NSF-FUNDED RESEARCH AND MENTORING PROJECT
Reconstructing Reputation in the American South (NSF #2327372, $211,309)

I am currently at work doing research for my next major project, Reconstructing Reputation in the American South. Supported by an NSF EPSCoR grant, I am in Atlanta doing archival and interview research with members of the the business and civic community to examine the roots and consequences of the American South’s reputation for racism from the Reconstruction era to the present, with a special focus on the Civil Rights era. Building off insights from my first book, this project zooms out from the neighborhood and asks what it means for an entire region to have a reputation. Once again using the business community as a lens into reputational processes, given its need to attract people to places to spend both time and money, this project utilizes the strategic case of the American South, examining how it went from a region where the front lines of Jim Crow emerged at Woolworth’s lunch counters, city buses, and Black Wall Streets to one where businesses in progressive cities fight to shed a regional reputation for racism that might lose them money.

This will be a multi-city project, with more research to be done in Birmingham, Alabama (the most visible site of violence during the Civil Rights Era and a rare industrial city in the South) and New Orleans, Louisiana (a city dominated by a tourism economy, but split between tourism that romanticizes the antebellum South and tourism that reckons with the brutality of nearby plantations). Atlanta was chosen as the first site for the project because it is the city in the South that has most actively pushed against the image of the South as a backwards place, even as it has dealt with racial violence that has touched the rest of the region. Dubbing itself, at different times, “the city too busy to hate” and “the Black Mecca,” Atlanta provides a case study of what boosterism looks like in response not only to the specifics of a city, but the stigma of a region.

Research is ongoing, but to this point I (along with graduate trainee Ciel Quebedeaux) have collected over 40 interviews and gone through archives at the Atlanta University Center Archives Research Center, the Auburn Avenue Research Library, the Emory University Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, and the Georgia State University Special Collections.