By Vikki Bynum
In early November 2024, I submitted my completed manuscript, Deep Roots, Broken Branches: A History and Memoir, to the University Press of Mississippi. As the author of three previous historical works, I relished the opportunity to write a five-generation history of my family as well as myself, to go beyond the interesting but limited perspectives of ancestral stories passed down through the years. In addition to telling family stories, I placed us on the stage of history—much as I have done for many readers of my blog, Renegade South, who have contacted me over the years to thank me for telling their ancestors’ histories, often adding their own stories, photos, and documents.
I could not have written this history/memoir, or maintained my Renegade South blog for over fifteen years, without my own specific training in history. It was research into my father’s life that led me to write The Free State of Jones, the story of a class uprising against the Confederacy that later became a movie. In turn, Deep Roots, Broken Branches tells the story of abolitionist Welsh immigrants drawn into the United States’ bloody Civil War, of German immigrants under siege in Minnesota’s Dakota War of 1862; of my grandmother’s experiences as a “New Woman” of the Progressive Era; of her and my grandfather’s devastating experience of the Great Depression; of antisemitism and two world wars. Without my knowledge of Black as well as labor history, I might not have discovered the lynching of three Black men in Duluth, Minnesota, in the aftermath of the Great Steel Strike of 1919 that eventually ended my grandfather’s work as a locomotive engineer on the Mesabi Range.
Likewise, the significance of my own experiences as an Air Force child growing up in an era of Cold War militarism and racial segregation might have eluded me had I not become a historian of class, race, and gender. Without that education, the liberating effect of my family’s military transfer from segregated Florida to integrated California, followed by a tumultuous year in a midwestern “Sundown” town that allowed no Blacks within its city limits after sundown, might only have been the individual story of a confused adolescent girl surrounded by forces she did not understand. In short, without historical context, the twists and turns of my ancestors’ lives, and my own, would have made little sense to me or to my readers.
A few days after I submitted my manuscript to the press, Donald Trump was elected to the Presidency of the United States. Although my faith in the political party system of the United States had long since faded, I was shocked and demoralized by the depth of voter desperation and political callousness that elevated a supremely unqualified candidate to the highest office in the land—not once, but twice. The nation had survived Trump’s first presidency, but the conditions that produced him had not been fixed and the worst was yet to come.
As a citizen, I’m horrified by the Trump Administration’s rapid creation of an authoritarian state disturbingly reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich of the 1930s. As a historian, I’m equally sickened by Trump’s and other politicians’ attacks on higher education. With gleeful cooperation by red state governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas, the state in which I reside, the Trump Administration is diving in headfirst to dismantle university courses that focus on race, gender, and class. They have fired professors who speak on forbidden topics both in and outside of classrooms. The recent firing of my friend and colleague, historian and socialist activist Tom Alter, from Texas State University delivered a blow to all who know and care about him and his family. But attacks on university professors and curriculums are more than personal. Tom’s recent book on working class history is one of many cited in Deep Roots, Broken Branches. His firing, alongside current political attacks on curriculum, threatens to destroy the very heart of scholarly research and the integrity of the history profession.
