Where things seem dark, look for the light.

I spent much of Friday in the back seat of a car en route to Clarksdale, Mississippi, writing the weekly email I planned to send out once I got there.

It had been a dishearteningly familiar week on Capitol Hill. Once again, citizens were being dragged from their seats by state troopers for vocally but peacefully demanding that Tennessee’s legislators take up the basic gun-safety laws that a clear majority of Tennesseans want.

In the year since the Covenant School shooting sparked the first such protests in Nashville, the Republican leaders of the Tennessee General Assembly have continued the authoritarian tactics that have made national headlines, and they’ve doubled down on their pandering to the gun industry. Legislation currently under consideration would let teachers have firearms in the classroom and allow 18-year-olds to open-carry assault rifles.

In that email, I wrote about the Gadsden Flag, the most popular specialty license plate in Tennessee. While some conservative Americans have embraced it to express their opposition to “big government,” whatever that means, the first Americans to fly the Gadsden Flag were revolutionaries protesting tyrannical government. In my opinion, tyrannical government is what we now have in Tennessee.

Downtown Clarksdale is 20 square blocks of what Walmart and white flight will do to the fragile economy of a small southern city: empty barbershops, dress shops, and dime stores; crumbling sidewalks and abandoned gas stations; a single-screen cinema with scattered letters clinging to the dark marquee.

One weekend every April, those old storefronts and sidewalks become stages, and music lovers descend on the home of the blues. They fill up the New Roxy Theater, with its flaking concrete walls, long-gone roof, and string lights. They cool down inside the Bank of Clarksdale, settling in between marble columns to sip whatever they brought with them and watch a band play where bank tellers used to be.

All weekend long, on stage and off, you’ll see the vast cast of characters who come together every year to celebrate Clarksdale and support each other. These are people you’d never imagine occupying the same space—green hair and golf shirts, top hats and Tevas, sequins and sagging pants—but everywhere you look they’re bumping fists and hugging necks. The artist who headlines in one juke joint might sit in on drums or pass the hat in another.

In the spaces between the spaces are signs of life that never left. A small coffee shop flourishes among the empty storefronts like a weed in broken asphalt. Murals cover brick walls like kudzu.

In hollowed-out Clarksdale, community is infrastructure and kindness is currency. It breaks my heart—and gives me hope.

PS: Tennessee’s Gadsden Flag license plate, first offered in 2017, began as a nonpartisan project in 2015. Proceeds from plate sales go to preserve and improve the Sycamore Shoals State Historic Site in Northeast Tennessee. According to a 2022 report from WJHL-TV in Johnson City, the plates brought in $479,000 of funding that fiscal year alone.

Happy Monday!

Allison
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