Welcome to The Wiregrass, Where Corruption Is Rampant, Contradictions Abound, and Cynicism Reigns Supreme
Matt Kessler on a region "offering a rare glimpse of Southern culture without its veneer of decorum."
The Wiregrass sits at the southernmost tip of the Bible Belt, beginning just south of Augusta, Georgia, and running west to Troy, Alabama, and south into the Florida Panhandle, with peanut crops and pine tree groves stretching as far as the eye can see. Cut off from the national freeway system, it is geographically isolated from other parts of the South and therefore culturally distinct. Locals pride themselves on their toughness, ties to the land, and close-knit friendships. Southern hospitality, a trademark of the Deep South, is replaced by a hardscrabble rancher’s mentality, offering a rare glimpse of Southern culture without its veneer of decorum.
The antebellum South is often thought of as a land of large plantations and chattel slavery, but the Wiregrass is a historically poor area with bad soil. Lower-class, white subsistence farmers migrated south from North Georgia in the 1810s to raise cattle and hogs; and Black subsistence farmers joined them after the Civil War, drawn by the opportunity to buy cheap land. Cotton couldn’t grow there until the invention of commercial fertilizer in the late 1800s, a century after the rest of the region; and not long after, the boll weevil—a long- snouted beetle migrating north from Mexico—infested the cotton fields, destroying the industry and ravaging the Deep South.
Before the boll weevil made its way to the region, the Wiregrass’s farmers and bankers rapidly transitioned the local crop to peanuts—long seen as an inferior food only fit for hog feed. The gambit paid off, and the Wiregrass became the peanut capital of the country. But it was never a cash crop like cotton. Indeed, the area was so poor that, for generations, wiregrass was a derogatory term like boondocks, signifying a place that was backward and ignorant. It was only after World War I, when Alabama rebranded Dothan the “Queen City of the Wiregrass” to improve the region’s image, that local pride took root. The Wiregrass is now a designation most widely used in southeast Alabama, whereas southern Georgians refer to themselves as being from the low country.
As the region developed, and working-class whites and Blacks battled for the same field hand jobs, the police assumed a unique social class. Their role was to enforce the unspoken social codes that separated the haves and have-nots into tightly contained communities, and, in return, they got to live above the law. Today, the Wiregrass is haunted by its legacy of corrupt policing. Teenage girls share safety tips, like carrying window emergency hammers, to prevent traffic stops from escalating into predatory sexual encounters. Even conservative, white Christians teach their children to be wary of the men in blue. This has sowed a deep class resentment of the region’s civic institutions and a general air of paranoia.
In the Wiregrass, time moves slowly, and idle conversations last for hours. But people don’t criticize the police in public, and local politics are only discussed in private dining booths with large wooden dividers. Little has been written about the area, because people refuse to participate in interviews with historians and journalists, afraid their words will come back to haunt them.
The story of the Wiregrass is the story of the contemporary, rural South, where people fear the police, resent the government, and believe they must rely on themselves for self-defense. In the absence of the rule of law, gossip carries the force of gospel, determining where you work, who you love, and, in extreme cases, what sentence you might receive.
The story of the Wiregrass is the story of the contemporary, rural South, where people fear the police, resent the government, and believe they must rely on themselves for self-defense.
The bucolic beauty of the region belies a long history of violent miscarriages of justice, especially in cases involving interracial sex. In 1934, Claude Neal, a twenty-three-year-old Black farmhand from nearby Jackson County, Florida, was accused of raping a white woman, castrated by a white mob, killed in the woods, and then hanged from a tree in the courthouse square. Several thousand people gathered to watch the lynching, and postcards of Neal’s dismembered body sold for fifty cents each. When the sheriff cut down the body the next morning, the white mob began to riot, attacking any Black person they came across and forcing the governor to call in the National Guard.
Today, the Wiregrass’s legacy of racial violence still permeates every aspect of life in the community. One need look no further than its criminal justice system, which, like many in America, disproportionally punishes Black men, who are vastly overrepresented in Alabama’s prisons. As of this writing, 54 percent of the prison population is Black, compared to 27 percent of its citizens. An ongoing Department of Justice lawsuit alleges that the state’s prisons are unconstitutionally unsafe and inhumane, due to prisoner-on-prisoner violence, prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, unsanitary conditions, and excessive and deadly use of force with batons and chemical spray by the guards. In 2024, the state garnered national attention for returning dead inmates to their families with organs missing.
Instances of corruption pile up one atop another: In 2016, the district attorney of Dothan, was found to have imposed unusually high fines on poor Black defendants for minor offenses like overdue bills and traffic violations while allowing rich white defendants to escape punishment. The scheme generated more than $1 million in five years, which the DA used for retirement parties, work travel, and court attire. Two years later, an Alabama sheriff pocketed $750,000 in jail food funds, malnourishing the inmates and using the money to purchase a beach house by the Gulf of Mexico.
In 2017, a Black inmate named Kharon Davis, whose only prior offense was driving without a license, was forced to await his trial in prison for over a decade. He was found guilty of murder by an all-white jury in Dothan, even though investigators recovered no fingerprints, DNA, or other forensic evidence at the crime scene. Studies by the Equal Justice Initiative show that the capital punishment of Black men is most frequent in areas where lynchings occurred. And indeed, despite being the twenty-fourth most populous state, Alabama has the fourth most prisoners on death row, a majority of whom are Black men. Houston County, home of Dothan, has the highest per capita death sentencing rate in the state, with more people on death row than the entire states of South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Missouri, and Kansas combined.
Despite these tense historical crosswinds, people from the Wiregrass will tell you the region’s issues are class-related and not race-related. They believe the police pick on the poor indiscriminately and that Black people face more problems because they are poorer. Indeed, race relations in the Wiregrass would surprise most outsiders. Interracial families are now common (though they still strike deep-seated unease among many), and both Black and white millennials swear they have a more progressive worldview than their parents. Yet vestiges of the Old South are hard to ignore. The “n-word” will casually pop up in conversation, and the older generation of white folks will still invoke minstrel stereotypes for laughs. Bars in town have signs with racist dog whistles warding off Black patrons.
Houligans Irish Pub, a popular local bar in Dothan, Alabama, is one such establishment; a sign on the door prohibits entry to anyone wearing “saggin’ pants,” do-rags, or skull caps. And yet Houligans prides itself on being a friendly, open-minded gathering place with a diverse clientele. Indeed, the patrons of Houligans range widely: from young, Black crypto investors who think the South is now the most racially inclusive part of the country, to elderly white cowboys who write poems in the shape of the state of Alabama.
This bar seems to embody the contradictions of the Wiregrass: today, social circles in the region are more consistently diverse than in many places outside the South, including self-righteously progressive cities like Los Angeles and Chicago. And the reality of racism is out in the open, here, the subject of casual jokes; not a taboo topic too sensitive to mention and therefore often shoved under the rug. But in other ways, the region feels doomed. People have long ago resigned themselves to the inevitability of racism, which is so engrained in the culture it feels impossible to weed out. Maybe the Wiregrass is a canary in the coal mine for the nation as a whole, a place whose police corruption and unfair criminal justice system has birthed an irreparable cynicism about our potential, as a society, to move beyond the pernicious ideologies we’ve inherited from our forefathers.
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Matt Kessler
Matt Kessler is a writer from Alabama. He has reported justice, race, and equity stories in Mississippi for The Guardian, and environmental stories for The Atlantic. His radio work has been broadcast on Mississippi Public Broadcasting and Illinois Public Media. A fellow in the University of Southern California's PhD in Creative Writing and Literature Program, he lives with his family in Birmingham. This is his first book.
