Richard Doster has a novel coming this June, Crossing the Lines, about a sports writer who explores the reasons southern culture can produce beautiful artwork and entertainment while also rejecting the black people around them. Segregation and oppression appears to have inspired great music and literature.

I watched the Mississippi pass, wondering what would matter in a thousand years. And who, when my great grandchildren ran the business, would have had the more profound effect on the world: W. A. Gayle, the mayor of Montgomery, or Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun Records? Who, fifty years from now, would have had the greater impact: Marvin Griffin, the governor of Georgia—a man who had power, influence, and more friends than a movie star? Or Martin Luther King, a Negro pastor who couldn’t get a seat in most of Atlanta’s restaurants?

B.B. King once played on street corners to pay his power bill. Howling Wolf had played in overalls and cut up shoes. I’d listened to Willie Kizart make a miracle through a cracked amplifier he couldn’t afford to fix. And I wondered, there on the east bank of the Mississippi, who’d done more to make the world better: them, or the Arkansas state legislator Jim Johnson?