A significant percentage of Newbern residents, Black and white, live below the poverty level. When Lewis, who was born in Newbern, moved her family back to the area, she decided to open a non-profit that would provide needed services, like food distributions, to people across Hale county.
She found out that Braxton was still trying to take his seat as mayor. And she joined forces with him to remedy the chaotic political situation, largely by themselves.
In October of last year, Lewis took her children to the movies. The evening quickly turned horrific as they arrived back home.
Lewis’s house was on fire. The family arrived just in time to see the second story collapse.
Lewis said it wasn't until she began receiving hate mail that she realized there might be a connection between the fire and her support for Braxton. One note she received reads: "You f**cking nr bh get your nr ass out of my town right now with non nr mayor braxton or die or get burn down. I've been watching you 4 kids right and your nr new home. If you do [sic] get out of my town you and that n*r non mayor Braxton gona [sic] die." The letter included images of swastikas and a drawing of Braxton and Lewis being hung from a tree.
Braxton, too, started experiencing retaliation after he won. He has been ostracized by some members of the white community in town, though, some support him and still consider him both a friend and their mayor.
When Black families called in to report fires, he would be the only firefighter to show up to the call. He would have to call firefighters from neighboring towns to help.
Later, a Black woman flagged Braxton down to tell him her elderly sister had gone into cardiac arrest. Braxton ran to the fire department to get a defibrillator, but he had been locked out of the building. He drove home, returned to the department, got the machine and tried to revive the woman, but it was too late.
Following the incident, Stokes and the council served Braxton, who has won awards for his service as a firefighter, with papers for suspension from the department, accusing him of theft and not showing up for trainings. After the Hale county emergency management agency director intervened, Braxton was reinstated.
Braxton has also spotted drones following him and his wife around town, at their home and at his mother’s home. At one point, he said, a white man attempted to run him off the road.
a lot of counties in the cotton belt have looked like this since pre-civil war, when all men of the white minority were required, by law, to be armed and trained to assist in suppressing any slave insurrection. after the civil war, there was considerable upheaval in these places that the powerful minority had to suppress. incarceration, political violence, state terror were all financed and deployed to prevent the new majority of enfranchised black americans from accessing state power or making common cause with broke whites.
on the left, we talk a lot about the foucalt's boomerang of imperial tactics of oppression returning from the colonies to the metropole as fascism. but there is literature out there articulating the unique laboratory of settler states engaging in exploitation and resource extraction informing later imperial policy. i.e. The South (of the US) functioned as an experimentation site for the US to sharpen its claws in developing extractive, exploitative political projects to export abroad.
the national forgetting of this place and its critical history (and its rich history of violent insurrection against capitalism) allows its legacy and function as a political project to continue to this day. make no mistake, the suppression of "Critical Race Theory" and larger suppression of history education in the south is just as much about forgetting what came before as it is about keeping the lid on today and into the future. think about how many meat packers and industrial concerns have relocated to The South in the last 100 years, where unionization rates are always in the toilet for some mysterious reason. i'm sure it has nothing to do with the police being given wide latitude for violence and strike breaking. the large, diverse and exploited labor force is still here, under the boot of capital.
the project of US capitalism is to turn every place on the planet into the southern US. we are tomorrow's people.