Confederate flags in the rural non-south

I'm not quite sure how many times I've seen the Confederate Battle Flag being flown in rural California, but it is certainly more than I would expect outside the South. Given that Southerners often defend flying the flag as "heritage not hate," seeing it where there's no heritage to speak of is surreal. Then why fly the flag? 

 Media coverage on the topic rarely offers a compelling explanation. The articles typically follow a similar format, with interviews of the flag-waivers disclaiming racist intent countered with interviews of historians that emphasize the white supremacist character of the Confederacy. For example, NPR reports that Feeling Kinship With The South, Northerners Let Their Confederate Flags Fly, with the subjects sympathizing with the confederate cause of "fighting for states' rights, and the freedom to make their own way and to choose their own way against a tyrannical federal government."

The article highlights historian Rachel Jelks for the position that the flag represented defending the institution of slavery. But it frames this as merely an alternative view by introducing her simply as one of "many others" who believe this. Her credentials are mentioned, but the article does not seem to treat hers as the correct position. 

 Subjects frequently invoke current government overreach in justifying flying the flag. A Columbus Dispatch article has an Ohioan clarifying that the flag symbolizes his "distaste for the Federal Government." In their view, the war was primarily an issue of federal overreach, and so fly the flag as a stand against current overreach.

This reflects the mythological Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, where slavery did not cause the conflict and the secession justified by the tyranny of the federal government. While directly contradicted by the historical record, it gained significant traction in the 20th century and became the default understanding of the Civil War for many. While the beliefs of the flag waivers are not out of the ordinary, it is still unclear why that particular symbol is utilized as opposed to other less inflammatory symbols.

These reports largely interpret the phenomenon as individualistic and fail to articulate any overarching theory. One exception is a 2022 article by David Graham in The Atlantic, which addresses the political divide on removing confederate monuments. He uses a contemporary poll to argue that "support for Confederate symbols and monuments follows lines of race, religion, and education rather than geography."

Graham finds through the poll that "non-southerners feel the same way about Confederate monuments that southerners do." What was once a regional difference had become nationalized. And he joins a number of other political scientists in identifying the urban-rural divide as the most significant political divide in our country today. 

Will Wilkinson is one of the more strident proponents of this theory. He supplements his 2019 report The Density Divide with a Substack article that argues that rural America has gone through "southernification." He acknowledges a lack of empirical evidence for this effect, but sees it as necessary to unify rural whites into a "single constituency."

A 2025 New York Times Op-Ed similarly argues that aspects of rural, country, and southern identity have all merged into a mainstream "rural" aesthetic that is exploited by populist politicians like Donald Trump. They go a bit too far with this approach by attributing too much of modern culture to this aesthetic, but they do accurately identify how Southern culture has become de-regionalized.

Simply looking at history reveals a simpler explanation. A Black Perspectives article highlights how activists donned Klan hoods and waved the Confederate Flag at an anti-civil rights event in the Bronx. In that context, it seems difficult to ignore the racist history of the flag in attempting to explain its modern usage outside of the South. 

Confederate Memorial Plaza, Anderson, Texas. 

Image Source: creativecommons.org 

Chronicle of Higher Education features LSU-Alexandria as an institution successfully serving rural students

Dan Berrett reports on Louisiana State University-Alexandria's success in surviving the rural area amidst which it sits.  The headline is Rural America, Growth Area? and the sub-head is "There’s a growing population of high-school seniors waiting to be reached — if colleges can figure out how to better serve them."  Here are some key excerpts:  

On the surface, Louisiana State University at Alexandria might seem like an institution in trouble. It’s a public regional campus in a rural swath of the state, located in a city of under 50,000 that hugs the Red River and is “surrounded by forest and farmland,” says Adam Lord, a spokesperson for the university. Central Louisiana, according to Lord, is “defined by work-force shortages, growing health-care deserts, and limited access to degree programs.” Less than one-third of the city’s adults have at least an associate degree, below both the state and national average.

But the institution saw its enrollment more than double between 2013 and 2023, largely by focusing on the regional and state population. The heavily rural, 11-parish area in which the campus sits accounts for 94 percent of its student body, and the state’s residents make up 70 percent of its online learners. LSU-Alexandria has grown largely by expanding its online enrollment and touting its low cost and high value. The undergraduate-only institution has developed pipelines to the state’s graduate professional programs. It’s created programs for the rural work force — including aviation, disaster preparedness, and cybersecurity — and programs that feed into local companies, like RoyOMartin, a plywood manufacturer, and utilities and hospitals.

Where its graduates once left for Texas, the institution is now trying to keep them at home.

* * * 

The notion that rural areas are growing runs counter to a decades-long narrative of decline.

* * *

The largest increase in undergraduate enrollment — more than 9 percent — over the past two years has been among institutions in rural areas, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

“There is a slight gain in the number of rural students. That’s the news,” says Patrick Lane, vice president for policy analysis and research at WICHE.

* * * 

Several scholars of rural higher education who spoke with The Chronicle come from such areas themselves, and they consistently recall feeling alienated when they arrived on campus — not unlike what first-generation students and students of color describe, says Tony Pipa, a senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution, who has written about rural America and produces a podcast on the subject. “They feel like a fish out of water,” he says of rural students. “Rural is an identity.”

That sense of identity can leave a lasting impact, says Andrew Koricich, a professor of higher education and student affairs at Appalachian State University.

* * *

When rural scholars meet each other, they might find common ground discussing how many 
stoplights or how few people were in the communities in which they grew up, Koricich says. The sense of identity expresses itself in deeper ways, too. “I think there’s a piece of it that is very much around self-sufficiency,” he says. “You meet other rural scholars and we have similar stories about how we had to figure out everything ourselves.”

I really appreciate the attention here to rurality as identity, which is consistent with a recent finding by political scientists regarding rural voters.  

Another NY Times take on rural culture, in relation to Trump and MAGA

Today's New York Times Opinions podcast features a conversation about "The Aesthetic that Explains American Identity Now."  The alternative headline is "MAGA and the Country Aesthetic."  Here's the NYT's overview description of the episode: 

Rural aesthetics are in, from cowboy boots to country albums by pop stars to pastoral idealism peddled by influencers. The New York Times Opinion editor Meher Ahmad speaks to the columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom and the contributor Emily Keegin about what these cultural touch points mean for our politics and society at large.

Before including some key quotes, I'll just observe that I think the commentator's argument is overstated.  Here are some excerpts:  

Ahmad: Both Tressie and Emily are keen observers of the cultural zeitgeist, and in their own spheres they’ve been noticing an ongoing mainstreaming of all things country and rural. Think shows like “Yellowstone” and “The Hunting Wives”. Pop stars like Beyoncé and Sabrina Carpenter produce country songs as part of their repertoire. And tradwife influencers like Hannah Neeleman, popularly known on social media as Ballerina Farm, has now more than 10 million followers.

* * *

McMillan Cottom: There’s a show where a farmer takes a wife ... But you can even get into shows that aren’t as character driven, where the rurality is actually a character. So then you’ve got shows where there are alligator hunters in Louisiana, a show called “Swamp People.”

* * * 

Keegin: Yes. I think we’ve had a very long romance with rural aesthetics in this country.  (emphasis added)

And after the second Trump win, what I noticed was there was a big cowboy trend that took off. Denim is big. Western culture is big. “S.N.L.” this season had a musical act in a hayloft. Realtree coming in and dominating the sweatshirt world.

Ok, honest confession, I had to look up "Reatree."  Had no idea what that was.  I had heard of a realty company with a similar name selling rural properties.  As best I can tell, the two are not related. 

Keegin: Well, OK. Where would you have seen it? You would have seen the pattern on the merch of Chappell Roan. She has a hat that says “Midwest Princess.” And Midwest Princess, I think, is part of this trend, as well. That was picked up by the Harris Walz campaign. If you recall they also had a Camo hat.

* * * 

McMillan Cottom: When we’re talking about being romantic for rural life, we’re really talking about an imaginary place. This isn’t really the rural life that actual people who live in rural America tend to be familiar with. These are signifiers that are maybe less about a physical place, a geography.  (emphasis added)

I would say the divide is between nostalgia and today’s politics. It manifests in many different ways. But when you say something like “Make America Great,” that’s a backward-looking vision. That is not about the future — although it’s trying to own the idea of what the future should look like. It is really calling to a nostalgia for an imagined American past where all families were “traditional” and all women were real women and home life looked this way.

* * *

Keegin: We look at how culture changed through the Clinton years and what was on TV. And when the rural revolt happened in 1994, we had a narrative around that about a shift in a rising conservative culture in this country — which was absolutely true. Narratives are based in truth. And our television shows followed that. 

* * *  

McMillan Cottom: [K]eeping in mind that when we talk about Donald Trump being a sort of a quintessential New York urban figure, that may be true in his biography, but we’re not talking about real places when we talk about urban versus rural.

And when you appeal to rural, you are always, always, calling up the idea of urban. These two things exist at the same time. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is: I would say that what Donald Trump does — the way he enters into the rural imagination: He does it through Southernness.

* * *

I think that what Donald Trump does is he becomes associated with rural life because of how often he has appealed to Southernness, when he, of course, raises the specter of racism or raises the specter of genteel womanhood — all of those things that the South is kind of known for.

They came in the figure of Donald Trump and his rhetoric, so we keep this big treasure chest — a repertoire of ideas in the South. And when somebody wants to call them up, they can go and open the toy chest, and there it is. You can pull out the Confederate flag, and you can pull out songs of the South or whatever it is.

And suddenly, people’s imagination is in the South. Well, once you are in the South, in the imagination, you are just a — if you’ll forgive me — you are just a hayride away from rural America.

And so those two things, I think, are happening simultaneously with Donald Trump. Appealing to nostalgia will always have political power, especially when people are very anxious and afraid, which is what I would argue people are — for many, many reasons. And that’s why I think Donald Trump reads as rural to some people.

Although I’d pay money to see Donald Trump in actual rural America, for what it’s worth.

* * *

Keegin: You know, Donald Trump shows the seams. You see where the makeup ends on his face. It’s very clear that his hair is done by himself, and you see the grease in it. There’s a photo of him where you see that he holds his tie together with tape.

I think when we boil down what a rural aesthetic is, regardless of who is engaging with it, it is about the human hand and showing what humans create — versus the urban aesthetic, which is based in machines and in technology. We think about our urban centers: That is where we produce a lot of our culture, but they’re also the center of our governments and our financial centers.

All of the aesthetics that we associate with urban life come from those occupations, which are about the mind over the body. This is not where you are toiling and making things with the human hand and with your physical self. And that is the schism. When I look at Trump, I think: Yes, there are a lot of things about him that are very rural — because he’s not slick.

Then there's more in this podcast about the "Renaissance of country music" and what it suggests about this political moment.  I'll leave that to you readers to assess.  Some of the illustration of what these NYTimes folks label "rural"--especially matters related to cowboys and Taylor Sheridan's "Yellowstone"--seem to me more specifically about the imaginary associated with the "wild west" and with patriarchy.   In the latter regard, I was reminded of Kristen Kobes Du Mez' Jesus and John Wayne, a book I highly recommend.  

An unduly provocative headline from the Ezra Klein Show about rural-urban tension

Image from today's New York Times Ezra Klein Show podcast.

The headline for the Ezra Klein podcast today--the one that popped up on my NYTimes audio feed--is "The Rural Power Behind Trump's Assault on Cities."  I found that very provocative--unhelpfully so.  It seems to place blame on rural America and rural Americans for Trump's assault on urban America.  In fact, it's not only provocative, it's a bit misleading regarding the content of the podcast, which is an interview with Suzanne Mettler about her book, with Trevor Brown, Rural versus Urban:  The Growing Divide that Threatens Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2025).  I'll come back to that, but first I want to excerpt the part of the interview where Klein gets closest to backing up the provocative headline: 

Klein:  

I’ve heard a lot of people who study civil wars say it is a bad sign when the federal government is ordering armed troops from some states into other states over the objections of those states’ governors and — these are all cities they’re ordering them into — those cities’ mayors.

And you can look at this, and I think I have been looking at this, and say: This sure looks like a rural coalition militarily occupying the cities it has come to see as the power centers of their enemies. (emphasis mine)

What I don't understand is how Klein can assert that a "rural coalition" is militarily occupying U.S. cities.  Who makes up this purported "rural coalition," exactly, when there are too few rural voters to have put Trump in the White House?  Klein's assertion completely overlooks the much more robust numbers of urban voters who chose Trump.  (Nicholas Jacobs, co-author of The Rural Voter, has commented on this in various publications, most recently here).  Perhaps Klein is thinking about the disproportionate power of red states in the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College?  If so, he should consider that the rural voters in California and New York are as underrepresented as those states' urban voters--and that "red states" like Idaho and Arkansas have "blue cities" like Boise and Little Rock, whose urban residents are overrepresented.  (I wrote more about this here and here).  

Or is Klein somehow claiming that rural is occupying urban because a disproportionate number of rural young people join the armed services?  whatever Klein means, I see this framing--this attribution of what Trump is doing to a "rural coalition"--as inflammatory and therefore unhelpful.  Of course, it is also inaccurate unless one uses a really capacious definition of "rural."     

Here's Mettler's response to Klein's comment.  Unfortunately, Mettler doesn't actually respond to Klein's assertion that some rural coalition is militarily occupying U.S. cities.  She says:  

Well, it’s unthinkable. It’s so un-American to be telling the military you can use cities as training grounds and to be sending in federal troops and federalized National Guard into cities. And this comes on top of Trump, for the past few years, using a lot of rhetoric against cities — but now using actual violent force against cities.

So how is this possible? It’s possible because of the rural-urban divide. It’s possible because this us-versus-them politics has become so deep.

By the way, the headline for this podcast on the NYT home page right now is a less sensational "How the Democratic Brand Turned Radioactive in Rural America."  Both the provocative and less provocative headlines show up when you click through. 

Here are some of the more interesting exchanges about the book that are featured  in the podcast:

Klein: 

Before we get into what created the divide, beginning in the ’90s, what kept urban and rural America politically united for so long?

Mettler:  

If you go back to, say, the late 19th, early 20th century, as industrialization is happening, rural areas really feel left behind. There’s a big agricultural depression in the 1920s. Then the Great Depression comes. And rural people at that point are really upset, and policymakers are worried there’s about to be a revolution in the countryside, as they call it.

But what happens is that Franklin D. Roosevelt steps in and creates this big rural-urban coalition. And to an extent that I was unaware of until we wrote this book, he really put rural Americans front and center in his vision of what needed to happen for the country and created all of these policies that were really designed to lift up rural America.

Archived clip of Franklin D. Roosevelt: 

I cannot escape the conclusion that one of the essential parts of a national program of restoration must be to restore purchasing power to the farming half of the country. Without this, the wheels of railroads and of factories will not turn.

* * *  

Rural Americans really appreciated that. They felt the Democratic Party was there for them, and many of them remembered it for their lifetimes. And then their kids did, as well, all the way up until the 1990s.

In the 1980s and early ’90s, rural places were more likely to send Democrats to Congress than Republicans. Only a few decades ago, there was still a coalition where there were rural politicians who were really at the forefront in Congress in brokering compromises on all sorts of important policies.

Klein:

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. And that kicks off this process of ideological polarization, where the parties sort into liberal and conservative. The Dixiecrats die out.

And I think the most commonly believed story about what happened in the urban-rural divide is that they hated the Civil Rights Act. I think if you look at a lot of Democratic accounts of this, you’ll see something like that.

But you don’t buy that account. Why?

Mettler:

Yes, that’s wrong. So for one thing, just look at when the rural-urban divide emerged: It’s not until the late 1990s.

The story that you’re telling, usually the follow-up is that the South left the Democratic Party. Well, in fact, there were a lot of urban Southerners who left the Democratic Party. But rural Southerners stuck with it up until the 1990s, and then they left.

Klein:  

The way your book is structured, you sort of say: There’s this economic divergence, and then layered on top of that very quickly is what you call elite overreach. That’s what we’re talking about here.

The way you describe it is: “It was not any one issue that tipped the scales but rather the persistent commonality that ran across them. From 2008 onward, rural Americans perceived an urban elite that sought to impose itself on far-flung places, controlling residents’ lives through new rules and procedures, in which they felt they had little voice.”

And you argue that the issue here is not the policy but the sense of respect or disrespect, of listening or not listening, of representation or absence of representation — that there was something sort of beneath policy that drove this.

Klein: 

Political scientists use this slightly strange tool called the feeling thermometer, where they ask people to rate other groups on a 1-to-100 scale.

You have this data for white rural America, and on a scale of 1 to 100, they put Black Americans at a 70 — pretty good; Hispanic Americans at 67; gay men at 57; illegal immigrants at 39 — pretty low; and Democrats at 14 points.

So Democrats are rated at less than half illegal immigrants’ rating.
By the way, this is not just rural America — white urban Democrats put Republicans at 17 points. But the hatred is much more concentrated at the political outgroup, at least in these measures, than at any other group.

Klein:

White rural America’s sense that the Democratic Party sees all these other groups as in need of help and respect and is prioritizing them ahead of them — Arlie Hochschild’s idea about other groups getting to cut in line. And then there’s a real rise of discourse around white privilege. And this creates — we’ve seen this in our politics — a lot of anger.

Like: You’re telling me — in a poor community that has very few jobs now, where life expectancy is going down — that I have white privilege, and your urban coalition is what needs the help? Or that illegal immigrants need the help?

I’d like you to talk a bit about that distinction between the divide being discriminatory, and the divide being a feeling: That coalition doesn’t prioritize me, so I’m going to go with a coalition that does.

Mettler:  

It’s a really important issue in that I think a lot of urban Democrats assume that what’s at play in this rural-urban divide is that rural white people are racist. What we find is that it’s not reducible to that.  (emphasis mine)

The way we understand it is that it’s in this same period that there’s the sense of elite overreach on the part of Democrats, where rural Americans are looking at the Democratic Party and thinking: They don’t understand us. They don’t care about our communities.

And on this, they’re viewing the Democratic Party as really prioritizing the needs of people of color in urban communities and immigrants — but not really understanding or caring about rural people who are struggling, as well.

This last bit from Mettler is, to my mind, so important.  What Mettler doesn't say is how academics contribute to this problem of saying that so-called rural resentment is all due to racial animus.  See some nuanced and thoughtful pushback to that notion--or at least the notion it is all so simple--in this academic article.   

I'll no doubt have more to say about Mettler and Brown's book in future posts, after I've read it.   For now, I'll just say that three of my recent publications aim to take a more optimistic tack regarding rural voters.  They encourage progressives to play to rural residents' rural identity--to show them that they and their needs are seen.   Read more here, here, and here.  I'm somewhat less optimistic here, while still taking seriously the need for politicians--including those on the left--to respond to rural needs.  

Lots of rural (and Southern) stereotypes in today's NYT opinion

Today's NY Times opinion podcast featured three southerners in conversation under the headline, "There is No Trump Without the South."  Here are some excerpts that play to stereotypes of the South--and its conflation with rurality. (That conflation is not entirely inaccurate in that the South is the most rural region of the nation).  Rural-urban tension is also touched on, as a sort of parallel to the tension between the South (and what it represents) and the rest of the nation.  

Jamelle Bouie:  

One observation everyone in this conversation has made and other people have made is the way that there has emerged an almost generic national rural culture.

It’s a certain kind of country music. It’s a certain kind of pickup truck. You see it if you go to rural New Hampshire, if you go to rural Montana, if you go to rural Illinois. It’s very much rooted in a franchised version of a white Southern rurality.

And I bring that up to say that it’s both the case that the country will shunt its difficult conversations, as Tressie said, about race to the South and make it a Southern problem. But it’s always been the case that the rest of the country has been fascinated by the South in really important ways.

* * * 

Tressie McMillan Cottom: 

Every time a Southern politician goes out and they congratulate themselves about building the new car factory or the new battery maker in some rural part of their Southern state or municipality, what they have generally done is they have made a deal with either a national or a transnational conglomerate that says: You do not have to worry about unionizing.

* * * 

And what we are seeing here is not just a transplant of people but of ideas that don’t necessarily create that kind of mobility for Southern workers across the South, which then leads to a war, a battle for the soul of rural America that you can feel very tangibly in the South.

David French: 

I come from a town — when I was growing up there, it was about 8,000 people. We had three stoplights in a rural town in Kentucky. That’s where I spent my elementary and high school years, and it’s unrecognizable now because a Toyota manufacturing plant came there and completely transformed the city.

But these are good, high-paying jobs. They are transformative jobs in these parts of the South, but it is absolutely true that they also pull and draw jobs from other parts of America. And it’s one of the reasons I think so many people have been moving to the South.

Bouie:

But I also want to say that part of the allure of the South as a cultural object — and this is getting back to what Tressie had said earlier about cost of living — is not simply that things might be cheaper but that you have an opportunity to use your wealth, for lack of a better term, to dominate other people.

You can have a big compound in the middle of Texas and drive a gigantic vehicle and use all the resources you’d like and boss people around.

McMillan Cottom: 

It’s the “Yellowstone”-ification of the country, Jamelle.

Bouie: 

Yes. And that aspect of it — there’s no policy you can do to compete with that, I guess. Because what a place like California is offering, the trade-off is it’s going to be more expensive to live there. Unless you are in the highest echelon of income earners, you’re not going to be able to hire someone to look after your house for dirt cheap, right? You won’t be able to exploit someone so easily.

But you are going to live in this multicultural, cosmopolitan place where people are going to exist, at least culturally, on some plane of equality. And if you like that kind of life and experience, that’s what you’re in L.A. for, that’s what you’re in New York for, that’s what you’re in Chicago for and all the places that are their own places but offer a smaller or more manageable versions of that thing.

* * * 

McMillan Cottom: 

Now, I think at the state level — again, especially in a place like North Carolina — we tend to prefer a more socially conservative performance of Southern politics. But on the ground, especially when you’re talking about local elections, it is that the Democratic Party wants to run a far more conservative candidate than can excite the base across the rural parts of the South.

Bouie: 

I think that it would be a good idea for the Democratic Party to make serious investments in Mississippi, a state where Democratic candidates with no investment routinely hit the mid-40s in statewide elections. That’s a clear sign.

It’s going to be really hard to close that gap because of racial polarization in the state. But the gap can be closed, and making Mississippi competitive would be a huge blow to Republicans if you’re a Democrat. It changes the game.

Rural lack of anonymity in the wake of Tennessee explosion

An explosion yesterday at an ammunition plant in McEwan, Tennessee, population 1643,  left several dead and many missing.  In the Washington Post's coverage of the disaster, I was struck by these comments from the Humphreys County Sheriff in that they reflected rural lack of anonymity.  

Nearly 12 hours after the explosion, law enforcement officers were still trying to contact victims’ families, Davis said, adding that officials planned to work through the night to keep looking for possible survivors, interviewing witnesses and family members, and trying to find out what happened.

“It’s hell on us,” he said. “It’s hell on everybody.”

The close-knit nature of the community compounded the pain. Davis said that he’s “very close” with at least three families involved in the explosion and that the sheriff of the neighboring county could say much the same. That closeness drove Davis to keep looking for survivors, caring for the injured and consoling the bereaved, he said.

“When you have small counties like this, we know each other, we communicate with each other, we love each other,” Davis said. “And that’s what — honestly, it’s what keeps my motivation alive.”

“We’re working for our people,” he added.

This is from the New York Times coverage of the explosion: 

The explosion has shaken the small, tight-knit communities in Hickman and Humphreys Counties, which have a combined population of about 44,000.

One of the communities is known as Bucksnort, where there are winding dirt roads, ample hunting ground and just a handful of businesses. Steven Anderson, who runs a trout farm there, said there were only three points of interest in town — the trout farm, the munitions plant and a gas station with a convenience store where he said workers from the plant often eat lunch.

Postscript:  On October 13, the New York Times ran this story, "A Tennessee Sheriff Becomes the Face of Grief after Plant Explosion."   

Risks to rural hospitals grab big headlines in Arkansas

The lead story in today's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is about the perils that Trump's "One Big, Beautiful Bill Act" poses to rural hospitals in the state.  Here's an excerpt from the feature by Neal Earley, which provides some excellent explanatory reporting: 

Rural hospitals in Arkansas will have to ready themselves for some major changes coming in the next few years that could mean savings for the federal government but fewer people with health care coverage.

The changes are part of the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act the U.S. House of Representatives passed on Thursday. It includes key changes to Medicaid and health care for low-income Americans that are projected to reduce federal spending on the program by $1 trillion over 10 years and lead to an increase in the number of uninsured people...

But some hospital officials worry the work requirements and bi-annual eligibility checks would mean a drop in coverage for many, shifting the cost burden to providers.

“You can take people off the rolls, but they’re still going to come to the (emergency room),” said Shelby Brown, administrator of Southwest Arkansas Regional Medical Center in Hope. “And small rural hospitals like we are in Hope, Arkansas — we don’t have the volume to absorb more people without insurance.”

The Kaiser Family Foundation says 813,000 Arkansans are enrolled in Medicaid, and 41% of those live in rural areas. 

Cuts to Medicaid would be felt more acutely by rural hospitals, as they don’t have the type of patient volume that suburban and urban hospitals have that could help them absorb a drop in revenue, Brown said.

* * *

Arkansas already attempted to implement work requirements in 2018, but it led to about 18,000 Arkansans losing coverage. In 2019, a federal judge struck down the requirement.

While the new requirement is designed to eliminate waste and force those who are able to seek health insurance through their work, Bo Ryall of the Arkansas Hospital Association said prior experience has shown health care providers are the ones who will observe the financial hit, saying, “Arkansas’s prior experience with work requirement enforcement and frequent re-determinations increased uncompensated care in hospitals.”

The story also quotes Stacy Harberson, CEO of Howard Memorial Hospital in Nashville, AR:

[R]ural hospitals (are) already operating at such a thin margin it could be very detrimental.

"Rural" all over the news as Senate passes "Big Beautiful Bill" that will undermine rural services, especially health care

Analysis of what Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" would do to rural health care has been in the news for several weeks, and it stayed there today as the Senate passed the Bill by a vote of 50-50, with Vice President J.D. Vance breaking the tie.  

What follows appeared on the Ezra Klein Show today, July 1, but much of it was recorded in advance in anticipation that the bill would pass.  Here, I'm just going to highlight the bits about rural health care, including as they relate to "red state" voters: 

Klein: [T]hey are very substantially cuts to the Republican Party’s voters. They’re cuts to Republican states. They’re cuts to Republican hospitals — rural hospitals in areas that vote for Republicans and are very dependent on the care that gets financed by Medicaid in order to stay open.  (emphasis added)

This is the Republicans’ old ideology coming into conflict with their new coalition.

Yglesias:  Absolutely. If you look at the share of people who are on Medicaid by state, there are seven states where more than a quarter of the population is on Medicaid.

One of them is New York, and one of them is California. But the other five are New Mexico, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia.

And then you look at states like Mississippi and Alabama: If they would accept Medicaid expansion funding, there’s a huge, potentially eligible population share in those states.

It’s a big conflict inside the heart of Republican politics. [Details about Mitch McConnell and Kentucky] 

There’s just a conflict between the Republican Party electorate and their ideology, which has shifted in some ways but really remains focused on low taxes, on investment income, low corporate taxes and wanting to cut spending on programs for the poor.

About work requirements and how they've worked out so far, Klein and Yglesias shared this conversation:

The most conservative states don’t accept Medicaid expansion funds. They have tried to impose work requirements in Arkansas, for example.

(Read more about the Arkansas experiment here and here.) 

So we ran the experiment: Does putting work requirements on Medicaid increase employment? And the answer was no. When they did it, employment didn’t go up. People did lose coverage, but employment didn’t go up.

And Republicans didn’t reverse course after that. They didn’t say to themselves: Oh, our goal here was to get more people working, but we didn’t succeed at that. They said: You know what? This cut the rolls. It cut spending. We’re happy with that.

That’s a free market view: If you want a television, you’ve got to pay for it yourself. If you want chemotherapy, you’ve got to pay for it yourself.

On work requirements, I published this three years ago in Politico.   

Here's more from Yglesias, on perverse incentives: 

There’s this threat that hospitals will go out of business. I’m in Maine right now in a very rural area, and hospitals don’t have a ton of customers here. If they lose let’s say 10 percent or 15 percent of their customer base and have higher uncompensated care burdens — some of the facilities will just close.

Senate Republicans have discussed creating a hospital bailout fund to prevent this, but it seems crazy to me to address hospitals’ business model problems by giving them direct payments to stay in business even though they’re not treating patients, rather than just letting people get the treatment they need.  (emphasis added)

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska ultimately voted for the bill, but only after she was offered big concessions for her state.  Read more about those here.  Apparently, one of those concessions was to double to $50 billion (from an initial $25 billion) the amount in a fund that would support rural hospitals.  Another related to how SNAP will be administered in Alaksa. 

Also instructive is this interview by NPR with Kaiser Health News reporter Sarah Jane Tribble, published yesterday, leading with Juana Summers questioning Tribble: 

SUMMERS: Rural America is poised to be greatly impacted by these proposed cuts. Roughly 20% of the U.S. population lives in rural areas where Medicaid covers 1 in 4 adults. Here to talk about what could be at stake for those communities is Sarah Jane Tribble. She's the chief rural correspondent for KFF Health News. ...

Sarah, just start if you can by telling us a bit about what you have been hearing from people in rural communities across this country about these proposed cuts.

TRIBBLE: Yeah, I'm not hearing good things. They're very concerned, because Medicaid rates are so high in rural America, that these cuts will be very detrimental, they'll cause more hospitals to close, they'll tax rural health clinics. I was sitting next to a CEO of a rural hospital from Colorado. He has a 25-bed critical access hospital, the only hospital between the Kansas border and Denver on the Colorado I-70 corridor. And he had been talking about the cuts and not happy about them. And then we heard about the rural transformation fund that the Senate has been working on to sort of help offset the cuts. And he leaned over and he just scoffed. He just said, that's just not going to be enough. So I think that there's a lot of concern out there in rural America.  (emphasis added) 

Here's a late June NPR story about the ripple effects the cuts are likely to have on hospitals in rural Colorado, this one focused on the San Luis Valley in the southwest part of the state.  Here is a key excerpt from the story by John Daley: 

"I'm trying to be worried — and optimistic," said Konnie Martin, CEO of San Luis Valley Health in Alamosa. It's the flagship health care facility for 50,000 people in six agricultural counties — Alamosa, Conejos, Costilla, Mineral, Rio Grande and Saguache.

The numbers out of the bill about deep Medicaid cuts were "incredibly frightening," Martin said, "because Medicaid is such a vital program to rural health care."

Martin's hospital is not alone. "I think in Colorado right now, nearly 70 percent of rural hospitals are operating in a negative margin," in the red, Martin said.

Here's a late June Washington Post story about Medicaid as a "lifeline" in West Virginia.  

1956 article recognizes still existing barriers to rural practice and accidentally makes a good point

It should perhaps surprise no one that many of the systemic barriers that plague rural lawyers are long standing. Many rural lawyers charge less for their services (in order to ensure that local residents can actually afford their services). But yet, young rural lawyers still have to contend with student loan payments, and if they decide to start their own firms, the cost of overhead expenses such as rent, wages, cost of legal databases, insurance...etc. And in many rural communities, starting your own firm might be the only way to actually get legal work. Rural America is dominated by small firms, which do not hire very often. 

This reality is not new, of course. And recognizing it isn't new either. In 1956, the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina published a series of articles that looked at the income of lawyers and why it had not kept pace with other professions. The central thesis was that lawyers should charge more to accommodate their overhead expenses, and readers were cautioned against lawyers who cut their fees to get their business. 

A screenshot of the relevant section from the November 20, 1956 article is shown below:

. 

The article ignored that incomes in rural North Carolina are appreciably lower than its urban centers, a reality that was even more true in 1956 than it is today. If a lawyer raises his rates too high, he may find himself without the ability to get clients. 

But by ignoring this point, the author accidentally made a really good point: Rural lawyers have to charge less, all while not having appreciably lower overhead expenses. A smaller percentage of what they charge the client ends up in their pocket and thus ends up back in their communities. Simply telling lawyers to raise their fees is not adequate; more must be done to make practicing in rural communities not only financially appealing but feasible.

This article is a good reminder of how long these issues have persisted. 

When will women in rural Missouri have true abortion access?

On November 5, 2024, as much of the country watched Donald Trump regain the presidency, abortion advocates in Missouri celebrated. Amendment 3, a ballot proposition to repeal Missouri's total abortion ban, had passed. Missouri was one of seven states that enacted amendments to protect abortion rights on November 5. And in a state that Donald Trump won by over 18 points, voters had somehow simultaneously restored the right to abortion by a narrow margin of 52 to 48 percent. For abortion advocates, passing Amendment 3 was a hard-fought but undeniable victory. 

Then, the question became: "What's next?"

For rural Missourians, the answer is complicated. Over the past few decades, Missouri has severely limited abortion access. Hit hardest were women in rural communities. For years, there were only three abortion clinics in Missouri, which has a population of over 6 million. By 2017, a Planned Parenthood in St. Louis was the only place in the entire state you could get a medical abortion. And in 2022, Missouri passed the "Right to Life of the Unborn Child Act," a trigger ban that months later became the first in the nation to go into effect when Dobbs v. Jackson overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. 

This was the landscape framing desperate efforts to restore medical access to abortion in Missouri. But celebrations fell quiet in weeks after the election as anti-abortion advocates began to respond. Elected officials in Missouri pledged to "vigorously defend" abortion bans in the state. On January 16, 2025, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced federal legislation to defund Planned Parenthood. I felt my own stomach churn when my little sister, a veterinary student at the University of Missouri, texted me: "I'm getting anxious. About living [here]." 

One-third of Missourians live in rural areas. But even those in urban counties have felt the effects of the decades-long effort to restrict access to abortion. Columbia, Missouri, where my sister lives, has a population of 130,000. But it's over a two hour drive to St. Louis, where the sole abortion provider in Missouri is located. Rural Ozark County ⁠— which has a 29.6 percent poverty rate, the highest in the state — is a four hour drive from St. Louis. Not to mention travel costs, medical expenses, and scraping together time off work — all challenges exacerbated by rurality.

While Amendment 3 granted abortion access until the point of fetal viability, the St. Louis Planned Parenthood cannot legally resume providing abortions. This is, in part, due to a December ruling by Jackson County Judge Jerri Zhang which upheld licensure requirements for abortion clinics — meaning that though Missourians have a renewed right to abortion, there is no place for them to obtain one. This leaves rural women in Missouri vulnerable, particularly those in the southern half, where the nearest abortion clinic might be several states away. 

However, progress was made: In the same opinion, Judge Zhang struck down other restrictive laws, including a 72-hour waiting period and a requirement that physicians who perform abortions have admitting privileges in all hospitals that provide obstetric or gynaecological care within "30 minutes or a 15-minute drive." Judge Zhang considered rural Missourians in the decision, writing that: 

[A] person who travels three hours to get a medication abortion and then returns home, would not benefit from [these restrictions]. If complications arise after taking the medication, the individual would need to seek emergency care at the nearest hospital emergency room, as with any other medical emergency.

Aside from the judiciary, what else can be done? In a state like Missouri, where only 28.9 percent of statewide legislators are women, many will turn to grassroots organizing. "What's Next?," an organization dedicated to improving abortion access in Missouri, has advocated for Know-Your-Rights Trainings and other local initiatives. In a 2024 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, over 35 percent of rural women reported they wouldn't know where to go or where to find abortion information. This post by Rooney Debutts details other statewide legislative efforts to improve abortion access. 

One thing is clear: The fight for abortion access in rural Missouri is far from over. 

On the occasion of Jimmy Carter's death, looking back at his truly rural attachments

On the occasion of his death, I'm re-upping here every mention of former President Jimmy Carter from Legal Ruralism.  I'll start however, by noting the comments of a Georgia Public Radio journalist on NPR shortly after Carter's death was announced.  The journalist contrasted Carter's rural Georgia upbringing with his progressive record on race rights--as if being progressive on race is not what you'd expect from a rural resident.  (I've looked for the direct quote, but I cannot find it). 

Here are some highlights, beginning with a few excerpts from Kai Bird's biography of Carter, The Outlier.  

Jimmy’s father, James Earl Carter Sr., had a tenth-grade education before dropping out to join the army. In 1903, when Earl was only 10 years old, his father, William Archibald Carter, was shot dead during a violent brawl with a business rival. They had been arguing over who was the rightful owner of a desk. Earl was certainly not country “white trash”—but neither was he part of the southern plantation aristocracy. By the late 1920’s, he made more than a comfortable living growing peanuts, corn, and cotton and drawing “rents” from his Black tenants. He managed to expand his farm acreage even during the boll weevil blight of the 1920’s, which wiped out many cotton farmers.

Jimmy Carter was apparently a fan of William Faulkner.  Here's a salient passage from page 20 of the Bird biography:   

More than most white southerners, the rural folk of South Georgia had defied assimilation and loyalty clung to their native culture as a matter of principle. They had their own vernacular and distinctive accent. And they had their own religion, and unvarnished, evangelical southern Protestantism that affirmed the supremacy of the white race in society and patriarchy at home.

Two generations had passed since the Civil War, but that conflagration continued to define their collective identity. “The past is never dead. It's not even past”—so says Gavin Stevens, a character in Faulkner's novel Requiem for a Nun.  Curtis Wilkie, a celebrated journalist from Mississippi who later covered the Carter administration, wrote in his memoirs, “We deliberately set ourselves apart from the rest of America during the Civil War and continue, to this day, to live as spiritual citizens of a nation that existed for only four years in another century.” The South had lost the Civil War but most if not all white southerners unashamedly celebrated what they revered as the “Lost Cause”. On the eve of the Civil War, Georgia was the South's leading slave state with some 462,000 slaves, or nearly 45% of the population. It was also the last southern state to rejoin the union, in July 1870. It was all about slavery. The South was preoccupied with a history heavily laden with questions about guilt, evil, and sin. History mattered to these Georgians.

There are more passages from Bird's book that use the words "rural," "country," "redneck," and such.  You can search for those words on the Kindle edition to learn more.  

Here's another post about Bird's writings on Carter, this on the occasion of Carter going into hospice nearly two years ago.  In it, I also discuss a NYT story by Rick Rojas which focuses on what Carter meant to Plains, Georgia:  In short, lots of tourists and thus economic development.  The excerpt leads, however, with what Plains was to Carter:   

The appeal of Plains, Mr. Carter has said, was its promise of the kind of humble, small-town existence he desired after the presidency. 

* * *  

As much as Mr. Carter wanted a semblance of a regular life, the result of his living in Plains turned it into no ordinary town. The signs marking town limits boast that Plains is home to the 39th president. The farm where he was raised just outside of town is a National Park. His modest house is surrounded by black security fencing and guard posts.

Other small towns in this part of Georgia, linked together in a constellation of country roads, have withered or have streets lined with fast-food joints and convenience stores. The center of Plains has a cafe and a row of gift shops that bustle with tourists.

Without Mr. Carter, “you wouldn’t have the downtown atmosphere that you have,” said Jeff Clements, an owner of the Buffalo Peanut Company, a commercial peanut sheller and seed treater that owns what was once the Carter family’s warehouse.

And here's a 2018 post about Carter, "the uncelebrity president."  This post includes data on the racial makeup of Sumter County, home of Plains.  It's majority Black, with about 6% Latino/a.  

And this post is based on a 2015 column by Nicholas Kristof.  In it, I query if Jimmy Carter can be rehabilitated without also rehabilitating the rural South. Note that I asked this question before the rise of Donald Trump, along with the crediting (or blaming) of rural America for that phenomenon.  

The reference to Carter in this 2023 post is less central; the post is more about responses to his policies--and from California, no less.  The next few posts are about Carter's historical significance, including in relation to presidential primaries.  

Arkansas bureaucrat (essentially) calls state's rural residents "white trash"

In early November, the State of Arkansas announced the purchase of 815 acres in rural Franklin County where the Department of Corrections intends to build a 3000-bed prison.  The state government did not consult with people in the region about the decision when the land was being purchased and the project planned.  My understanding is that they announced it after the land deal was done.  

Since then, local opposition has arisen, most prominently from an organization called the Franklin County and River Valley Coalition (Franklin County straddles the Arkansas River).  That organization's Freedom of Information Act requests surfaced offensive emails from Jonathan Duran, Deputy Director of the Arkansas Geographic Information Systems office, a division of the Arkansas Department of Transformation and Shared Services.  Some prior coverage of the controversy is here and here. 

Below are some excerpts from today's coverage of the matter in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, beginning with more back story on the emails:  Duran  emailed his boss a "'white trash' clip from the satirical animated TV show "South Park..

With the subject line "Franklin County town hall meeting," the first email from Duran states: "Do you think a possible townhall meeting in Franklin County about the proposed state prison might go a little like this?"

Below that in the email is a link to YouTube to a segment from "South Park" titled "They Took Our Jobs!"

* * * 

One of the characters is labeled "pissed off white trash redneck conservative." The cartoon characters in the clip repeatedly chant, "They took our jobs!"

Below the link Duran provided in the Oct. 31 email to Johnson [his boss], Duran typed: "They took our land!"

Yesterday, the River Valley coalition released a second email from Duran.  It says, "Do y'all feel like spy plane pilots now?" A smiling face emoji with a wink is inserted at that point.   "Is that an outhouse or an old refrigerator to the right of the house in the drone pic?" 

The coalition commented: 

His email was intended to mock and belittle the hardworking, law-abiding citizens Duran serves, undermining the integrity of public service in Arkansas. Such a comparison is a gross disrespect to the people he represents.

The coalition is calling for Duran to be terminated because what he said "disrespects rural Arkansas."  Their statement read: 

A simple apology or reassignment will not suffice. Duran's behavior demands more decisive action: the complete removal of Jonathan Duran from his position.  We call on Governor Sarah Sanders to take immediate action to uphold the values of professionalism, respect, and fairness within Arkansas' leadership.

The coalition's attorney declared,"The people of Franklin County and the River Valley deserve public servants who treat them with dignity and respect."  I could not agree more.  

I looked up Mr. Duran, and I see he proudly claims his status as a native of Arkansas, and with a degree from the University of Arkansas at Monticello, he may be from rural Arkansas himself.   That makes it even more disappointing, in some ways, that he's now the city boy ridiculing his country cousins. 

It will be interesting to see where all of this goes--both the prison siting and the State of Arkansas bureaucrat ridiculing rural folks--given Governor Sanders' popularity with rural voters--at least up until now.   

Here is a link to the Arkansas Times coverage of these events, including information on the land purchase being concealed until it was a done deal.  And here is Arkansas Democrat-Gazette coverage from on December 12, revealing that most of the locations the state considered were in Western Arkansas--and several were metropolitan by some measure, including a number in greater Fort Smith, on the Oklahoma state line.  Here's the "short list"; note that the Alma sites are in Crawford County, which has a population of just over 60,000, but is part of the Fort Smith metropolitan area:  

* Alma -- ball field;

* Alma -- train tracks;
* Alma -- south of ball field;
* Clarksville [Johnson County];
* Fort Smith -- end of airport/industrial park;
* Fort Smith -- Stephens;
* Fort Smith -- Treece;
* Greenwood -- Holland Farm 2;
* Huntington -- Holland Farm;
* Mansfield;
* Menifee -- ruled out due to water availability;
* Mulberry; and
* Rudy

The story also notes the search criteria for a site:  

* Minimum of 250-300 contiguous acres, relatively flat and not in a floodplain;
* Not within 60 miles of an existing state Department of Corrections facility (to avoid workforce cannibalization);
* Available regional workforce based on commute times;
* Availability of primary infrastructure (water, electric, feasibility of wastewater treatment, etc.); and
* Proximity to emergency services and medical facilities.

The document states that the Franklin County site "meets or exceeds our search criteria."  However, "[a]ccording to the site assessment, research and the whittling down of an initial 25,000 'candidate parcels', 6000 were within "[two] miles of a U.S. or Interstate Highway."  The Franklin County site ultimately chosen is 22 miles from the nearest Interstate, which is I-40, via the city of Ozark. 

Location, Location, Location Revisited: More Needs to be Done

For this post, I am going to revisit a post I made seven years ago in which I discussed the role that law schools can play in alleviating the rural lawyer shortage. While academia has made some progress, namely in the establishment of rural legal clinics, it has not tackled the problem in a way that could lead to meaningful change. 

Many of the underlying statistics from seven years ago are still true. Data from the Occupational Employment Statistics within the Bureau of Labor Statistics still bears out that the rural lawyer shortage is practically universal around the country. As it was in 2017, Southwestern Montana is an exception. There is one additional exception, the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. As with last time, I am measuring the shortage by location quotient, which provides a good approximation of an area's employment in a given sector compared to the national average. The Location Quotient controls for population so you can do a direct comparison between rural and urban employment. 

While the media has spoken a lot about people migrating to rural communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, this migration has not been even. An analysis from The Daily Yonder suggests that rural communities whose economies depend on recreation saw the greatest increase from this migration. While rural America continues to grow after the pandemic, a further analysis from The Daily Yonder shows that between 2023-2024, population growth was concentrated in rural counties that border metropolitan areas. Neither of these developments are particularly helpful to the vast majority of rural counties. 

One huge difference that I have seen in the last decade that I have been writing about this issue is an increase in general awareness. Some states are actually offering incentives to practice in rural spaces and law schools are increasingly offering rural practice clinics or similar such opportunities. A report to the Maine Legislature in January 2024 quantified the impact of the University of Maine's Rural Practice Clinic in Fort Kent, in the remote northern part of the state. These opportunities are important and do help tremendously. However, the students are only there for a portion of their law school experience, often as little as a semester. The jury is still out as to whether or not these types of programs actually increase the number of lawyers who opt to live and work in rural spaces. 

I have long advocated for the establishment of law schools in rural communities so students can spend three years immersed in a rural space, learn what it means to be part of a rural community, and have more time to extern in the small practices and/or local governments that dot the rural landscape. 

The Current Landscape

In the past seven years, there has not been a single rural law school established. However, there also hasn't been a rural law school closure. So, we have kind of been stuck with the status quo over the past few years. By my count, there are 11 ABA Accredited law schools located outside of metropolitan areas, though some of these are in larger college towns: 

• Appalachian School of Law (Grundy, VA)
• Ohio Northern University (Ada, OH)
• Pennsylvania State University (University Park, PA)
• Penn State Dickinson Law (Carlisle, PA)
• University of Idaho (Moscow, ID)
• University of Mississippi (Oxford, MS) 
• University of New Hampshire (Concord, NH)
• University of South Dakota (Vermillion, SD)
• University of Wyoming (Laramie, WY)
• Vermont Law and Graduate School (South Royalton, VT)
• Washington and Lee University (Lexington, VA)

There are 198 fully accredited ABA law schools so roughly 5% are located outside of metropolitan areas. There are some law schools in areas that might be considered more remote - Cornell University in Ithaca, New York is a good example. Students at those schools would have more opportunities to be exposed to small town practice than a student in a major metropolitan area. However, these areas are still metropolitan areas and job centers in their own right. 

Exposure, Exposure, Exposure

I still believe many of my original points from 2017 - there is no better way to expose students to the issues facing rural communities than prolonged exposure. Becoming immersed in a community for multiple years is the best way to understand its problems. As I said then, even if a student does not remain in the rural community after law school, they still leave with a greater understanding of the challenges that the legal profession faces in those spaces. They can become advocates for actually addressing the problem. 

Law Schools Are Needed in Rural Spaces

If you've been online long enough, you have read the line that we have too many law schools. I'm not sure I agree, and my reasons are the same that they were seven years ago. We have too many law schools in metropolitan areas and too few law schools in small towns and rural communities. We need more law schools in small towns and rural communities. 

What should this look like? A scan of the schools listed above shows a potential solution. Only two of the schools, Vermont and Appalachian, are private standalone schools without a parent university. And both have experienced financial issues within the last decade. In response, Vermont Law decided to reinvent itself by offering master's degrees in areas such as public policy and becoming a "law and graduate school." As I did seven years ago, I believe that schools like Appalachian and Vermont play a key role in the solving the rural lawyer shortage. 

But there is stability in the backing of a major university system, and I believe that the path forward is for state university systems to leverage their resources and state backing to put law schools on their rural campuses. This would provide a financial shelter that a standalone school would not have, and it would provide stability for the students who opt to attend these schools.

I'll use my home state of North Carolina as an example of how this could look. North Carolina has one of the most expansive university systems in the country with every public university being considered a part of the University of North Carolina system. In total, there are 17 campuses with four located outside of metropolitan area: 

• Appalachian State University (in Boone)
• Elizabeth City State University 
• University of North Carolina at Pembroke
• Western Carolina University (in Cullowhee)

The idea of establishing a new graduate school on one (or more) of these campuses would not be without recent precedent. Just this year, UNC Pembroke established a Doctor of Optometry program in order to alleviate the rural medical provider shortage.

A law school on any of these campuses would address the access to justice issue in a historically impoverished portion of the state. Appalachian and Western Carolina serve Appalachia while Elizabeth City State and UNC Pembroke serve Eastern North Carolina. A law school on a small rural campus also allows for specialization in rural lawyering. Unlike a law school on a flagship state university campus, it won't necessarily attract students who are looking for urban opportunities. A smaller, most focused school should yield the best results for both the students and local community. 

The Raging Current 

But it would be naive to assume that establishing a new rural institution isn't swimming against an already roaring current. 

There is an epidemic of closures and mergers of small rural institutions over the last several years. In 2023, the Hechinger Report estimates that at least a dozen rural, non-profit institutions had closed or announced plans to close since 2020.  In Vermont (a majority rural state with one small metro area), there have been five non-profit college closures since 2019. Keeping a small rural school afloat is becoming a gargantuan task. 

But the closures and mergers aren't just limited to private schools. Public universities are also closing and merging. You can look at Vermont to see a spate of mergers that ultimately involved four public colleges becoming one. In 2018, publicly funded Lyndon State University merged with Johnson State University to form Northern Vermont University. In 2023, two more rural colleges, Castleton State University and Vermont Technical College merged with Northern Vermont University to form Vermont State University.

Even the schools that are staying open are cutting majors and ultimately opportunities. Dr. Pruitt posted about this issue a couple of weeks ago. Her post linked to a story that discussed the struggles of a student at Delta State University, a public university in rural Mississippi, who saw her planned major cut. The story discussed majors being cut at rural public universities in places as far flung as New York, Minnesota, North Carolina, Alaska, and Arkansas.

Rural education is in trouble and convincing lawmakers to invest further is going to be a challenge. I did provide an example above of a rural public university investing in graduate education so it's not impossible.

Conclusion

To successfully solve the rural lawyer shortage, it is essential that lawmakers realize the value of investing in a public rural law school. These schools not making money should not be seen as detriment but rather a key investment. 

A public rural law school would ensure that students are exposed to rural issues for all three years of their education, and a small public rural law school provides an opportunity to further specialize in small town practice and attract students who are interested in (or at least open to) the idea of small-town practice. 

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.

Recent coverage of the rural vote in North Carolina and Georgia

Police Department of Roxboro, North Carolina
Person County
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2023

With both of these states in play in the 2024 Presidential Election, media outlets have been paying attention to the rural vote.  In this post, I'll just highlight a few of the stories. 

Hannah Knowles and Yasmeen Abutaleb reported for the Washington Post on September 12, under the headline, "Harris Puts Pressure on Trump in an Elusive Battleground:  North Carolina."  Here's an excerpt: 

Harris has raised Democratic hopes of winning North Carolina, a populous battleground that has been just beyond their grasp since Barack Obama briefly turned it blue in 2008. The elusive prize represents the party’s best chance of winning a state Biden couldn’t in 2020, and the race here is a dead heat about eight weeks before Election Day.

* * *

Democrats have long believed the state’s rapidly growing population and demographics — including a significant number of Black voters and millennial voters — put it firmly in play. Yet roughly 40 percent of the state lives in rural areas, which tend to be conservative strongholds that have helped the GOP stay on top.

* * * 

“It is a more small-town, rural state than Georgia is,” [Amy] Walter [of Cook Political Report] said. Cities quickly give way to red territory. Harris needs to “post better numbers in the suburbs right outside of Charlotte or right outside of the research triangle, and that’s the challenge,” Walter said.

The story mentions nonmetro Robeson County, home to the Lumbee Tribe.  

Here's Sarah Kallis today, "The State of the Presidential Race in Rural Georgia," on NPR.   Here are some excerpts from Kallis' conversation with NPR host Mary Louise Kelly:  

KALLIS: So I'm standing on a park in Rutledge, Ga., and it's a pretty small park in the middle of town. And I can see a gazebo, a metal swing set and a slide near me. There's also a rooster walking around the park that you might have heard earlier and you might hear again on this call.

KELLY: (Laughter) OK, good.

KALLIS: And so on my drive here from Atlanta, I passed miles of cotton fields. Rutledge is a very small town. It's only about 871 people. And I can see several small businesses, like a restaurant, a hardware store and a dentist, near the park. But most of the other storefronts are vacant. Rutledge is near a planned Rivian electric vehicle plant that promised to bring in thousands of jobs, but construction has been paused indefinitely. And I've spoken to a lot of people here who said that small new businesses often struggle to make it.

KELLY: I hear the rooster there. And I also hear you telling me that residents are worried about local business. They are worried about the local economy.

* * *

KALLIS: Right. So rural counties outside of the major cities in Atlanta tend to vote Republican pretty consistently. But some counties, like Liberty County, which is in southeast Georgia, sort of near Savannah, have pretty large pockets of Black voters, and they tend to lean Democratic. Liberty County ended up voting for Biden in 2020. Overall, rural voters in Georgia voted mostly for Trump in 2020, but both the Harris and the Trump campaigns have opened field offices in these rural areas to try to connect with voters there.

And here's another NPR story, from a few days ago, on rural voters in Georgia. Steven Fowler reports for Georgia Public Radio under the headline, "Once again, the presidential race is looming large in Georgia."  Some excerpts follow: 

FOWLER:  But an underrated piece of the puzzle was Biden losing by less in many rural parts of the state, particularly the Black Belt in South Georgia.

So last week I drove about 2 1/2 hours south of Atlanta to a little town called Cordele, where local Democrats say they can't restock yard signs fast enough. And they were setting up tables and chairs for a debate watch party that drew dozens of people from several nearby counties.

ISAAC OWENS: I would like to think that Joe Biden won because of the city of Cordele and those votes.

FOWLER: Isaac Owens is a local pastor and city commissioner in Cordele, known as the watermelon capital of the world, and home to about half of the 20,000 people that live in Crisp County. He says that, a lot of times, candidates overlook rural communities.

OWENS: Because, oh, that's small. That's insignificant. But what happens when a group of small, a group of insignificant come together? They're no longer small and insignificant. They make a powerful thing.

FOWLER: Trump won about 65% of the vote in Crisp County the last two presidential election cycles. And Biden barely won the precinct that encompasses Cordele. So many eyebrows were raised when Democrats opened a campaign headquarters there, one of many offices they set up in places where there aren't a lot of voters, let alone ones that seem like they might vote for a Democrat.

Watch this space for more coverage of the rural vote, including out of southern states that are becoming swing states.