Southern United States

early noughties that yeah it was like i

think like 2000 to 2006 so really interesting with her actually so i had heard you know that she was sober and stuff and it was quite interesting so basically she got sober at the age of 22 because she realized that alcohol was hurting her acting career and she wanted a future that didn't involve drinking so she got sober because she says that she was quite shy as a youngster And she started drinking as a teenager in the American South to help her cope with being shy and insecure.

So the turning point was her acting classes and her hangovers really began to clash.

And she felt she had to choose between acting and alcohol.

The agricultural southern states relied on slavery for the labor-intensive work of planting and picking cotton and tobacco.

President Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803 doubled the size of the United States and led to westward migration towards and then beyond the Mississippi River.

When Congress considered Missouri's application for statehood, it was divided between the Northerners who wanted to restrict slavery in the new state and the Southerners who wanted Missouri to be admitted without any restrictions.

The issue was temporarily resolved by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave-owning state, recognized Maine as a free state, and banned slavery north of parallel 36 degrees 30 minutes north in the Louisiana Territory.

Nevertheless, the southern slaveholding states remained concerned that the northerners might gain control of federal institutions and abolish slavery nationwide.

Though, as no candidate won a majority of the electoral votes, the House of Representatives had to choose among the top three candidates.

Although Jackson had won substantially more votes than the others, Henry Clay helped to deliver three crucial states to Adams in the House election, ensuring Adams' election as the sixth U.S. president in what many quickly termed a corrupt During the Adams presidency, Van Buren led the congressional opposition to his centralizing policies.

The president was also opposed by Calhoun's Southern States Rights Faction and General Jackson's supporters, who believed he had been cheated of the presidency by corrupt Washington elites.

In the states where that law continues to matter, the states still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting, minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process.

The decision here is about Louisiana's District 6, but so too it is about the many other districts, particularly in the South, that in the last half century have given minority citizens, and particularly African Americans, a meaningful political voice.

After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long.

If other states follow Louisiana's lead, the minority citizens residing there will no longer have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.

That's Alana Odoms, executive director of Louisiana's ACLU.

You'll be hearing a lot more from her in this series, along with many more experts and advocates.

That crown jewel she talked about has been an incredibly useful tool, and not just in the South.

States like New York, New Hampshire, South Dakota, California, and Michigan have all been subject to VRA oversight and remedies.

The abolitionists will get their message out, sure.

It'll be virtually ignored in this Southern society, he thinks, and they're going to take it out on black people.

Here's what John says.

He was disturbed by the possibility the mass mailing might spark an anti-black backlash by the city's poor whites.

He's saying essentially, great, you moderate Jacksonians for the politics of the time, stop this crisis.

But what about all this press that's freely circulating in the north? and opinions that are being changed.

How would the anti-abolitionists prevent the abolitionists from using the postal system in the non-slaveholding states? And the suggestion of some Southern editors is to strip them of any protection.

In other words, if someone generates an abolitionist newspaper, strip them of any protection that your state might offer.

There's a lot of influence at this time in trying to, I mean, these, they are tired of being under the thumb of the white man in the country.

I mean, the, the Black people at this time, because of the fact that Japan really does step into the forefront, the Black leaders are like, "Okay." So kind of like how when the Civil War started, a lot of the Native tribes threw in with the South 'cause they figured the South probably wasn't gonna exploit us as hard as the North already has, the Union already has.

It's sort of that kind of situation going on for the most part.

And what's really weird about it is-

A lot of this is independent too.

A lot of this rises out of the same kind of reactionary tendency that just about every colonized power, or rather colonized minority feels.

Uh, I mean, you saw this in South America as well, and it had nothing to do with the Japanese.

You see, you know, like pan-Latino movements rise up.

As we said before, Hurston is considered part of the Harlem Renaissance, but she took the Harlem Renaissance much further than Harlem.

She used her work to elaborate on the various struggles Black Americans were experiencing all over the United States.

But she was also a product of the Black South and had a specific desire to take the lived experiences and cultural expression of Black Southerners seriously.

Her work provided a rich literary engagement with the meaning of Black culture while it was being transformed by migration.

Hurston's work was also unique in the way that she incorporated her research methods into fiction and short stories.

The same way very famous novelists from England or Russia or America do.

She documented so many stories that might have otherwise been forgotten.

And she looked at Black Southerners and said, you are worthy of literature.

This guy wrote this book, his name was Stefan Kuhl.

And he said that the Jim Crow laws in the United States of America, the American South, which was the Democratic Party, served as a precedent in a stricter sense for scholars who have long been aware that Hitler's regime expressed admiration for American Democratic Party race law.

Yeah, the Nazis looked at the Democratic Party down South and they loved what they were doing with race law.

In a Pulitzer Prize winning book, this journalist by the name of Isabel Wilkerson, in an interview with Democracy Now!, she looked at the ways that Germany borrowed from the Democratic Party, Jim Crow laws.

So what they did was they sent researchers to the United States to study Jim Crow laws here in the United States to study how to research how the United States, which were the Democrats, had managed to subordinate and subjugate its African-American population.

There it is.

They sent Nazis came to the American South to talk to the Democratic Party about how they had subjugated their Africans because they want to do the same thing to their Jews.

The Democrats were Nazis before the Nazis, and they were Nazis after the Nazis.

Maybe there's something to this.

But I would say culturally living in the American South, it's very interesting because you're in the Bible Belt and people will preach you to hell.

Like in the book, like you have one of the things the aunts talk about is, you know, people come and see us on Saturday and then preach us into hell on Sunday.

And I feel that.