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The United Daughters of the Confederacy was established in Tennessee in 1894 to preserve Confederate culture and falsely promote the South's military leaders as national heroes. The Daughters of the Confederacy were largely responsible for erecting statues, naming streets, curating museums and publishing textbooks that were widely accepted by municipal school districts as accurate and admissible history until the late ‘70s early ‘80s. Many white Southerners began this “lost cause” rhetoric as a way to rationalize how they were unjustly treated by the rest of the country and projected that one day “the South will rise again.”

Fast forward to January 5, 2021, when a group of wealthy Memphians (Tennessee) flew to the U.S. Capitol on a private jet to “Stop the Steal” — an effort to incite an insurrection mounted to halt the certification of U.S. President Joe Biden. There's a lot of pride in the southern region, but it's also part of the South's plan to reclaim its old values, even if it means punishing the rest of the country for daring to socially evolve.

The South really wants to win, and it is, at sustaining the inherently inadequate and inhumane system of capital punishment. Death Penalty Information Center's Enduring Injustice report states in the late 1800s, the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation altered the legal status of African Americans in the South not for the sake of Black personhood, but rather, to ensure the continuation of a strict racial caste system. White southerners created the Black Codes, convict-leasing systems and, eventually, the Jim Crow laws.

In the 2009 book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Douglas A. Blackmon reveals that after the emancipation, the country was worn out from the endless political fight to affirm the dignity and treatment of African Americans. During this period, the North turned a blind eye to cruel punishments meted out to African Americans. The South then began the mass re-enslavement and death of Black people accused and charged with minor offenses as small as vagrancy. Those accused of crimes during this time often endured excessive punishment, extreme sentencing, and legal death sentences. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, executions have been led in mass by Southern states like Texas (569), Virginia (113) [abolished in 2021], Florida (99), Georgia (76) and Alabama (67). When the death penalty was ruled unconstitutional in the landmark 1972 case of Furman v. Georgia, Florida became the first state to pass a new death penalty statute only six months later. Most of the country paralleled, but Florida’s law had a nuance that only Alabama and Delaware adopted; the jury’s vote regarding life or death was a recommendation, not a decision, as mentioned in Marc Bookman’s A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays. The trial judge alone would determine the sentence.

Florida’s rebellion was no surprise — the South is often the first to rebel against progressive politics. They were even embarrassingly called “rebels” in the American Civil war because they fought battles against their own country. As the South leads the nation’s systemic death race, it reveals how widely different the region is from the rest of the country’s social values. More than two-thirds of the United States (34 states) have either abolished capital punishment (22 states) or not carried out an execution in at least ten years (another 12 states). The rest of the country has firmly trended against capital punishment, and the uprising of criminal justice reform has taken a front seat in the current era of social justice. However, southern states and their district attorneys’ are still largely convinced that the death penalty is working to deter crime — in some alternate universe.

At the onsight of 2020, during a turbulent time in our world, Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 20-100, repealing the state’s death penalty. The repeal made Colorado the 22nd state, plus the District of Columbia, to remove the death sentence as an available penalty. Surprisingly, just one year later, on March 24, 2021, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam signed HB2263 into law, abolishing the death penalty in the Commonwealth of Virginia, historically placing it as the 23rd state, and very first in the Confederate South, to eliminate capital punishment. Virginia was a game-changer, and more conversation rooted in the racial implications of capital punishment in the United States has resurfaced.

The racial makeup of U.S. district attorneys is currently 80% white and 43% male. The similarities of the use of capital punishment in America and the demographics of district attorneys parallel another demographic makeup used by predominately Southern, white, male mobs from 1882 to 1951, and that is lynching/lynching mobs. (Though I could argue here, the practice lasted much longer than 1951.) Though some poor whites were also lynched, the number of Black people tripled the death of whites, and lynching was used for the simplest of actions, like failing to cross the street if a white male or female was on the same side.

The World Population Review published the states with the highest homicide rates in 2021 and (five) southern states that currently impose the use of capital punishment including; Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina were included in the top 10. Southern states are not deterring violent crime with capital punishment sentences. The public is not safer nor are offenders less likely to offend because of capital sentences. The South is winning in one of the country’s most morally shameful races ever: the death race. The death penalty is an old guard in the South well past its dishonorable discharge.

Joia Erin

Writing since November 2020 · 3 stories contributed