No hyperbole or writer’s license necessary, my first conscious memory was at Greenbriar mall. I was pre-school age and my mom took me to an Easter breakfast program circa 1974 when Rich’s had a restaurant on the second floor that overlooked the mall. My mother and I watched the program from the floor of the mall because of crowd. We couldn’t get into the restaurant but I know there was an Easter Bunny taking pictures and walking around. After the event was over I went to pre-school at the KinderCare on Fairburn Rd. That experience at Greenbriar Mall and KinderCare…

The white south was so dependent on slavery ideologically and culturally that it nearly completely ignored finance capitalism, manufacturing, technological innovation, industrial innovation and the legal and wage labor benefits and tools that come along with them. The very same elitist cultural forces that kept Black people ignorant and illiterate (in an academic sense) kept large swathes of poor white people ignorant and illiterate and more or less incapable of taking advantage of economic innovations in the North and the rest of the 19th century world. If for no other reason than a mistake by white pre-1860 leadership of that…