Fifty years ago next week, Georgia’s Jimmy Carter was elected president—the first man from the Deep South to win the White House since Zachary Taylor in 1848. Salvation South magazine editor Chuck Reece says the story the South told itself that night was true, just not in the way most of us remember it. Here’s Chuck.

On this episode, Lee Bains, the Birmingham-born songwriter who leads the Glory Fires, reads from Work Lunch, his first poetry collection, just out from Hub City Press. At his kitchen table in Atlanta, he tells Chuck Reece about a billionaire's buyout that ended his writing job and the Spanish-speaking crew that welcomed the only gringo on the job site. He also talks about his grandfather, who taught him to work with his hands, to work with words, and that he was no better than anybody else.

In the fall of 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court ran out of patience. Fifteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, it ordered Southern school districts to end segregation "at once." Many white families answered by leaving for private "segregation academies." Some stayed. And Black students watched their own schools, and everything those schools had built, disappear.

Mississippi writer Ellen Ann Fentress was 13 when her parents quietly paid her tuition at Pillow Academy. Today she runs The Admissions Project, a growing collection of first-person essays about race and Southern schools.