Andrew Hudgins's complex identity as a Southerner was formed primarily during his high school years in Montgomery, Alabama. Montgomery is often called the "cradle of the Confederacy" because it served, through 1861, as the first capital of the provisional government known as the Confederacy, the alliance of southern states that seceded from the Union. It was in Montgomery that the Confederacy's first constitution was drafted, which, while resembling the U.S. Constitution in many ways, also made provisions for states' rights and slavery.

A hundred years or so later, the city became nearly synonymous with the civil rights movement because so much of its tensions were embodied there. It was in Montgomery, on December 5, 1955, that Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her seat in the front of a bus to a white man and was arrested. Her individual protest rippled into a yearlong boycott...