Racial and regional identities developed alongside each other throughout American history. This panel explores how the place and space of the American South shaped African American history and culture in the 20th century, particularly during and in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Exploring agricultural activism, migration to and within the region, and African Americans’ enduring attachments to the South, this panel emphasizes the outsized role the region has played in shaping African American life.

Although the South is most frequently conceptualized as a site of Black abjection and suffering, the region has also served as home for the majority of African Americans across the nation’s history. Two of the papers on this panel historicize African Americans’ enduring attachments to the region through the history of the New Great Migration. Exploring the movement's development in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, they examine how the fight for racial justice impacted many migrants' decision to move to the South. To complement this perspective, the other two papers explore the experiences of African Americans who never left the region, including those who made a conscious political choice to never leave. These papers focus on the different ways rural Black folk navigated and resisted the regional hegemony of the plantation, by both experimenting with ways to transform the structure of Southern agriculture and by seeking non-agricultural forms of employment. In so doing, these papers detail how African Americans (re)created and (re)imagined the region as a place not singularly defined by their economic exploitation.