Understanding rural access to justice requires understanding historical economic injustice

Understanding rural access to justice issues in the rural South can be a bit complicated. As I outlined back in February, many places in the rural South have withstood the complete collapse of democracy in their communities. For the first half of the twentieth century, communities of color in these states had to reckon with a world where every lever of power, including the media, was captured by white supremacist interests. The people affected were denied access to anything that could have reasonably built wealth, their ability to own property was restricted, and they were limited in what educational or economic opportunities they could pursue. The scars of this past can be seen in high poverty rates and other statistics of despair across the region. Understanding this history is important to understanding the difficulties accessing justice in these communities and why it's important to fight for it. 

As with my last post, I am going to focus on my home, Eastern North Carolina. And I am not just going to look at my home county, I am going to look at the broader region. North Carolina has 11 counties that exist in a state of "persistent poverty"

Persistent Poverty Counties in North Carolina
Source: North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management

(as defined by the federal government) and all of them are rural counties in the eastern part of the state. Eastern North Carolina is also home to large Black and Indigenous populations. In fact, as of the 2020 Census, North Carolina has the highest concentration of Indigenous people east of the Mississippi River. 

Eastern North Carolina was the economic and political powerhouse in the state's early history. From the American Revolution until the 1910 Census, Wilmington was almost consistently the state's largest city. The only exception was the 1820 Census, where it was temporarily replaced by fellow Eastern North Carolina city (and the state's first capital), New Bern. This growth was fueled by agriculture and the shipment of goods out of ports along the coast. With economic success came political power. One of the leading perpetrators of the Wilmington coup in 1898 and one of the leading architects of what would become Jim Crow in North Carolina, Furnifold Simmons was from New Bern. Simmons was rewarded for his efforts in ushering in white supremacist rule with a United States Senate seat, from which he ran a political machine that almost single handedly selected the state's elected leadership. Simmons served in the Senate from 1901 - 1931 and is still the longest-serving United States Senator in the state's history. 

Poverty rates in North Carolina
Source: National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. 

The region's economic and political prosperity was enjoyed only by a select few. A lot of people in Eastern North Carolina have long existed in deep, multigenerational poverty. For the first half of the twentieth century, Jim Crow and white supremacy reigned supreme in North Carolina. Blacks and Indigenous people were systemically excluded from many economic and educational opportunities and were often forced to work as underpaid farm labor. These decisions by the political leaders of Eastern North Carolina have had disastrous long-term impacts on the region. The decline of agriculture in the state was most acutely felt in Eastern North Carolina and its importance to the state's economy has long been supplanted by emergence of the banking industry in Charlotte and the education and tech industries in the Raleigh-Durham area. Because of poverty and spatial isolation, many people in the region are still denied access to economic and educational opportunities. The legacy of Jim Crow lives on. 

This history shapes what access to justice means and what it looks like in Eastern North Carolina. The economic subjugation of entire groups of people impacts their access to institutions of power.