Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson
SINCE 2016 the number of people who want to chat with me about rural communities, particularly in the South, has dramatically increased. Popular questions include how the Highlander Research and Education Center and our southern organizational partners prioritize, engage, and communicate our missions in this specific “political moment.”
To think of this as a specific moment, however, could not be further from the truth. This is a political present, and it is not disconnected from a dialectically incredible and troubling past. The special magic of being connected to the southern freedom and black liberation movements is that we attempt to practice the liberation in the present that we had hoped to live into. Elizabeth Catte’s reflection shows how that connectedness to our radical legacies of resistance informs so much of what is possible in Appalachia and across the South.