English Bertis D. - Civil Wars, Civil Beings and Civil Rights in Alabama’s Black Belt: A History of Perry County

R EMORSELESS TIME CHANGES EVERY HUMAN landscape and institution, expanding and maturing some, diminishing and complicating others. Alabamas Canebrake region between Marion in Perry County and Demopolis to the west in Marengo County contains some of the richest land in America, the accumulation of soil sticky black in appearance when wet, resting atop chalky formations formed by uncountable tiny sea creatures left behind by a receding ocean. Easily cleared and phenomenally rich in nutrients, the land provided a name to the region (Black Belt) and a conflicted history to its people (slavery and apartheid).

From the beginning, black people performed most of the labor and white people reaped all of the riches. Immense wealth characterized the region that produced most of Alabamas cotton, which comprised nearly a quarter of all cotton grown in America by 1860. This precious crop constituted half of all US exports and generated one-fifth of the nations gross domestic product.

Perry County, blessed by so many assets and located at the center of the Black Belt, became one of Americas richest counties. Prosperity provided white people leisure for education, writing, art, and music, all of which flourished in towns such as Marion. The county seat was often referred to as the Baptist Capital of the South because so many important denominational institutions were located there. Some affluent white slave owners passed along to valued slaves the benefits of high culture and fervent Christian religion. Heart-felt evangelicalism, along with the schools and churches it spawned, somewhat mitigated the rigidity of legal injustice.

When regional and religious conflict about the morality and efficacy of slavery finally plunged the nation into civil war, all human relationships and institutions were shaken and many collapsed under the strain of division, mobilization, war, invasion, and occupation. Rebuilding shattered relationships and institutions following the cataclysm proved even more difficult than reestablishing the primacy of southern cotton to the global economy. White people resented black separatism, agency, and empowerment. Black people resisted every white pretense that nothing much was changed by defeat other than tangential legal restrictions of the slave codes. Conflict was inevitable between two races with such contradictory memories of the past and conflicted expectations about the future.

Bertis English masterfully lays out these conflicting religious, political, economic, educational, and social expectations in one pivotal Alabama county. Utilizing the rich legacy of sophisticated social history, which derives significant patterns out of all proportion to the size of the place being examined, he has replaced the centrality of Perry Countys brilliant white cotton with its much more conflicted attempt to reconstruct institutions and social arrangements damaged or destroyed by war, reconstruction, apartheid, white oppression and corruption, black resistance, and the century-long struggle after 1865 for civil and human rights. In doing so, he has bequeathed us a genuine treasure during the states bicentennial. He concludes that within a state and during an epoch that birthed much that is worst about the South, one small, overwhelmingly African American county produced a political/educational/religious/social revolution, mostly without violence, that may be unparalleled and is certainly unusual in the South. The last chapter alone, describing the human capital spawned by brave and resilient people in such a tiny American space, offers hope for America in a newly troubled time. If any of Americas 3,142 counties cast a shadow so long, a beacon so bright, or a history so rich for African Americans as Perry County, Alabama, I have yet to read about it.