I can understand your sentiment, as when I moved down to the South I worked for some literary professors of Southern Literature and had the chance to edit the journal. He knew the South so I listened. He said to me, "You think you are making an impact on the minds of your students?" [in the classroom I taught Mississippi college students in freshman English 101 back in the 90s. "But once they leave your classroom where you tried to open their minds, they will be enveloped back into the Baptist cloud of beliefs." He had a more loquacious and charming way of putting it than I. So, I don't recall his exact words.

But I discovered it's not about the poor or Southern charm, which is white, or the false stereotypes of "southern trash." We have some poor whites up in the rural north as well basking in semi-ignorance.

It's about the piles of black bodies that worked soil, farmed the land under the whip and owned by titles before the Civil War and farmed by the blacks under onerous sharecropping contracts and crippling debt chaining them in a new type of slavery, under a silly and offensive Northern name of Jim Crow, a white man wearing blackface.

I've read 365 laws so far of that post war period from 1865-1967 written by the legislatures of those 15 states. They are all illegal by the standards of democracy and decency, shocking made and passed by all white male legislatures under a mostly one-party system. Blacks are segregated in the very fabric of those laws: not allowed married whites by law, not allowed to go to white schools by law (with 10 times the funding of broken white ones), not allowed to travel in the same sections of busses and trains by law, not allowed to adopt children of another race by law. Not even allowed, in 1967, to step a black foot on the white white sand beach in Sarasota Florida by law.

The inequalities of these laws saturate them, based on the very principles anathema to the Declaration of Independence's fundamental genderless and color principles of natural rights embedded in all humans. The Constitution born from those principles of freedom to pursue one's own happiness in one's own way, of liberty and justice for all, wrapped up in the fundamental ideal of unalienable rights, a truth they found to be self-evident. Those principles were practiced in the north, where many states abolished slavery instantly, like Vermont in 1777 or Massachusetts in 1781 when a judge ruled in favor of a black woman enslaved, finding it illegal to enslave her because her inalienable rights were violated.

It is not about the soil, of the poor treatment of poor whites. (though I note you use the "hicks and hillbillies" to evoke poor whites, not poor blacks). It's about the laws made against American principles of equality because all of them acknowledged difference based on race. These hundreds of laws violated the American ideas and ideals just by acknowledgement difference based on race embedded in them. Sure, they were carried out in a clearly uneven and unfair way. But it is just white men writing of difference into all those laws that shows a profound segregation of mindset inherent in their thinking that is against the very idea of democracy. It is autocratic thinking, and the phrase "separate but equal" makes clear those laws are a form of autocracy, not democracy. Their white male way of thinking about law on the legislative, judicial, and executive police branches of enforcement about power is revealed as structurally different than democracy: divisional and not unifying.

There is no doubt there are good white people, and all the blacks I met were nothing but kind. The violent encounters came from some white southern men, so easily triggered into violent threats I back down from in terror, almost getting beat up for mere trifles that in the North never happened. The number of dead bodies during lynching is enormous of course, and the short book "Southern Horrors" or the one "100 Hundred Years of Lynching" show article written from across this period that give the depravity of white mobs slaughtering, burning, shooting and butchering black Americans based on allegations and no due process rights that is reveals an attitude of repression so vast it is hard to comprehend. So far, the real number is over ten thousand blacks killed for trifles until after 1965. The dead blacks received no justice as white men were tried for a killing until 1981, when the first real trial occurred in Georgia after Michael Donald was hung. There simply is no balance here. Black Americans committed no such atrocities, made no divisional laws, and were locked out of voting until 1965 (with a small exception in the 1870s where some held office).

Not getting the fair and legal recognition of sameness, equality, and making divisional laws is still practice today by DeSantis, though elsewhere, targets black Americans and their history, trans and gays, in bills that continue to make laws based on white decisions of what and who should be included and who shouldn't. This thinking goes on.

I've no doubt you yourself may be against it, as many white southerners are. But almost all Southern black Americans are. And their voices and votes are still be held down by the white men (and some white women) in charge.