Introduction
This essay explores the significance of Southern Black art in the context of post-Civil War America, focusing on how artists of color address themes of family history, intergenerational trauma, and the complex decision to remain in the South despite systemic oppression. The narrative of Black America is often framed as one of movement—forced migration during slavery, followed by the Great Migration, where approximately six million African Americans left the Jim Crow South for Northern and Western cities between 1916 and 1970 in search of better opportunities (Wilkerson, 2010). While the North, particularly Harlem, became a cultural mecca for Black art during the Renaissance of the 1920s, this essay argues that Southern Black art offers a profound counter-narrative. Through works such as Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920), RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), and Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger (1990), Southern art reveals a radical act of reclamation—choosing to stay as a form of resistance and stewardship over ancestral land and memory. By examining these works, this essay seeks to uncover how Southern Black art challenges the myth of the Northern “Promised Land” and interrogates the enduring impact of trauma on those who stayed.
The Myth of the Northern Mecca and the Southern Source
The Great Migration is often portrayed as an escape to a Northern “Promised Land,” where cities like Harlem became synonymous with Black cultural expression during the Harlem Renaissance. This period saw an explosion of creative output from writers like Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer, whose works frequently revisited Southern imagery—red clay, cane fields, and folk traditions—despite their Northern context (Huggins, 1971). This suggests that even as Black artists thrived in the North, their intellectual and artistic output remained tethered to Southern memory. The North provided a “vocal war”—a platform for protest, publication, and organisation—but the South remained an ancestral archive, a repository of raw, unmediated trauma and cultural DNA.
By contrast, Southern Black art retained a direct connection to the land and its history. While Northern art often addressed the white gaze with explicit calls for change, Southern art, as seen in folk traditions and localized storytelling, was more insular and spiritual, speaking primarily to the community. This distinction highlights a critical point: the “great art” of the North was, in many ways, an extraction of Southern pain and resilience. The South, therefore, is not merely a place Black artists had to escape to achieve greatness; it is the source code of Black American cultural identity.
The Architecture of Staying: Trauma and Resilience
The question of why some African Americans chose to stay in the South, despite the brutality of Jim Crow laws, is often reduced to economic constraints or lack of opportunity. However, Southern Black art suggests a deeper motivation: a commitment to stewardship over family history and land. Films like Sounder (1972) portray the South not as a site of mere victimhood, but as a place of profound continuity, where staying becomes an act of guarding ancestral graves and resisting displacement (Ritt, 1972). Similarly, RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening uses a non-linear, observational style to capture the cyclical nature of time in the South (Ross, 2018). Trauma here is not a discrete event that passes; it lingers in the atmosphere, like humidity, shaping everyday life and artistic expression.
Indeed, staying in the South can be seen as a radical act of ownership. To remain was to assert, as many did post-Reconstruction, a rightful claim to the land that had been worked under slavery. This act of defiance is evident in the mundane beauty captured by Ross—children playing, the sweat on a brow, the silence after loss—elements that speak to a persistent, quiet resistance against erasure.
Case Study: Oscar Micheaux and the Struggle for Progress
Oscar Micheaux’s silent film Within Our Gates (1920) provides an early cinematic lens on Southern Black life, directly countering the racist propaganda of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Micheaux, often associated with Northern “race films,” fixates on Southern realities—lynching, systemic violence, and the fight for education (Green, 2000). His narrative underscores a pivotal Southern conflict: the desire for progress within a system designed for stagnation. As the film suggests, and as echoed in historical accounts, education was seen as a key to advancement even then, though access remained severely limited in the South compared to the North (Anderson, 1988). Micheaux’s work illustrates that “moving ahead” did not always mean migrating North; for many, it meant building schools, churches, and community structures where they stood, a theme of resilience that permeates Southern Black art.
Magical Realism and the Weight of Trauma
Southern Black art frequently employs magical realism to grapple with trauma too heavy for literal representation. In Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), directed by Benh Zeitlin, the fictional Louisiana Bayou community of the “Bathtub” becomes a site of mythic resilience. The protagonist, Hushpuppy, refuses to abandon her dying father and sinking land, embodying a modern parallel to post-Reconstruction Southern Black families who stayed to claim sovereignty over their environment (Zeitlin, 2012). Similarly, Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger (1990) introduces a Southern “trickster” figure, Harry, into a Great Migration family’s suburban Los Angeles home. Harry represents the South’s darker legacies—manipulation, survival instincts, and buried spite—demonstrating that Southern trauma follows migrants North, carried in the blood rather than left behind (Burnett, 1990). Both films reveal how Southern art uses the surreal to articulate the enduring impact of history on family and identity.
North vs. South: Vocal War and Sensory Memory
A notable distinction exists between Northern and Southern Black artistic aesthetics. Northern art, often pedagogical and confrontational, as seen in the protest literature of the Harlem Renaissance, directly addressed systemic racism for a broader, sometimes white, audience (Huggins, 1971). Southern art, conversely, engages in a sensory war—more introspective and community-focused, dealing with lived experience through texture, silence, and spirituality. This contrast is evident in Hale County This Morning, This Evening, where Ross prioritizes fleeting, personal moments over overt political statements (Ross, 2018). Southern art, therefore, offers a quieter but no less powerful resistance, rooted in the land’s memory rather than the North’s industrial promise.
Conclusion
In diving into Southern Black art, this essay challenges the notion that the South is a “backwards” place that Black artists had to flee to achieve greatness. Through works like Within Our Gates, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, and To Sleep with Anger, it becomes clear that the South is the foundational source of Black American cultural expression, intertwined with trauma, family history, and the radical choice to stay. Staying was not merely a passive act of endurance but a form of ownership and resistance, a declaration of rightful inheritance over a land marked by suffering. For contemporary audiences, both young and old, understanding this narrative reframes the South not as a graveyard of opportunity, but as a living archive of resilience. Future research might further explore how these themes evolve in contemporary Southern Black art, ensuring that the stories of those who stayed continue to inform our understanding of the Black American experience.
References
- Anderson, J. D. (1988) The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. University of North Carolina Press.
- Burnett, C. (Director). (1990) To Sleep with Anger [Film]. Samuel Goldwyn Company.
- Green, J. R. (2000) Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux. Indiana University Press.
- Huggins, N. I. (1971) Harlem Renaissance. Oxford University Press.
- Ritt, M. (Director). (1972) Sounder [Film]. 20th Century Fox.
- Ross, R. (Director). (2018) Hale County This Morning, This Evening [Film]. Cinema Guild.
- Wilkerson, I. (2010) The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. Random House.
- Zeitlin, B. (Director). (2012) Beasts of the Southern Wild [Film]. Fox Searchlight Pictures.
