Country

Denmark, South Carolina, the small town where Bakari Sellers grew up, anchors this book, which weighs the pride and the suffering that continue to shape one of the poorest states in the nation. Blending memoir with historical and cultural analysis, it moves through the South's past, present, and future.

Sellers builds the story around his father's path, from his beginnings in the South to his friendship with Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King, his work as a civil rights hero, and his membership in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). That history opens onto the decline of the rural Black working class, many of whose families can trace their ancestry back seven generations. The author writes about people the media rarely pays attention to, and they are not strangers to him. They are his relatives, neighbors, and friends.

He describes the pressures these communities face: losing access to healthcare as rural hospitals close, struggling to get by after the factories they depended on shut down and moved overseas, trying to keep cherished traditions alive as their towns shrink, and searching for a way forward without giving in to despair. The result is a lyrical, personal history of a region in transition.

The book is also a tribute to fatherhood, addressed to Sellers' father, whose lessons have guided him, and to his newborn twins, whom he hopes will carry the Sellers family name and honor its legacy.