Meet Carter Gill, History Education Major and SOAR participant
Name: Carter Gill
Hometown: Fargo, ND
Major: History Education
Anticipated Graduation Date: 2025
SOAR Project: “The American South: A Longitudinal Comparative Study on Race Relations and Civil Advancement between Reconstruction and Today.”
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Alexander Jorgensen
What made you choose VCSU?
I initially came for the music program. My first interactions with the VCSU campus were through music contests and honors band, and I knew I wanted to keep doing music outside of high school. I also knew early on that I wanted to get into history education, and I knew that VCSU had a great education program, so that’s why I chose to come here. History was always a subject I did well in and really cared about, so I settled on majoring in history ed and minoring in music.
How did you initially become interested in your research topic?
I became interested in this subject through a historiography class I took in the fall semester of 2023. My research project in the class was on reconstruction, a period of American history after the Civil War when the federal government secured civil rights for the recently freed Americans in the South. The project examined what historians consider the successes and failures of reconstruction in the South. My SOAR project is an extension of the research I did for the historiography paper.
What is the topic of your SOAR project?
The project is a longitudinal study of the effects of the Civil Rights Act and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments on the American South. It examines how those pieces of legislation and civil liberties have been applied to those states and how the federal government has handled and secured them. Alexander Micheal’s book The New Jim Crowe is a major source for the project. It is about how the 13th Amendment contains a loophole that technically makes slavery legal under the condition that it is a punishment for a crime. The book examines the racial makeup of prison populations in Southern states and the severity of the crimes committed. It also discusses the private for-profit prison system: In private prisons, many black prisoners are serving the maximum sentence for minor crimes. Something as inconsequential as marijuana possession might be charged as a life sentence in some cases. This for-profit prison system allows these prisoners to become property of the state and perform unpaid labor while serving their sentences. This study looks at the progression of civil rights from the reconstruction to the Civil Rights movements to today.
What has your research process looked like?
I’ve been very fortunate to have already done a lot of research on this subject for my history and political science classes, so I already have a lot of background and contextual research done. The next piece of my research plan is to find newer data on prison populations so I can draw comparisons across the last 150 years of the civil rights movement.
Have you come across any unexpected learning opportunities while doing your research?
An unexpected learning opportunity has been learning how to navigate independent research outside of the traditional classroom project schedule. In SOAR, there is an agreed-upon schedule with different benchmarks that you plan with your project advisor, but there aren’t traditional deadlines or submission dates. Seeing how much time and effort goes into an independent research project has been eye-opening. I plan on attending graduate school, and having experience with research like this is a really valuable skill that I can continue to utilize after I graduate.
Abstract
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” (U.S. Const.). This is where the promise of the American Dream of ‘liberty and justice for all’ originated via the pen of Thomas Jefferson, which begs the question: Has the United States followed through on the American Promise detailed in its foundational documents like the Declaration of Independence? One of the greatest impediments of the advancement of the American Promise is the issue of race which Reconstruction sought to remedy after the Civil War. After severe pushback from Southern state legislatures and a series of Supreme Court decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) a political and social structure was built around the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine that would define American race relations until the Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Brown v. Board of Education (1954) which worked to dismantle what Americans typically see as systemic racism. However, Michelle Alexander makes the claim in her book The New Jim Crow that systemic racism in the United States still exists but in a new form, stemming from the explicit exemption regarding slavery in the 13th Amendment that says that slavery or involuntary servitude is only acceptable if the subject that is enslaved has been convicted of a crime. Alexander contributes the War on Drugs to the specific targeting of Black Americans because “In the drug war, the enemy is racially defined” which is reflected in her findings that law enforcement of the War on Drugs was “employed almost exclusively in poor communities of color” including both Black and Latino populations (Alexander, 2017, p. 122). This research project will analyze the development of the American South following the end of the Civil War to today utilizing a multidisciplinary approach to the comparative method to find if the status of race relations in the region, specifically focusing on the socioeconomic advancement of Black populations has improved in the last century-and-a-half and establish what advancements have been made and what is left to accomplish which could implicate the South for continuing to facilitate systems that systemically oppress Black populations in these states.”