and son left the station’s convenience store. A white gaze seemingly followed them during that short but treacherous walk to their car. Collectively, it was as if our Blackness had somehow disrupted a rusty, archaic fog meant to uphold cultural ignorance.

Passing into Maryland carried more weight than previous trips, where I dealt with the surreal presence of the official barrier separating the North from the South. This trip, though, felt like it could have echoed the subconscious of Harriet Tubman, asking herself if she was sure she wanted to go back.

Signs kept warning drivers that the state line was approaching in two miles, one mile, half a mile, and then I saw what I consider to be America’s Berlin Wall: the Mason-Dixon Line. In my case, the reminder was in the form of a sign hanging on an overpass, like a greeting to the Upside Down of “Stranger Things.” There was no way to avoid the demarcation of legal slavery, America’s greatest sin, whether you took that highway or other routes.

It was a true indication that America’s past haunted its present. Even after passing a momentous town like Gettysburg, the turning point of the Civil War, the Mason-Dixon ghost lingered in its aftermath as if I had traveled back in time.

Credit: courtesy of brooke Howard

Credit: courtesy of brooke Howard

After passing through central Virginia, and fearfully remembering the Trump-emboldened Nazi rally that rattled the University of Virginia (my alma mater) and Charlottesville in August 2017, I steered towards cities and larger towns. Again, I was a Black woman about to venture south of the Virginia border alone, for the first time. Sticking mainly to areas with larger populations helped me maintain a little more confidence and security.

The rest of the drive carried on without incident. I enjoyed cruising down the highway, transitioning from listening to music from hip-hop collectives The Diplomats and Ruff Ryders, to solo acts like David Banner and Travis Porter. I was beginning to feel ready for a new adventure in a new city, optimistic about the impending lifestyle change, cultural differences and the people I’d meet.

Once I got to Spalding County, Georgia, I was immediately greeted by a Confederate cemetery and reflection area.

Credit: courtesy of Brooke Howard

Credit: courtesy of Brooke Howard

“No act of injustice, no failure of duty, no shadow of wrong has left a blot upon these souls or a stain upon these memories,” a memorial dedicated in 1922 by a chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy read.

“Our tribute of gratitude, reverence, and love to the soldiers of the Confederate States of America,” read an additional UDC memorial, resurrected in 1909. “In everlasting remembrance of the heroic deeds, sublime self-sacrifice and undying devotion to duty and country, of Spalding County’s Confederate Soldiers.

“Their mausoleum is our heart, their fame hath deathless bloom; time is their watchful sentinel, and glory guards their tomb,” it continued.

Credit: Brooke Howard

Credit: Brooke Howard

There was a major parkway named for Robert E. Lee, as if the Virginia rebel had some other history outside of being the lead Confederate commander of the Civil War.

Residents flew multiple Trump flags and banners in their front yards. Every trip to Walmart for quick household necessities resulted in a buffet of pro-Confederacy signs, like the driver who decked out his Jeep with a “Sons of the Confederate Veterans” bumper sticker and its very visible rebel flag. And there were others who proudly displayed their political choices on their cars’ rear bumpers, as if the election had not come and gone.

The so-called “hood,” residents told me, was on the other side of the train tracks and I shouldn’t venture that way. A neighbor walking her dogs barefoot saw my New York license plate and reminded me I was “a long way from home.”

I was no longer being suffocated by overcrowding but instead felt stifled by a lack of cultural empathy.

According to the 2022 census, Spalding County was ironically composed of about 37.5% Black people, almost three times the national average. That meant some of those houses I passed on those dank, dark, sunken roads, with Trump-Vance paraphernalia and an unnecessary amount of cars parked out front, possibly belonged to people who looked like me, perhaps unknowingly rooting for their own oppression. Then again, maybe they were Black people so unbothered that they didn’t bother to vote at all.

As a lover of history, I understand the importance of timely context and that we cannot erase our country’s past. Instead, we have to learn from the full scope of it, but how can we evolve if people presently champion an ideology that promotes the dehumanization of people who are Constitutionally considered equal citizens?

The Confederate mindset brazenly pushes for racial and ethnic violence and assimilation. With the election of Donald Trump — not once, but twice — it has gained momentum. Trump’s running-mate, a man from the same neck of woods between Kentucky and Ohio where I was raised, notoriously equated immigrant communities to “higher crime rates” as a result of “ethnic conflict.”

A supremacist philosophy once concentrated in remote pockets of the Deep South and the fringes of society has now become mainstream, brought to the forefront like the Night Riders’ Reconstruction-era terror, to keep racialized law and order — in the name of peace.

Despite my hesitation on the Southern transition, my trip from the North made me realize I had to be alert throughout. It wasn’t just the moment I crossed the Mason-Dixon Line or that I was moving to the Lower South; I also felt I had to look over my shoulder in places once considered Free States.

It was all America, and it was all part of the same system.

The current political landscape has somehow transformed the 21st century into small-town USA. It’s not just the nooks and crannies of the South that I had to travel by Jim Crow-era Green Book standards, but it visibly resonates louder in an area so economically fueled by African American enslavement.

Despite being a Black woman in America whose diverse ancestry helped build before the country even existed, I would never be considered good enough to be the poster child of what America was philosophized to become.

However, my American lineage has helped me embrace my purpose as a storyteller in a nation hammered with contradictions. Regardless of the location, my fight continues for those who came before me and could never have achieved a fraction of what I’ve been able to accomplish.

Breaking color barriers requires breaking geographical barriers.

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