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Old cotton mills can make for beautiful ruins.

Those weather-beaten red-brick buildings with bell towers and rows upon rows of windows have a haunted quality. They stand like long-abandoned monuments, scattered through the countryside and in our towns and cities.

And they give no hint of the deafening roar and lint-clogged air that once spewed from their machines during one of the most culture-changing periods of Georgia history.

Natasha Trethewey’s poems are like anonymous dispatches from a southern past, waiting to be opened by the reader.

They are evocations of another time, another place — stories told hauntingly through the sustained contemplation of a single aged photograph in which bales of cotton and American flags, black children in freshly starched clothes and the image of an American president merge; or a clouded childhood memory of a mother’s bruises hidden by makeup; or the preserved Civil War–era fortress on Ship Island, where the hopes and dreams of the African American native guard — the first black soldiers mustered into the Union Army — swelled for a time and was then forgotten.

In part one of this story, I talked about the origins of Easy Company — the boys of Currahee — and their training at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, and their participation in the Normandy invasion of June 6, 1944.

By November 1944, the Allied push toward Germany had stalled in the hills and valleys of France and Belgium. German defenses along the Rhine River were seemingly impenetrable. Then, on December 16, at the onset of winter, the enemy launched a massive counteroffensive that caught the Allies by complete surprise.

A German force of seven tank divisions, 250,000 Wehrmacht soldiers and Waffen-SS infantry pushed through the Allied lines in the Ardennes forest of Belgium—the first step in a daring lightning strike to the Meuse River. If successful, it would divide the American and British forces and quite possibly lead to their defeat.

Between 1917 and 1932, some 5,000 lovingly designed and constructed Rosenwald Schools were built for rural African American children throughout the South. They constituted a network of educational training camps in which minds were fed and nourished against the dark backdrop of legalized segregation. As such, they helped to lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.

But the Rosenwald Schools were only physical forms and shapes. To animate the education that took place in them required hundreds of dedicated teachers who devoted their lives and careers to the inspiration and transformation of the children in their charge. To name them all could fill several columns, but to honor them all, let us remember the grand story of Dr. Susie Wheeler—an authentic Georgia hero.

By 1917 the Reconstruction that was to have secured freedom and equal opportunity for 4 and a half million former slaves in the South had vanished. In its place was the vision of a “New South” that promised commercial success for the crippled region and profit aplenty for Northern industry.

Marring that vision, however, was the Jim Crow system built upon the legal separation of the races that was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson. By the second decade of the 20th century, most of the region remained an agriculture-dominated society that suffered from economic, educational, and cultural poverty and deprivation.

The poorest of the poor were African Americans who lived in the country, for whom the dream of freedom was virtually extinguished. Public education in the South was generally lacking for everyone, including most whites, but the minimalist support for rural black schools (where they even existed) was appalling.