Keri Leigh Merritt

In the American South, an oligarchy of planters enriched itself through slavery. Pervasive underdevelopment is their legacy.

In northern Louisiana, white supremacists slaughtered 150 African Americans, brutally thwarting their hopes for autonomy and self-governance.

The initial movement to build memorials to the Confederacy and its supposed “lost cause” were the original cancel culture.

For generations, Southern white elites have been terrified of poor whites and black workers joining hands.

The success and brilliance of the new PBS series on Reconstruction is a reminder of the missed opportunity facing the nation.

White southern men who didn't own slaves often escaped to the swamps to avoid conscription and wait out the Civil War.

Voter suppression tactics have roots in Southern history dating to the Antebellum era.

Centuries of economic inequality have left Southern politics ripe for insurgent outsiders.

Black power, and the causes it supports, began long before the official Black Power movement.

How black freedom benefited poor whites.

Economic analyses of the antebellum era upend the notion that Southern whites were united in their support of slavery.

After emancipation, prison labor replaced slavery as a way for white Southerners to enforce a racial hierarchy.

Land redistribution could have served as the primary means of reparations for former slaves. Instead, it did exactly the opposite.