In 1974, the great southern journalist John Egerton wrote a prescient book entitled The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America.

In a series of connected but self-contained essays, he made the point that something fundamental was changing – both in his native south, and in the country as a whole. But even Egerton seemed not to be sure exactly how things would unfold.

He was, as those of us who knew him could attest, one of the great and gentle souls of his time, a man deeply committed to racial justice who wanted badly to believe that it would be a good thing if this troubled place in which he lived – this part of America that had once fought a war for the right to own slaves – could emerge from the strife of the civil rights years somehow chastened and wiser for the journey; if it could narrow its distance from the rest of the country and perhaps even lead it toward better days.

That was the hope. But Egerton, as was his habit, saw darker possibilities as well. Giving voice to his fears, he wrote:

The South and the nation are not exchanging strengths as much as they are exchanging sins; more often than not, they are sharing and spreading the worst in each other, while the best languishes and withers.

For a while it was easy enough to make the case that Egerton’s gloom was misplaced, or at least overstated. The anecdotal evidence was all around.

In Virginia, the Republican governor, Linwood Holton, had stunned political observers when he was elected in 1969 on a promise of racial reconciliation. In contrast to the southern Democrats who had controlled Virginia for a hundred years, Holton proclaimed that the “era of defiance”– of resistance to civil rights progress – was coming to an end. He supported school desegregation, appointed women and minorities to state government, and promised to make Virginia “a model in race relations”.

In Florida, the new Democratic governor, Reubin Askew, sounded nearly identical themes. He supported bussing as a tool for integrating schools – a moral and educational imperative, he said – and while appointing African Americans to the highest levels of state government, he set such a standard for integrity and competence that Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government rated him one of the top 10 governors of the 20th century.

And, of course, there was Jimmy Carter. Elected governor of Georgia in 1970, Carter proclaimed in his inaugural address that “the time for racial discrimination is over”. Easily the most ambitious of these New South champions, he soon set out for the presidency with southernness at the heart of his appeal:

I’ve been the product of an emerging South. I see the clear advantages of throwing off the millstone of racial prejudice. I think it’s a process that’s compatible with the moral and ethical standards of our nation – the heritage of our country, as envisioned by our forefathers. I also see that we have a special responsibility here. When we are meek, or quiescent, or silent on the subject of civil rights at home or human rights abroad, there is no other voice on Earth that can replace the lost voice, the absent voice, of the United States. This is what the persecutors want, and this is what the persecuted fear.

For many Americans, it was mesmerizing – a peanut farmer from the deepest south reconnecting the country with its finest ideals. In 1976, when Carter won the Democratic nomination, he stood side by side at the national convention, gazing out across the sea of delegates, with Martin Luther King Sr.

There they were, two native Georgians, one black, one white, a southern governor and a civil rights lion, sharing a moment that felt like a revival – not only of the faith they both proclaimed, but of a dream deferred – of shining hopes and possibilities in which so many of us wanted to believe.

“Surely the Lord,” shouted Daddy King over the mad cacophony of music and cheers amid descending balloons, “is in this place.”

There was intoxication in the moment, but we knew it was shadowed by something very different – the realities John Egerton was writing about.

In the presidential election of 1968, Richard Nixon had embarked on a southern strategy, and he did not mean the things that Jimmy Carter was telling us. In a sense, Nixon’s mentor had been George Wallace. He watched in private admiration as the Alabama governor, who had pledged in 1963 his commitment to “segregation forever”, learned to redefine his appeal. In the presidential primaries of 1964 and 1968, Wallace spoke more obliquely about race, almost as if he were teaching the nation how to think in code.

From the time he famously stood in the schoolhouse door, he had begun to polish that skill. Everybody understood in the summer of 1963 the mission at hand, how Wallace was embarked on a doomed, quixotic quest to block the admission of black students Vivian Malone and James Hood to the University of Alabama.

But just as secessionists a hundred years earlier had talked about states’ rights when they really meant slavery, Wallace cast the federal government as a bully – an outside force pursuing integration without regard for the will of the people – and himself as a noble defender of freedom.

A few years later, on the campaign trail for the presidency, he found it useful not to mention segregation but to talk about “liberal sob sisters” or “bleeding heart sociologists” or “some bearded Washington bureaucrat who can’t even park a bicycle straight”.

All the shared resentments were there, but he and his audience felt shielded from the charge – his accusers frustrated as they attempted to make it – that they were bigots at heart. There were times when he couldn’t contain himself. Once in 1968 he invoked the specter of urban riots – those moments when African American rage, often in response to police brutality, erupted into violence; became, in a sense, a magnified reflection of the crime.

“We don’t have riots down in Alabama,” Wallace roared, bantamweight defiance flashing in his eyes. “They start a riot down there, first one of ’em to pick up a brick gets a bullet to the brain. And then you walk over to the next one and say, ‘All right, pick up a brick. We just want to see you pick up one of them bricks, now!’”

Newsman Douglas Kiker of NBC, observing the response of a midwestern crowd, was struck by a sudden, horrifying epiphany: “They all hate black people, all of them. They’re all afraid … Great God! That’s it! They’re all southern! The whole United States is southern!”

There were African American activists, people like James Baldwin or Malcolm X, who begged to differ. Both had written with urgency about the indigenous racism of the north. But if the story was more complicated, if racism had already taken root in every nook and corner of America, was there nevertheless something in Kiker’s moment of revelation? In this era of homogenization, when television and interstate highways – and soon enough, the internet – were erasing the isolation of the south, pulling it into the national mainstream, was there something about our place that was beginning to reshape the country? And if there was, might it be a source of mystical promise? Or was it, more inevitably, a reality overflowing with dread?

Ever since colonial times, the south, with its reliance on slavery as the backbone for its economy, has been the epicenter for American racism. As Alexander Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy, said of his new secessionist state, “… its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man.”

In her runaway bestseller, Caste, Isabel Wilkerson makes the case that this assumption, sometimes less venomously stated, never really disappeared from the American psyche and began, in fact, to make a comeback in 2008.

Two things happened that year. First, the US Census Bureau issued a prediction that by 2042 – not that far in the future – whites would no longer make up a majority of Americans; a plurality, yes, but no longer a majority capable of imposing its will. And then, as if to illustrate the possibility, a Black man was elected president.

“I went to bed last night,” lamented Rush Limbaugh, after Obama was re-elected in 2012, “thinking we’re outnumbered. I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country. I don’t know how else you look at this.”

As Wilkerson noted, the fears that Limbaugh put into words led to measures more concrete than a pundit’s bombast. As Tea Party Republicans vowed to “take our country back”, the GOP began changing election laws, making it harder to vote.

Only two years before Obama’s election, President Bush had signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act that passed overwhelmingly in the US House of Representatives and unanimously in the US Senate. The right to vote was a bipartisan truth, touted by a Republican president as one of his cornerstone commitments. But no longer.

On 25 June 2013, in a case coming out of Alabama, the US supreme court gutted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, and in the next three years nearly 16 million people were deleted from voter registration lists.

Meanwhile, there was hatred in the air. Social media posts compared the president and first lady to monkeys and apes, armed participants at political rallies carried signs proclaiming “Death to Obama”; and one day during the birther controversy, a man parked his car on Constitution Avenue and began firing his semiautomatic rifle toward the upper floors of the White House – toward the rooms where the first family lived. A bullet lodged in the windowsill. (The shooter is in federal prison, slated to be released in 2033.)

But perhaps most ominously, as a measure of the free-floating rage, by 2015 police were killing unarmed African Americans at five times the rate of whites – at a rate that was a disturbing reminder of the rate of lynching in the Jim Crow era.

Two years later, during the Trump administration, children of color were being seized and separated from their parents in an effort to deter illegal immigration, and that too, for many of us raised with the shame of southern history, was an echo of the past.

On a quiet downtown street in Montgomery, Alabama, an old warehouse with a long, dark history, stands now as a memorial – a museum that opened in 2018, created by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to trace the through-line running from slavery to the present day; from the terrorism of lynching and the humiliations of racial segregation to a criminal justice system that, among other things, creates a climate for police brutality. As soon as you walk through the door, you see on the wall the words of a man held captive here, recounting a particular moment of horror:

I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction block. She

knew some of them would be taken from her; but they took all.

The children were sold to a slave trader. I met that mother in the

street, and her wild, haggard face lives in my mind today. She

wrung her hands in anguish and exclaimed, “Gone, all gone!

Why don’t God kill me?”

Preserving such history is one major purpose of the EJI. Bryan Stevenson, the organization’s founder, is a lawyer who spends much of his time working through a legal system he knows is flawed, opposing capital punishment and other harsh sentences imposed upon people on the margins of American life.

Stevenson also believes the nation must remember and reckon with the past – and because we have never mustered the will, we hear it’s echoes even now. There are few echoes more stark or elemental than the cries of children taken from their parents.

Steve Schmidt, former campaign strategist for John McCain, worries that under the leadership of Donald Trump, the party in which he believed began moving, not toward a reckoning, but resolutely in the opposite direction, stirring the ancient hatreds of race.

But there was another side to the story, also emanating from the south. In Atlanta, which had emerged first a center of African American education, and then, not at all coincidentally, as the epicenter of the southern civil rights movement, younger activists like Stacey Abrams heeded the call movement icon John Lewis.

“Ordinary people with extraordinary vision,” Lewis wrote near the end of his life, “can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the Democrat process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.”

By autumn 2020, Abrams and others led a vigorous network of voter advocacy groups working to turn out a multiracial coalition in Georgia. The far-reaching effort worked.

Joe Biden won Georgia, the first Democrat to win the presidential contest in the state since Bill Clinton’s first run in 1992. Georgia also elected Raphael Warnock, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church, once the home pulpit of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, as the first African American to represent Georgia in the US Senate.

In his maiden speech to that body, Warnock offered this assessment of the election – and of the state of things in America.

I am a proud son of the great state of Georgia … At the time of my birth, Georgia’s two senators were Richard B Russell and Herman E Talmadge, both arch segregationists and unabashed adversaries of the civil rights movement.

After the supreme court’s landmark Brown v Board ruling, outlawing school segregation, Talmadge warned that ‘blood will run in the streets of Atlanta’ … Yet there is something in the American covenant, in its charter documents and Jeffersonian ideals that bends toward freedom. And led by a preacher and a patriot named King, Americans of all races stood up.

History vindicated the movement that sought to bring us closer to our ideals, to lengthen and strengthen the cords of democracy. And I now hold the seat, the Senate seat, where Herman E Talmadge sat. And that’s why I love America …

All of this, he said, was the heart of the promise springing from his place. But there was another dimension to the story, an emerging threat to the foundations of democracy, spreading, like the progress he had seen in his life, from Georgia to every corner of the country.

The people of Georgia sent their first African American senator – and first Jewish senator, my brother, Jon Ossoff – to these hallowed halls. But then what happened? … We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights and voter access unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era … And the question before all of us at every moment is, what will we do.

This, he said, is the cold reality of our time. If it is true, as John Egerton wrote, that the south and the nation have exchanged sins, Warnock holds out hope that we might somehow exchange virtues as well. But time is running short, and American democracy hangs in the balance.

From The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance by Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker (NewSouth Books, March 2022)