Just off Interstate 65 south of Nashville, a small private park bedecked with Confederate flags surrounds a nearly thirty-foot-tall statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest astride his horse and waving a pistol. “He’s crying, ‘Follow me!’” explained the sculptor of the controversial artwork, Jack Kershaw, who would later brush off criticism about the piece by asserting that “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery.”

In the late 1940s, with support from the Rosenwald Fund and the University of North Carolina's Institute for Research in Social Science, anthropologist John Gillin directed a series of southern community studies, including a remarkable study of York, South Carolina, a small town thirty miles south of Charlotte. In 1948 and 1949 three graduate students—one black, two white—moved to the town they called "Kent," and each immersed himself in one of York's three subcultures.