Whats up, Axios Southern bureau chief Michael Graff right here, with just a few reflections on a tough weekend in our area …

One hour earlier than the town of Memphis launched movies of police fatally beating Tyre Nichols on Friday, Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens joined leaders from cities and states throughout the nation condemning the officers’ actions.

• “Atlanta and Memphis have a shared historical past: Atlanta is the birthplace of Dr. King, and Memphis is the place he was killed by an murderer,” Dickens mentioned in a video shared to his social feeds. “That is one more time the place all of us should bear witness to the lack of life by the hands — lack of Black life, a Black man dying — by the hands of regulation enforcement.”

Why it issues: The Memphis footage prompted emotional responses from individuals across the nation, however within the ever-changing South, they had been additionally painful reminders of a shared previous, and a sophisticated future.

• “Memphis. I find out about a tragedy in Memphis,” tweeted Bernice King, the youngest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. “My coronary heart goes out to that metropolis.”

Driving the information: Demonstrators marched solemnly and peacefully over the weekend in cities all through the South — Raleigh, Charlotte, Atlanta. In every place they chanted names of native individuals killed in altercations with police, like Darryl Williams in Raleigh or Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte.

• And in Atlanta, the demonstrations got here at a strain level within the metropolis’s policing historical past, after clashes between regulation enforcement and protesters of the so-called “Cop Metropolis” police coaching facility turned lethal earlier this month. Gov. Brian Kemp issued a state of emergency final week.

The massive image: The South is strung collectively by paved highways and a barbed historical past, spicy meals and wealthy tradition, and a latest inhabitants increase that has introduced prosperity but additionally threatens to exacerbate longstanding financial inequities.

• Every wave of newcomers additionally frays traces to the area’s previous.

Take Dickens’ phrases about King, that he was born in Atlanta and assassinated in Memphis. Because it occurs, King ought to’ve been in North Carolina on April 4, 1968, the day he died, however canceled his journey to remain in Memphis for a sanitation staff’ strike.

• And in additional instant historical past, contemplate the trail of Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis: She was born right into a army household in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, spent twenty years as a police officer in Atlanta, and was later police chief in Durham, North Carolina, earlier than transferring to Memphis.

My thought bubble: As I watched the movies from Memphis, I couldn’t assist however consider an exhibit on the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. It’s a show of cabinets, with tons of of jars of soil collected from the websites of lynchings within the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

• The jars reveal the richness of this Southern earth: deep and darkish brown dust from Selma, pink clay from the Piedmont, lighter shades of sand from the coastal plain.
• All soil that has without delay sustained the nation and been burying floor for its worst sins.
• And now in some ways — from policing to political energy to inexpensive housing methods — it is doubtless the land of a area that can outline the nation’s future.