There is a quote attributed to Harriet Tubman that she likely never said, but the point still stands.

“I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”

Something similar could be said of the eleven states that seceded from the Union: their residents wouldn’t rank at the bottom of most metrics if they only realized how much they do to sabotage their own interests. For the record, I was raised in the North, went to college in Tennessee, and have spent the last 50 years in Florida. I’ve lived my entire adult life in the South and have some knowledge of what I’m writing about.

The South is full of wonderful people. I’ve experienced warmth and friendship from people of all stripes. I know kind and generous people of all races, yet collectively, the South tends to elect officials willing to drag down the people to achieve selfish goals.

This isn’t about a single political party. The South has followed the same pattern regardless of the controlling party. In the post-Civil War era, it was Democrats who chose white supremacy over Democracy. In the post-Civil Rights era, it’s been the Republicans.

Immediately after the Civil War, the South was truly in the sunken place. Before the war, enslaved people represented over half of all wealth in the Deep South. Slaves were often the collateral supporting loans from Northern banks. In some states, enslaved people were more valuable than all land and buildings combined. Cotton exports powered the national economy.

After emancipation, the entire asset class of human beings was wiped out. Planters lost billions in today’s dollars. The credit system tied to slave collateral collapsed, and Confederate currency became worthless. The result was a total economic implosion.

The war devastated Southern infrastructure. The railroads were destroyed, farms were burned, livestock were killed, and ports were blockaded. Cities like Atlanta and Richmond lay in ruins. The South emerged from the war poorer than at any point since the colonial era.

With no enslaved labor and no cash to pay wages, planters turned to sharecropping, tenant farming, and crop‑lien credit systems. These systems trapped Black families in perpetual debt and kept white planters in control of land. They ensured cotton production continued while preventing economic mobility for freedpeople. Using the Black Codes initially, followed by Jim Crow, the South did what it could to recreate slavery. Essential to maintaining control was the voting process.

The three Reconstruction Amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th) made Black people citizens and gave Black men the right to vote. Black voters sent several representatives to state legislatures and the House of Representatives. Black men won a few statewide elections in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi. One Black statewide official was appointed in Florida, and one man was elected to the U.S. Senate.

This was unacceptable to white people in the South. The Klan formed in Tennessee and spread throughout the former Confederacy. Only after Reconstruction did they spread across the nation. White people were not only broke after the war but were suffering the indignity of seeing Black people in positions of power while federal troops made it so. While Black people were climbing out of the sunken place, white people were entrenched there, until the contested 1876 presidential election gave them a chance to turn things around.

The election was decided in a smoke-filled room where Democrats traded the presidency for the removal of federal troops. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes took office and did his part by removing the troops and, the following year, passing the Posse Comitatus Act to ensure they never returned. White in the South rose again, ridding themselves of Black officials at every level and stopping or controlling the Black vote by several methods, including redistricting in the very same manner being used today. Congressional districts were drawn to maximize the power of the white vote, regardless of population. South Carolina was still a majority-Black state until 1930, yet they lost their last Black Congressman in 1897.

When Jim Clyburn was elected in 1992, he became the first Black South Carolina Congressman in 95 years. Note that even the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had little impact for a quarter century. Clyburn was only able to be elected because federal law forced the creation of a majority Black congressional district for the first time since Reconstruction. The Supreme Court, in its recent decisions including Shelby v. Holder and Louisiana v. Callais, is sending the South back to districts more closely resembling those that gave us an all-white Congress from 1901–1929.

The Southern economy has moved through five major phases since 1865: collapse, coerced rebuilding, stagnation, reinvention, and modern uneven growth. Each phase reflects a deeper truth: the region’s economic fortunes have always been tied to its racial order.

The Southern economy has risen and fallen in cycles since the Civil War. Still, every rise has been limited by the same force that caused the first collapse: a political order more committed to racial hierarchy than to broad‑based prosperity. Not unrelated to the economy is how the South fared in educating students.

Across every major national health‑system ranking, the American South ranks at or near the bottom in healthcare performance, with Mississippi constantly ranking as the worst in the nation.

Since the Civil War, the South has never caught up to the rest of the nation in education. Every period of progress — Reconstruction, desegregation, federal investment — has been followed by political choices that slowed or reversed those gains. The result is a region still living with the educational consequences of decisions made to preserve racial hierarchy, not human potential. The American South, led by Florida and Texas, has put more effort into rewriting racial history as opposed to honestly teaching it. This is made possible by the South’s choices in elected officials, buoyed by partisan politics actively reinforcing racism.

The racist dam has burst with the Supreme Court releasing the hounds on districts designed to protect Black and brown representation. Will we return to what America looked like from 1901 to 1929, when Congress was all-white? There is a great possibility that there will be no Black representatives in the House of Representatives after the 2026 midterms. Their only hope is Charlotte Bergmann in Memphis, who has been the Republican nominee in every general election since 2010. She was beaten soundly every time by Democrat Steve Cohen. After Republican redistricting, Cohen won’t be running again, but Bergmann has drawn three white opponents in the Republican Primary and isn’t expected to advance. Democrats are likely to lose several House members after their districts were targeted in redistricting.

The states rushing to make their representation whiter almost perfectly overlap with those that seceded from the Union. Of the eleven states that quit America. Eight of the eleven seceding states are actively redistricting or targeting majority‑minority districts. Mississippi was already good at suppressing Black voting. Arkansas did the job in 2021 by targeting Black voters in Pulaski County. Only Virginia, which uses an independent commission, didn’t target minority districts. Virginia used partisan redistricting to reduce the number of Republican seats, but the Supreme Court stopped them in their tracks.

White politicians in the South have found success when targeting people of color. Despite attempts to climb out, the South will always remain in the sunken place if advancement relies on suppressing a significant portion of the population. We will always be like crabs in a bucket.

What’s happening now isn’t mysterious. The South is falling because too many of its leaders are committed to the performance of power, not the practice of governance — and too many voters have been convinced that sinking together is better than rising with people they’ve been taught to resent. That’s the real Sunken Place: a political culture where sabotage feels like victory and suffering is repackaged as tradition. The tragedy isn’t that the South can’t do better. It’s that it keeps choosing not to, even as the water rises and the rest of the country watches the region drown in problems it keeps creating for itself.