Revolutionary Road

After a cross-country drive to visit friends, Berkman and Barbara Zeller settled in Boston to do politics and community medicine. Berkman worked with those creating a view of what was needed in radical politics called “Prairie Fire.” Hoping to work as a doctor for rebels in Mozambique, Berkman in the end was told not to come because they had won their revolution, and he ended up in Lowndes County, Alabama in a community clinic.

The Most Interesting Man I Met

This chapter focuses on Daniels's encounter with Victor C. Turner Sr., who worked for the Negro Cooperative Extension System of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Turner's biography as a representative of the educated black middle class is presented, including his participation in an officers' training program at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, during World War I. Turner told Daniels about racial violence and debt peonage in Lowndes County, Alabama, mentioning a planter named Dickson. Historical research connects a peonage case involving Lowndes County sheriff J.W. Dickson in 1903 with a case involving his younger brother, Robert Stiles Dickson Sr., in 1946. Neither brother was ever prosecuted, and the younger one was especially socially prominent. The chapter analyses Daniels's portrayal of Turner and Dickson, who remain anonymous in A Southerner Discovers the South. He sought confirmation of Turner's story from white Alabamans, including Birmingham newspaper editor James E. Chappell. Chappell's daughter Mary had taught at the Calhoun Colored School in Lowndes County and seemed to represent a new social consciousness among younger white southerners. However, another journalist's account of the suppression of the black Sharecroppers Union in 1932 reiterated that planter violence was endemic in the Alabama Black Belt.