“I have come back to the South. No one can really turn his back on the place of his birth, even though he may not like conditions of life in many respects. You can’t help the South without loving it, and you cannot love the South without helping it.”
— Cleavant Derricks, Crumbs From the Master’s Table, 1955.
Earlier this week I attended a trans rights rally in Chattanooga. It was encouraging to see how many people from the city showed up to protest legislative attacks on transgender people’s existence. The rally filled up most of EPB’s public park, and the crowd chanted a powerful chorus of love and determination.
Two days after the rally, Tennessee became the first US state to legally ban drag performances in public. The state also banned all gender-affirming care for minors.
In the days since I gathered with our community, I’ve had complicated feelings. I’m grateful for the many organizers who are fighting to keep Tennessee safe for queer people. But I also keep thinking that if Southerners are going to protect ourselves from authoritarian violence, we need to do more than “vote them out,” which is the suggestion I most often hear. We need to understand the connections between workers’ rights and bodily autonomy; between capitalist rule and fascist terror. We need to organize our workplaces and find our power.
But, below the Mason-Dixon line, spreading a Socialist understanding of power feels like a Herculean task. The South’s historical struggle for abolition has drawn out the most reactionary government rule anywhere in the country. The labor laws are broken. The public schools don’t teach revolutionary history. Our people are dangerously close to losing the memory of what previous generations fought for and won.
Speaking on the whitewashed legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., Kwame Ture said, “the enemy will never give you the truth, and will certainly never give you your history.”
Without our history, it’s hard for people here to imagine what resistance could look like. Therefore, it is the urgent work of every Socialist to share the revolutionary stories that came before us.
As you might know, last Fall I moved back to Tennessee after 16 years in Pennsylvania. When I lived in the Northeast, I got used to hearing liberals speak with a broadly dismissive view of the South. They’d say people here were racist and homophobic. They also thought Southerners were stupid, which meant it was fundamentally hopeless to try and reason with their bigotry.
I often found myself on the defensive, making arguments for the virtue of the South, which was a strange position. Of course, I hated my home state’s legacy of racist exploitation, and I hated the capitalist politicians who continued to enforce it through the law. But I knew better than to blame Southern people as a whole for the condition of our politics.
The ignorance of that flattened liberal critique always bothered me, but I’ve come to realize it’s more than just a petty slight. It’s harmful for anyone in America to project an unredeemable character onto the tough, diverse, complex people of the South, because our history is one of revolutionary struggle.
We live in the footprints of the abolition of slavery. This is where Black belt sharecroppers organized militant unions. This is where women in textile factories went on strike and won safe, dignified working conditions. This is where Appalachian miners brought guns to the picket line and clashed with scabs.
The South is not a hopelessly backwards place to write off—it’s where many marginalized, disenfranchised people struggled for power and won. We’re still being punished for what we accomplished.
As I created the rug I called “Gospel” during my MacDowell residency this winter, I pursued a desire to make those stories loud and visible. I started making a textile that memorialized moments of struggle and victory within a deeply radical Southern history.
Throughout the process of researching and gathering inspiration for the work, I kept noticing connecting threads between organizing and art, and between spirituality and the spread of Socialist ideology. To me, these details felt unique to Southern movements, distinguishing them from concurrent labor struggles in the North.
I felt captivated by the way that Black union sharecroppers in the early 20th century would blur the lines between scripture and Socialist language, taking meeting notes in Bibles and appropriating Biblical stories of God’s deliverance like that of Jericho. Christianity has always been deeply intertwined with Southern culture and community, and the best Socialist organizers found power in using Biblical metaphors to express revolutionary ideas.
It's difficult to imagine the United Mine Workers sustaining the energy and passion for a strike without the protest songs that emerged on the picket line. It was Tennessee-born miner’s daughter, Florence Reece, who first wrote Which Side Are You On? when an anti-union mob appeared at her family’s home looking for her husband who worked in the mine. The lyrics that Reece wrote on a torn-out page of her calendar would eventually be covered by Pete Seeger, who introduced many Appalachian protest songs to a global audience.
“Florence symbolizes that ordinary people out of their own life experiences can capture in simple words and feelings the idea of struggle.”
— Archie Green, Labor Song: An Ambiguous Legacy, Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 28, 1991.
I’m fascinated by the textile’s position at the political heart of South, both as an industrial object in fabric mills that became battlegrounds for labor rights; and as craft, such as the work of Alabama quilting commune the Gee’s Bend collective.
In an age of limitless information, when a political education is as accessible as scrolling on your phone, I still think there’s power in communicating through artistic and spiritual metaphors. One strength that music, craft, and religious symbols share is the transcendence of language. They bring people together for intimate connection, whether that’s wrapping a handmade blanket around a shoulder or joining voices in a chorus. Pulling on the strings of tradition and familiarity, these mediums are fertile ground to share ideas and history without relying on words.
Another reason I made “Gospel” was because I constantly question the conditions or events that lead to a person’s transformation. What actually changes somebody’s mind, inspiring them to move from an individual into a part of collective action?
In many ways, the project of transforming our community members into Socialists has some uncomfortable overlaps with the age-old Christian mission of spreading the Gospel. I come from an evangelical background, and I have a difficult time reckoning with political organizing when it reminds me of religion.
I think, however, that the difference in spreading Socialist ideology is that it involves more than changing another person’s mind. Rather than debunking or diminishing the various political beliefs that others hold, a socialist organizer must focus on activating every person in their lives with solidarity and hope for a better world. There is no power in a subordinated, passive socialist.
Every person who joins a revolutionary movement must undergo this transformation into an active participant in the collective struggle. In the places where our opinions differ, we use honest and loving conflict to collaborate on a vision of the future and how we get there. Above all, we make a society by struggling toward a common goal: our collective liberation.
I’ve been feeling moved by learning about Thomas Sankara, so I’ll quote his 1983 speech to the people of Upper Volta (Burkina Faso):
“The revolution expects our artists to be able to describe reality, portray it in living images, and express them in melodious tunes while showing our people the true way forward to a better future. …
The inexhaustible source for the masses’ creative inspiration lies within the popular masses. Knowing how to live with the masses, becoming involved in the popular movement, sharing the joys and sufferings of the people, and working and struggling with them—all these should be the major concerns of our artists. Before producing, they should ask themselves: for whom is our creation intended? If we are convinced that we are creating for the people, then we must understand clearly who the people are, what their different components are, and what their deepest aspirations are.”
In the final stages of creating “Gospel,” I added the image of a crow. I’ve always studied birds as a hobby, but I think most people tend to view crows as uninteresting at best and a nuisance at worst.
You may be surprised to learn that crows live in complex family communities. These tight-knit social groups have been observed passing down culture and tradition from one generation to the next. They remember the way that humans interact with them, and they’ll warn their loved ones after a bad encounter with one of us.
I wonder if the crow is not unlike people living in the places portrayed in “Gospel.” Maybe they’re uneducated, meaning others overlook their intelligence, wisdom, and wit. Maybe they’ve been written off as union workers despite their talent for organizing and intuitive sense of struggle.
At the top of “Gospel,” over a liberated world, my crow is flying.
News:
You can now buy a 12” x 18” print of “Gospel” on my Etsy shop or from my website.
Labor Intensive Recommendations:
Ishmael Reed’s Chattanooga poem.
Mr. Burns, a post-electric play by Anne Washburn.
As It Was Given To Me: thirteen years of photographs of the Appalachian region by Stacy Kranitz.
“Go where the love is.” — advice from my friend Susan, who says she heard it from somewhere else.
Thank you for this!!! Beautifully weaves together so, so much. It has given me much to think about re: family history, community, labor, textiles, place, home, joy, struggle, meaning... really incredible. Your synthesis of your physical (art)work and your ethics and values is super inspiring. I am burning with ideas!
Great piece. Have you ever read much about Claude Williams and Owen Whitfield? Gospel of the Working Class by Gellman and Roll does a great job chronicling the overlap between religion and socialism during the New Deal Era south. Both Williams and Whitfield were preachers who struggled alongside unions and left wing parties for worker power, anti-racism, and anti-fascism.