Race is part of rural American life whether we speak about it or not. It lives in our history, our schools, our churches, our neighborhoods, our family stories, and in the things people learn to avoid saying out loud. Common Soil America exists because too many of those stories—especially stories from Black rural communities—have gone unrecorded or unheard.

Common Soil America is an independent online publication about race, history, and life in rural America. This is not a project built to ridicule rural people or treat every town as if it were the same. I love rural communities. I also believe that loving a place means being willing to tell the truth about it.

I want to begin with transparency about who I am, because readers deserve to know who is telling these stories and why.

I am a 47-year-old white man, a member of Generation X, born and raised in the South. I have lived across the country, from large cities to towns without a single stoplight. As a child, I rarely attended the same school two years in a row, which meant I was constantly the new kid.

Some of the Black kids I met welcomed me quickly. Friendship depended on whether we clicked, not on whether I already belonged to the right group. In several of those same schools, some of the white social circles felt more closed to outsiders. That was my experience, not a universal rule, but it stayed with me.

Music also opened my world. I loved hip-hop and R&B from the moment I found them. The first record I owned—an actual vinyl record—was Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and I played it until I practically wore grooves through the album. For a long time, I did not understand race as something shaping my own life. Then, as a teenager, reality taught me that it had been present all along.

The Moment I Began to Understand

I was riding through downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee, with two friends when police stopped us. We were later told that officers were looking for people connected to a reported theft at a gas station.

The description, as it was given to us, included a white man around 6 feet 6 inches and 250 pounds, a Black man under 6 feet and around 180 pounds, and two other white men. At the time, I was about 6 feet tall and 165 pounds. My friend who was driving was Black, 6 feet 6 inches tall, and about 365 pounds. Our other passenger, his brother, was also Black. The vehicle involved did not resemble the car we were riding in.

Six police cars surrounded us. Officers got out with guns drawn and began shouting commands. They called it a felony stop. None of us understood what was happening. My friend behind the wheel was only a couple of months away from leaving for college to play defensive line. His brother was simply catching a ride. We had been in the car together for only a few minutes.

I watched officers handle my friends roughly while demanding answers about where we had been, who they were, and whether there were weapons in the car. My own cuffs came off, and the questions directed at me became calm. I was furious. At one point, I yelled that my friends and I had not stolen anything. The driver gave me a look that told me to stop talking and calm down.

That look has stayed with me. I felt free to show my anger because, on some level, I believed I could. Their reaction made me understand that displaying the same anger might place them in greater danger. I cannot say with certainty what would have happened, but I understood for the first time that we were standing in the same place under very different rules.

We eventually learned that the incident involved someone pumping about ten dollars’ worth of gas and leaving without paying. The descriptions did not fit us, and neither did the vehicle. The stop ended, but the lesson did not.

Soon afterward, my father moved us across the Tennessee line into Arkansas, about 45 minutes from Memphis. Chattanooga had made me notice something I had not fully understood before; what I encountered in Arkansas made it harder to dismiss as a single incident. In a town of fewer than 200 people, I encountered deeply rooted racism in ways I had not understood before. It was not merely a collection of ugly words or individual attitudes. I began seeing how race could shape relationships, opportunities, expectations, and the unwritten rules of a community.

I have many stories from those years, and I will share some of them here when they help illuminate a larger truth. But this publication cannot be only about my experiences.

My wife is a Black woman who was born and raised in Brooklyn and later moved South with me. Her experiences belong to her, not to me, and being married to her does not give me authority to speak for Black people. Listening to her has sharpened my understanding of how much I still do not know. That distinction matters.

I do not intend to speak for Black rural residents. I intend to listen carefully, report fairly, verify the history, and create room for people to tell their own stories in their own words.

What Common Soil America Will Do

Common Soil America will publish interviews, oral histories, local reporting, historical research, essays, and photographs. We will look at the schools people attended, the churches they built, the businesses and Main Streets that shaped local life, the land they kept or lost, the places they worked, the cemeteries that were forgotten, and the family stories that never made it into an official record.

We will ask how race shaped everyday life in rural communities and how those communities are changing now. We will distinguish between documented fact, personal memory, and opinion. We will ask difficult questions without deciding in advance that every person or every town fits a simple label. When we make a mistake, we will correct it.

This publication will not exist simply to repeat the most familiar pieces of national history. It will focus on the local record and on people whose experiences are too often treated as footnotes. It will not disparage rural life, but neither will it pretend that honesty is an attack.

Common soil does not mean complete agreement. It means shared ground: the places where people live, work, raise families, remember the past, and imagine what comes next. If we are willing to listen, document the record honestly, and resist turning our neighbors into symbols, that shared ground may give us somewhere to begin.

That is why Common Soil America exists. The work begins here.