I'm from a small town on the bottom edge of Mississippi, very near New Orleans and the Louisiana border. My family has lived there for generations.
White supremacy is not confined to strange men in the Deep South who put on white cloaks, it is not confined to strange gatherings of the English Defence League.
I come out of the environment of the Deep South, where I had seen the millstone of racial discrimination weighting down my people, both the black people and the white people; and I had seen the enormous progress that we were able to make after we removed the legal restraints of a two-class society, with the whites superior and blacks inferior. So I was very convinced before I became President that basic human rights, equality of opportunity, the end of abuse by governments of their people, was a basic principle on which the United States should be an acknowledged champion.
The Underground Railroad demonstrated to southerners, to slave holders, the extent to which slaves opposed slavery. To the extent to which some radical abolitionists, black and white, were willing to go to help slaves escape. And demonstrated the slow leaching of slavery from the border states which over time would leave them isolated in a slave-holding republic in the deep south. A slave-holding republic which slavery might be liquidated by constitutional means. They, therefore, struck a preemptive strike to create an independent confederacy. That independent confederacy cession led to a war and war, of course, led to emancipation and ironically the end of slavery itself.
The Deep South has a completely different history, both good and bad, that is fascinating for everybody. It makes people work together who usually don't, and that sounds like a cliche in so many ways, but it actually happened... and it happened because of a beautiful idea.
As the first man from the Deep South in 130 years to be President of this nation, I say that these people in white sheets do not understand our region and what it's been through. They do not understand what our country stands for.
After his speech was interrupted several times by Ku Klux Klansmen:
Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.
In all my stories and novels, no one ever escapes Louisiana. Maybe that is because my soul never left Louisiana, although my body did go to California.
I was born in the late '70s and grew up in the deep South, and I was very much still of an era where racism was a casual part of white people's public and private lives, though it had been pushed more into its own little echo chamber by then. As a five year old, I saw a fully costumed Klan circle, complete with burning cross, on a town square in rural Alabama at high noon.
I have finished To Kill a Mockingbird. It is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another book.
When I was growing up, my mother used to say, 'Don't ever bring no nappy-head Black girl to my house.' In the deep South in the '50s, '60s and '70s, the shade of your Blackness was considered important. So I, unfortunately, grew up hearing that message.
In my life, I've had estates in Russia, houses in Spain, in Norway, in the deep south of America.
I'm from the Mississippi delta originally.
NXT is huge, being able to be on TV internationally is a big deal, as it means you don't have to work so hard to get noticed as opposed to FCW, Deep South Wrestling and OVW, which were all televised, but locally.
Many of the master chefs in the South, both the upper South as well as the deep South, were blacks and many of those people came here to Washington, D.C., and opened up establishments. Very, very few of them have survived. But they certainly were very prominent.
As a kid, I felt I had it bad - and people where I came from did - but if I'd been in a similar position in America, it could've been 10 times worse. We have the NHS. We don't have slums like I've seen in the Deep south, or shocking intolerance.
Early on, one of my favorites was Ray Charles. I remember hearing 'I Can't Stop Loving You' in the early '60s and thinking, 'What an unbelievably soulful voice.' In those days, the Deep South was extremely segregated.
I loved my time in Deep South Wrestling. We trained so hard and I got a crash course into the world of sports entertainment and pro wrestling.
When it comes to the southern states, I used to actually live in Louisiana for a year.
Quite a few of The Rolling Stones records have had a great honesty about them. In fact, I would put them side-by-side with a 'Treasury of Folk Music' collection, containing all the prison songs, the farm and road-gang songs that were recorded on the spot in the Deep South.
My mother's people, the people who captured my imagination when I was growing up, were of the Deep South - emotional, changeable, touched with charisma and given to histrionic flourishes. They were courageous under tension and unexpectedly tough beneath their wild eccentricities, for they had and unusually close working agreement with God. They also had an unusually high quota of bullshit.
Sure, there's a chunk of African-Americans out there who associate the Republican Party with racism, frankly particularly in the Deep South. It's an unfair perception, but it exists. Over a period time, that perception will die away if Republicans are focusing on issues that happen to impact African-Americans.
Where I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it wasn't the south-east and it wasn't the deep south and it wasn't quite the south-west either.
As a little girl growing up in the Deep South, my mother told me that my future lay in my education. And she was right.
I grew up one of six children with working-class parents in the Deep South. My mother was a college librarian, and my father worked in a shipyard. I never saw them balance a checkbook, but they kept a roof over our heads and got all six of us into college.