South Talks

Our Movement Starts Here: Film Screening and Panel

Ben Chavis, Dollie Burwell, Melanie Ho, and John Rash

Our Movement Starts Here is a feature-length documentary film by directors John Rash and Melanie Ho that chronicles the story of a rural, majority-Black community in North Carolina that made history in 1982 by fighting the state’s toxic landfill, an event that is often said to have sparked the environmental justice movement.

The film will be followed by a conversation with the filmmakers and two of the participants in the film, Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis and Mrs. Dollie Burwell.

“Southern Environmental Justice”

presented by Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis

In this SouthTalk, Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis will speak on the evolution of the environmental justice movement, which is often said to have started as a local grassroots movement in North Carolina in 1982. Today the environmental justice movement has grown into a global movement for environmental justice, equality, and equity.

Dr. Benjamin Franklin Chavis is an esteemed civil rights leader, global business leader, faith leader, and public intellectual. He was born in Oxford, North Carolina. His family has been deeply rooted in Granville County, North Carolina, as landowners, farmers, educators, theologians, physicians, and activists for more than 250 years. Chavis is the host of The Chavis Chronicles, a television broadcast that airs weekly on PBS.

SouthTalks is a series of events, including lectures, performances, film screenings and panel discussions, that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public.

“Surplussed Atlanta: The Built Environment of Homelessness”

presented by Chuck Steffen

Downtown Atlanta is known for its glass office towers and professional sports venues. It is also known for having the densest population of unhoused persons in the metropolitan area. For nearly half a century, a succession of city governments, hotel and convention interests, real estate developers and property owners, neighborhood associations, and university administrations have pursued a campaign to relocate this population from the central business district to lower-income Black neighborhoods on the south and west sides of the city—either that or put unhoused people in jail. In his talk, Chuck Steffen will place this campaign in the context of efforts to transform the downtown built environment after the Second World War. The actors who tore down and rebuilt the heart of the “City Too Busy to Hate” created a built environment in which homelessness could and would flourish.

Chuck Steffen is a retired historian who spent forty years teaching at Murray State University and Georgia State University. He has written on a range of topics, from US labor politics in the early national era to the politics of homelessness in the neoliberal era. His books include The Mechanics of Baltimore: Workers and Politics in the Age of Revolution, 1763–1812; From Gentlemen to Townsmen: The Gentry of Baltimore County, Maryland, 1660–1776; and Mutilating Khalid: The Symbolic Politics of Female Genital Cutting. Toward the end of his classroom days, Steffen became interested in viewing the politics of homelessness and housing through the lens of a camera.

SouthTalks is a series of events, including lectures, performances, film screenings and panel discussions, that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public.

“When the South Was West: The Mississippi and the Founding of the Nation”

presented by Susan Gaunt Stearns

In 1789, three weeks after George Washington took office, twenty-two-year-old Andrew Jackson stood along the banks of the Mississippi River at Natchez and swore his allegiance to Spain. Washington’s oath is celebrated by American historians and laypeople alike, but understanding why Jackson, future president of the United States, would vow to be a loyal Spanish citizen requires rethinking what we know about the founding of the United States and the origins of the Deep South.

In the decades following the American Revolution, western expansion hinged upon American settlers gaining access to the trade of the Mississippi River, but in 1784 Spain closed the Mississippi to American trade, an event that nearly severed the nascent ties between the Euro-American communities of the Mississippi River Valley and the nation taking form as the United States. For two decades, Americans schemed, negotiated, and fought for control over the Mississippi and, with it, sovereignty over the vast continental interior. In this SouthTalk, Stearns explains why understanding the controversy over the Mississippi—why it mattered and how its meaning changed over time—is a necessary precursor to understanding the place of the future Deep South within the American republic.

Susan Gaunt Stearns is an associate professor of history at the University of Mississippi. Originally from New York City, she earned her bachelor’s degree from Yale and her PhD from the University of Chicago. Susan’s work focuses on the relationship between economic life and political ideology in early America, especially on western expansion’s role in defining the American republic. Her first book, Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade, was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2024.

SouthTalks is a series of events, including lectures, performances, film screenings and panel discussions, that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public.

“Making ‘Actual Freedom’: The Civil War and Enslaved People’s Legal Consciousness”

Gilder-Jordan Lecture in Southern Cultural History presented by Thavolia Glymph 

A now large and robust body of literature has enriched our understanding of the flight of enslaved people to Union lines during the Civil War. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to the role enslaved people’s understanding of the law played in the decision to flee in pursuit of freedom. In this year’s Gilder-Jordan Lecture in Southern Cultural History, Thavolia Glymph explores enslaved people’s legal consciousness—their knowledge and understanding of US and Confederate law—and how it guided the decision to flee and the arguments they made in defense of this decision.

Thavolia Glymph holds the Peabody Family Distinguished Professorship in History, and is Professor of Law at Duke Law School, Faculty Research Scholar at the Duke Population Research Institute, and president of the American Historical Association.

We Birthed a Movement

Jenny Labalme

Jenny Labalme, who was a student-photographer during the 1982 protests against a PCB landfill in Warren County, North Carolina, will discuss the exhibit We Birthed a Movement, which showcases a largely Black, rural, North Carolina community’s fight to block a toxic waste landfill that culminated in six weeks civil disobedience. Labalme has numerous photos in the exhibit, which is located in the Gammill Gallery in Barnard Observatory, and served on a history subcommittee that advised the University of North Carolina archivists and curators on assembling relevant materials for the exhibit.

Jenny Labalme spent almost two decades working first as a photojournalist and later as a journalist for publications in North Carolina, Alabama, Mexico City, and Indianapolis. Her protest photos have appeared in the Washington Post, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, and the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina, as well as in numerous books, scholarly articles, and the documentary film Our Movement Starts Here, produced by the University of Mississippi’s Southern Documentary Project.

SouthTalks is a series of events, including lectures, performances, film screenings and panel discussions, that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public.

“Country Queers: Lessons from a Decade of Documenting Rural LGBTQIA2S+ Histories”

presented by Rae Garringer

In 2013, frustrated by the lack of easily accessible rural queer stories, Rae Garringer bought an audio recorder for $200 and started recording oral history interviews with rural queer and trans friends in central Appalachia. They had no formal training in oral history or audio recording, and no idea what they were doing. Since then, the project has grown to include a collection of more than ninety oral histories, a traveling gallery exhibit, a podcast, and a book. In this presentation, Garringer will share photos made along the way, audio excerpts from oral history interviews, and read from their forthcoming book, Country Queers: A Love Letter.

Rae Garringer is a writer, oral historian, and audio producer who grew up on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia and now lives a few counties away on S’atsoyaha (Yuchi) and šaawanwaki (Shawnee) lands. They are the founder of Country Queers, a multimedia oral history project and podcast documenting rural and small-town LGBTQIA2S+ experiences since 2013, the author of Country Queers: A Love Letter, and the editor of the forthcoming To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers. When not working with stories, Rae spends a lot of time failing at keeping goats in fences, swimming in the river, and two-stepping around their trailer.

“Vibe of the South: Ordinary Blackness/Carceral Intimacies”

presented by Corey J. Miles

In this SouthTalk, Corey J. Miles will journey to the inner lives of southern trap rappers to explore how both frustration and care for the region refuse traditional explanation. Miles is an ethnographer of the Black South and an assistant professor of sociology and Africana studies at Tulane University. His book, Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South, investigates the ways Black people have built the South while being simultaneously excluded from it.

In his work, Miles captures the complexity of Black life and death in the American South. His work has been published in the Journal of Hip-Hop Studies, Cultural Studies, the Howard Journal of Communication, Humanity and Society, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Revolutionary Verticality? The Black Panther Party as Media Company”

presented by Rich Purcell 

At the height of its influence, the Black Panther Party was one of the most important and controversial political parties in the United States. It was well known for confronting anti-Black racism, police brutality, and the carceral state, as well as for establishing community-based mutual-aid programs. Lesser known was the party’s establishment of Stronghold Consolidated Productions, Inc., a business entity that the Black Panther Party incorporated in 1970 to manage its finances, print The Black Panther newspaper, and to negotiate various book, music, film projects.

In this SouthTalk, Rich Purcell, the Hubert H. McAlexander Chair of English at the University of Mississippi, will draw from material about Stronghold Consolidated Productions, Inc. from Huey P. Newton and Black Panther Party archives to reveal the party’s cinematic aspirations and its attempts to control the party’s intellectual property. Purcell will illuminate how the Black Panther Party’s intensely capitalistic relationship to intellectual property vis-à-vis Strongarm Consolidated Productions, Inc. both connects with and clashes with its own and other left-progressive theories of media, revolutionary cinema, and finance capitalism in the 1970s.

Friday, December 6, at 6:00 p.m.

Barnard Observatory

Fall Documentary Showcase

The Fall Documentary Showcase is a celebration of the work of Southern Studies documentary students. Each artist presents their work, followed by a Q&A session.