RII Track-4:NSF: Reconstructing Reputation in the American South

This Research Infrastructure Improvement Track-4 EPSCoR Research Fellows (RII Track-4) project would provide a fellowship to an Assistant Professor and training for a graduate student at the University of New Orleans. This work would be conducted in collaboration with researchers at the Urben Studies Institute at Georgia State University (GSU). How do places get reputations, and how do people work to build, support, or reject those reputations?

This project uses one case—the American South’s reputation for racism and parochialism from Reconstruction to the present—to examine larger questions about how place reputations get made. Specifically, this project will examine the role merchants have played in the reputational life of past and present Atlanta as one case in the South. It takes an understudied source of division and inequality—place reputation—and contextualizes it within both a long history and the current moment.

At a time when regional segmentation drives popular debate about political polarization, it is to society’s benefit to better understand why we think what we think about the places we live. The project is particularly important at a time of mass protests related to inequality across the United States. As those engaged with protest in the region demand fundamental changes to institutions of criminal justice and political representation, they undertake a project about the way things are and should be that is related to memory and mythology of the way things were.

Such an endeavor necessitates an understanding of place reputation, because reputation is the manifestation of the past living with us in the present, and must be reckoned with if we are to understand calls for change rooted in dealing with that past.

The PI will examine the role of merchants in the emergence of, maintenance of, and resistance to the American South’s regional reputation for racism and parochialism from Reconstruction to the present, with a particular focus on the Civil Rights era and the present. Businesses were important sites of racial discrimination historically, and the region’s business elite persisted in supporting segregation even in the face of outside pressures.

That said, there is also evidence that businesses were constrained economically by segregation, and post-Civil Rights era, businesses have taken an active role in contesting reputations for racism. Such actions can be done for reasons of sincere belief or pure financial interest, but evidence suggests the South’s historical and contemporary reputation for racism and parochialism is a live issue for businesses.

This has been particularly true in recent years in Georgia, where conflict has erupted between a conservative state government and the Atlanta business community over, among other things, civil and voting rights. It is within this context the PI proposes using EPSCoR to help build intellectual capacity at the University of New Orleans (UNO) by conducting research in Atlanta under the auspices of the Urban Studies Institute (USI) at Georgia State University (GSU).

The PI will do historical research at a number of archives located at GSU and elsewhere in Atlanta and conduct interviews with Atlanta merchants. The goal of the project is to better understand interconnections among region, reputation, and capitalism in the American South, using Atlanta as a case.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.