History + Culture = Everything

History + Culture = Everything

Seriously, we are in a crisis that is unprecedented because it's different in many ways. It's not unprecedented in its scale, in its nature. It's part of this broader historical context. It's part of what the United States is.

Melody

Welcome to Southern futures. I'm Melody Hunter-Pillion with the Center for the Study of the American South. Our guests join us to have conversations about place and the future and that means some discussion of history. Our guest for this episode is Dr. Mark Little, Executive Director of Create, co-founder of NC Growth, Smart Up and Black Communities Conference, and former executive director of the Kenan Institute. This musician and composer of music is also a native North Carolinian with a PhD in geology and geophysics. Dr. Little, I want to thank you for being here. You have a very interdisciplinary interest in work, background, but your work at its core focuses on North Carolina's future. In terms of place, let's start with where you're from and how your origin story perhaps drives and motivates your work.

Mark

Thank you so much for having me on the program. Whenever I'm asked about where I'm from, I always think about my grandparents. And I think for myself and many other people, thus the farthest generation, you can typically go back where you had lots of contact with someone growing up and so, to me, that's, that's who I am. My four grandparents are all from the low country of North and South Carolina. We want to phrase it that way eastern North Carolina, low country South Carolina. And my parents are both born in Washington, North Carolina in Beaufort County, Little Washington, to some people, some people are offended from that sound but Little Washington. I was born in Durham, North Carolina and grew up in Chapel Hill.

Melody

Tell us about your work with Create, NC Growth Black Communities Conference. I know that's saying a lot, but the end goal and tell me you know really how your background informs this work that you are doing back in your native state.

Mark

I came back to Chapel Hill in 2011, kind of by accident, and started working at the Kenan Institute on some economic development work. And the person I was working with there also is from eastern North Carolina. The institute itself has always had an interest in economic development in eastern North Carolina. And so, from the beginning of my, my work at UNC, that had always been the core piece of it. And when we were applying for grants to start what would become NC Growth, northeastern North Carolina was the initial focus area. And there's a couple reasons for that. So, one of the reasons is if you look at map of North Carolina, and you map all the counties that aren't doing as well economically, you have the most number of them all packed together in the northeastern part of the state. So that's one factor. But also, for me personally, one of the motivating factors is the much longer broader historical context of all this. So, in your intro, you talked about how the role of history plays and things. And for me, history and culture is everything, in terms of how I see the world and how I think other people act in the world, whether or not they recognize it or not. And so, for me, the northeastern part of North Carolina is, almost, the most northern northeastern extent of something called the Black Belt, which is, again, if you look at a map, right—I'm geologist so I like maps—also, if you look at a map of North America, and you map by counties, and you map counties by percentage of Black population, you see this colored U-shape that starts in southereastern Virginia, goes through eastern North Carolina, low-country South Carolina, Georgia cuts to the middle and south of Alabama, Louisiana, and it goes with the Mississippi River to Western Tennessee, Memphis, etc. This is a place where we had the largest plantations. You have rich soils, highest populations of former slaves. And so initially, the concept of the vision for this work was thinking about where are people now, most suffering economically, but also where’s these places where that has this historic context that informs that.

Melody

Often people forget in certain counties in North Carolina, we do have the largest group of Native Americans east of the Mississippi, the Lumbee tribe. And so that factors into some of these counties with poor or greater economic disparities well.

Mark

There’s all these layers, right. And so, right now, our work is across North Carolina and parts of South Carolina and we work every, all across the state also with all sorts of people in places that have these economic disparities. This other layer in terms of motivation is around peoples, right, who have been historically disenfranchised for all sorts of reasons. So, for me that motivation does also include Native Americans, for going back to this the history piece, in the culture piece. For many people in the United States, when you think of Native Americans, you think of people out west. But the first peoples who had contact with Europeans and Africans were in the eastern part of what is now the United States. And eastern North Carolina, in particular, has a deep and rich, rich history of interactions between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans. And many, many of us who are from these places have in our lineage, in our history, in our past, people who were from all these different continents, and in my own family, that is the case. And so, I recognize and celebrate that heritage that I have, and in the work that we do, we have made a very concerted effort to have really robust partnerships with all many of the tribes in North Carolina from the mountains all the way down to Columbus County, Bladen County and in the south, southeastern part of the state.

Melody

So, Dr. Little, in our current climate in the south and across the nation, the COVID crisis, we got that, violence against African American, civil unrest—all of these things seem to be overwhelming. They also seem to be exponentially disastrous for marginalized communities, in particular, in the rural south. How do we look at this, sort of these layers of a crises, that are striking these communities who are already historically had these challenges?

Mark

So, you mentioned I’m executive director or Create, we have a team of people of all backgrounds, we hire graduate students of all different backgrounds. And there's a conversation I oftentimes have with them as a leader of this group, as a manager, as someone who's helping to direct what we're trying to do. And then there's how I think about these things. And they can be different sometimes. For myself, I consider myself, I'm not an optimist, but I believe in trying if there's an ounce of chance that something could happen. So, for example, I was mentioning we started working northeastern North Carolina. There are many layers of reasons why the northeastern part of the state has been for decades, struggling, and if you really think about it, for centuries, because slaves were struggling too. So, when we think about the modern context, I think, for me personally, having an understanding the historical context for the work that I do, makes my perspective maybe a little less alarmed by what's happening. And while that doesn't decrease my motivation to do the work and to interact with people and to try to explain things in a way that other people can start to learn and start to understand things, for me personally, it is a fairly unbroken persistence of systems that were designed to take land from Indians, keep Africans subjugated, and as other non-white groups have come to the United States, to marginalize them in ways that are really complicated and difficult for them, because they enter the system where they're this or that, and in some contexts, they're on this side and other contexts are on this side. And it's a very complicated disease that we've created here for people, I oftentimes think about when I was in grad school, there's a friend of mine who was from Nigeria, and so he grew up in Nigeria, undergrad, had done some work, and then came to Rice University in Houston, Texas for grad-school, and he joined the Black Graduate Student Association, which was made about half folks from African and Caribbean and then half African Americans, people who'd grown up in the United States. And I remember having conversations with him when he first came about why some of our colleagues had a particular focus on talking about race and racial interactions. And I said, “you know what, [Yeme is his name], uh, you know what Yeme, the way your mind works is beautiful. I hope you keep thinking this way and keep thinking these are ridiculous things.” But unfortunately, like two years later, I remember having a conversation where he is like, I get it, I understand, because of the way he looks, he had started to see and understand the experience that his colleagues had been going through, and he'd been infected. So now he's infected with this disease that we all have here. The one thing I'll mention is, obviously with all these things going on, I'm having all kinds of conversations with people about this stuff and I always like to root it in the Constitution of the United States, which clearly lays these things out, it talks about three categories of people. It talks about Indians, it talks about Africans—it doesn't say that words—it’s slaves or enslaved people, I can’t remember the particular language but it was talking about Black, African slave people, and white folks. And that's from the gate, from the jump, that's what this place is about. And so, my understanding of what's happening now is in that context, and seriously, we are in a crisis that is unprecedented because it's different in many ways. It's not unprecedented in its scale, in its nature. It's part of this broader historical context. It's part of what United States is.

Melody

Mark, between anti-Black violence, economic hurdles, the COVID crisis, it can be really nice to turn to art, music or literature or whatever form people prefer. What have you found yourself reading?

Mark

Well, it's a funny question for me, I have three little kids at home. And so, what reading has been for me, for the past couple months, has been reading to them. I've been dreaming about having kids my entire life, so I had all sorts of plans for them before they entered the world. But one of the things that I think a lot about is being very deliberate about creating who they are. Obviously, as they grew up, they'll decide whoever they want to be. And one of the things that motivated this is interacting over the years many, many times with parents and kids of folks who've come to the United States from other countries. And very often, there's this point where the parents are upset with their kids because they don't speak their native language, or they don't practice their religion or these other characteristics. And part of it is because where they're coming from, there's a whole host of things they did not have to do as parents because the whole society they were in, brought those things to bear for their family and for their kids. And then they're at a loss because they themselves as parents act as if they would in whatever place they were from. But because everything else is awash with information and culture from America, they've lost that opportunity to have that influence. And so, for myself, I see myself in the same way. I am obviously a citizen of the United States, but I do not consider myself an American culturally or even historically. And so, it's incumbent on me to understand the culture and history of myself and my people and my ancestors, and to, as much as possible, push as much as that on my kids in the environments that I have control over. And so, with all of that, I'm very deliberate about bringing stories that come out of both the history and culture of people who are enslaved in the United States, but also Africans who were enslaved across the Americas, Native American culture as well as West African culture, and then other things as well. So, I picked two. And because I couldn't decide, and so I'll read maybe a paragraph from each. And so, the interesting thing about these two stories is both of them, I found some connection to my family. So, first one is Wiley and the Hairy Man, which some people may have heard before. It was a story that was told by Black people in Alabama region and my wife who's from Alabama, she remembers stories about a hairy man. And so, having that additional connection really resonate with me. And this is a story that my parents read to my sister and I when we were little, but having that direct connection makes it even more real for me. And the other one I'll read a little bit of is called Little Eight John and this version of the story is from the low-country South Carolina. The story under that title doesn't have a direct connection with my family history but some aspects of the story, or, I can’t remember if it was my mother or father, recognize or remember, “oh, I've heard that kind of chunk of that piece of that story.” And so that I like that—so that's why I chose these two, we read plenty that I have no personal connection to. So, her version of is called Wiley, His Mama and the Hairy Man. And so I'll read a couple paragraphs near the beginning, but not right at the beginning. And I like to do voices when I read to my kids so I don't know that I'll do all the voices and things, but I may—

Melody

I love this. This is more entertainment than I was counting on.

Mark

—we'll see, we'll see what happens here.

Mark

“’Well, I hope the hairy man is somewhere away and nowhere around here,’ Wiley said. He picked up his axe and start to work. But before he could begin, he spied the hairy man through the trees. Hairy Man just to a-grinnin’ at ‘em. Hairy Man was ugly, even when he grinned. He was coarse-haired all over, his eyes burn read his fire. He had great big teeth, spit all in his mouth, run it down his chin. He was terrible looking hairy man. ‘Don't you look at me like that,’ Wiley said, ‘don't you come near me.’ But the Hairy Man kept on coming and a-grinnin’.’” So, I'll stop there. So that part, because it’s kind of anticipating, like you want to really read it, want to like, “what's going to happen with the Hairy Man?” So, the one of the things is amazing about this story is it's about Wiley and his mama and this monster called the hairy man. And the relationship between this boy—andin this telling of the story, there's a preface that his father was killed by the hairy man. So, the father's is out of the picture in a physical sense, though, he is an inspiration for kind of some of the work that Wiley does, which is going on to chop down wood and help his mama. But the relationship between Wiley and his mom and how they talk to each other is pretty, is pretty wonderful. So really, the hero of the story, in some sense is the mother because everything the boy’s doing are things that she's, he comes home and says, “what should I do now?” And she says, “Okay, do this, do that” and she's a conjurer, right? And so, she knows. “All right, we'll try this and try that he goes out and tries these things.” And ultimately, the hairy man comes to their home and she has a plan to trick him, which ultimately works. But their interactions remind me a lot of how my mother interacted with me, but it's more about empowering and giving people tools. So, that's, this Mama's like that, all right. So, for this one, what I'll do is I'll read the end of the story. And we'll just leave it at that. “And sure enough, one dark, still night, it happened. Old raw-head, bloody bones rose up and came walking. He come after Little Eight John. And then one flicker of candlelight, that old raw head bloody bones turned Little John into a little dark spot. There was that dark spot like a grease spot on the kitchen table. The next morning, Little Eight John's mama take a wet rag and wash off that grease looking spot on the kitchen table. ‘Must have missed the grease there last supper,’ she said. She rubbed and rubbed at it until the dark spot was all gone. Wasn't not a streak of it left. And that there was the end of Little Eight John, what happens to all little children who never mind.” So, you know, before that, before that end, Little Eight John basically was being terrible. He was being terrible. And his mama warned him, “You keep being bad and old raw hair bloody bones will come and get you,” and that's what happened. For people of African descent in the United States, that linguistic connection is, for most of us, completely lost. In one of the few places where it's still, you know, where it has not been completely lost is in low country in South Carolina and Georgia. And my family that is there, don't speak it now. But my mother is, that's where people are from, and her father is called Baba James, right, Baba, which is father are from West Africa. And I first heard that, I didn't first read it. And so, for me, is one word, but it's a special and so my kids call me Baba. And no, I understand from reading all the all the broader context, but having it be an oral tradition and having been told from one person to another person, not from a book, is powerful and really important.

Melody

Mark, I want to thank you for introducing me to those stories, I had not heard them before. But you do have children, you do use these stories to both entertain and instruct. I want to talk about, though, how do you reimagine the future of this region and what it will hold for your children and how would you like your work to shape the region of that future for them and for other folk here in the south?

Mark

What we really focus on is trying to work with people and in places that are economically distressed and bring more wealth, resources, power, agency, job opportunities, economic development, business development, to those places. And from that perspective, my hope is that the work that our team is doing is able to change some of those places, but also potentially able to change how other people think about those places and people and there's a lot of things that we do to create that surface area for interaction between someone from Charlotte, for example, and someone from Scotland Neck, if you know where that is. And so, it's from the work context that's, in a nutshell, some of the longer-term goals and in hopes on the North Carolina level. Recently, maybe in the past year or so, really been trying to think about how to elevate the work and how we work on a regional and national scale. Not necessarily in doing more projects on the ground and in places, but actually, even in the formation of this center called Create, it was really an attempt to combine some of the academic research that's being done around economic development on a national level, thinking about what are the things that make different places more successful than other places, and combining that with this on the ground work that I've been part of where you understand the real personal context and, you know, people and people running businesses and community leaders and tribal leaders, etc. Thinking about how do you bridge those things in a way that can inform national or state level policy decisions and have a direct impact on people and places that we're talking about? What this place will mean to my children, I'm not sure. I think that there's a lot of how the United States has been in and is defined that is because of the southern region of the United States. One of the hopes that I have with his current context is that more people can begin to see, not just, there's this Black man who was murdered in front of everybody's eyes, that being able to connect that to how we fund public education, being able to connect that to why does the property values in the neighborhood start to decrease once you have more than 5% of the homeowners being of African descent, right? So, and even COVID in itself, the disproportionate impact that it has as a disease on people. So, these are all very fluidly connected to me and are part of this broader system. And prior to this history, it's very intentional, again, back to the country, very intentional. And it's built into not just things these symbols that we can all, not, well shouldn’t say all, that many people can agree on like silent Sam or that maybe most people can agree on like this recent murder, but all these other pieces to it, right, which I, again, if you're saying what was my hope, you know there’s little hope, a little hope that there might be more people who are starting to see and be willing to make these deeper connections about things. You got to do a lot of thinking and rebuilding to have that real change.

Melody

Dr. Mark Little, who's saying there's hope, but also a whole lot of work, and he is doing it, we want to thank you for being here with us. And thank you to our listeners. Be sure to join us for our next episode. For executive producer Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, associate producer Ellie Little, and sound editor Mark Meyer, I'm Melody Hunter-Pillion. Southern Futures is a podcast powered by the Southern Futures initiative, a new collaboration between the College of Arts and Sciences, UNC Libraries, the Center for the Study of the American South and other units of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Southern Futures, reimagine the American South.