Thread by @abfrancois

1/x My point here is neither to thrash Mississippi, nor to let other states off the hook. In a weird way, Mississippi holds all the contradictions of US history. Prior to the war it had the largest percentage of slaves and in fact slaves outnumbered free people in Mississippi.

https://twitter.com/abfrancois/status/1487436069528289280

2/x Jefferson Davis was a product of Mississippi. But then so was Henry Foote, a former governor who defended slavery prior to the war but after the war opposed white supremacy and defended the rights of interracial couples to marry.

3/x The KKK came out of Mississippi during Reconstruction but during the same period the state was governed by a multiracial coalition. The first 2 Black senators came out of Mississippi, including the first elected one.

4/x Mississippi was ground zero for the modern civil rights movement, which meant not just that the worst atrocities occurred there but also some of the most talented black and white activists came out of the state.

5/x All this is my trying to say that We can’t blithely argue Black people should just leave Mississippi. The claim makes no sense. First, the claim was made during Reconstruction when there was a movement for Black people to leave the South for Kansas and other points west.

6/x The movement was called the Exodusters and while there were many reasons why it was fated to fail, key among them was that Black people were not strangers in Mississippi; the state was their home.

7/x Second, the claim to pick up and leave makes no sense because it assumes things would be better “over there”. There were Exodusters who left Mississippi for Kansas, only to return after discovering Kansas was in fact Mississippi with bad weather and without the familial bonds

8/x Lastly, the claim to leave makes no sense because it fails to appreciate how Mississippi isn’t some weird outlier. The story of Mississippi is the story of America, in all of its complicated, beautiful, exhilarating , heartbreaking fucked up glory.

9/x At the risk of sounding sentimental, you can take the story of any people/nation and tell it in a way that redeems and binds people together. Since the days of slavery to this day Black people in Mississippi have been trying to tell that story. It’s a story worth telling.