Salvation South

In the fall of 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court ran out of patience. Fifteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, it ordered Southern school districts to end segregation "at once." Many white families answered by leaving for private "segregation academies." Some stayed. And Black students watched their own schools, and everything those schools had built, disappear.

Mississippi writer Ellen Ann Fentress was 13 when her parents quietly paid her tuition at Pillow Academy. Today she runs The Admissions Project, a growing collection of first-person essays about race and Southern schools.

Wendell Berry spent a lifetime writing about land, work, community, and the moral obligations we inherit from the places that shape us. In this commentary, Salvation South editor Chuck Reece remembers a childhood creek in North Georgia, a conversation with farmer Will Harris, and Berry’s enduring warning about the hidden costs of convenience.

This weekend, better than three million Southerners will sit in the bleachers at a football game. Chuck Reece, who memorized the Gilmer High School lineup before he could name three Beatitudes, argues these gatherings are the last reliable place where Southerners still stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers. His evidence is a woman in the Gator Bowl in 1980 whose name he never learned.

Dolly Parton’s death leaves a world of listeners grieving not only a singular singer and songwriter, but also a woman whose generosity, humor, and acceptance made people feel seen.

Chuck Reece remembers the night he and three underage friends talked their way into Atlanta’s Great Southeast Music Hall to see a 31-year-old Dolly Parton. He also reflects on her plainspoken belief that people deserve to be accepted and loved for who they are—and on the old hymn that has been in his head since hearing the news: “Farther Along.”

Salvation South Deluxe host Chuck Reece sits down with Jim Auchmutey, author of Smokelore, to argue about barbecue sauce—and to trace the deeper, harder story of who really built the tradition Southerners of every color now claim as their own.

The Sacred Harp, the shape-note hymnal published in west Georgia in 1844, got its first revision in thirty-four years—and more than seven hundred singers showed up in Atlanta to christen it. Chuck Reece explains why a book older than his great-grandparents keeps outliving its own obituaries, and what the hollow square knows that the rest of us have forgotten.

In the same storage bin as his parents' World War II letters, Chuck Reece found the scrapbook his mother ordered before he started the first grade in 1967. As thousands of Southern children head into first grade, he considers the one box on that page he has never quite finished checking.

Erika Council makes the only biscuit in the Michelin Guide — three years running. But behind that improbable honor stand two grandmothers, a church soup kitchen in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and a question her mother once asked that changed everything: were the Black women who built Southern food hidden, or erased?

Chuck Reece visits Bomb Biscuit Company in Atlanta to talk with Council about inheritance and recognition, the twenty-year IT career she walked away from, being priced out of a historically Black neighborhood, and the morning a stranger from Alabama reminded her what a biscuit can do that a history book can't. A story about food, memory, and refusing to let people disappear.

What does a cartoon sailor have to do with Pride Month? More than you might think. In this commentary, Chuck Reece traces a line from Popeye’s stubborn self-acceptance to the urgent realities facing LGBTQ+ young people today—and to the power of Pride celebrations in the South, where the simple act of saying “this is who I am” does important, mind-changing work.

Chuck Reece previews a new Salvation South Deluxe episode on the Jewish South. From Savannah and Charleston to the wider region, the episode—with historians Marcie Cohen Ferris and Shari Rabin—traces Jewish Southern history and provides a vivid look at how one community helped shape the American South.