TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/080690/0806640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.2 KB | 133 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 82

The End of the South


By Hodding Carter III

[Hodding Carter III, a former Mississippi newspaper editor, runs
a television production company in Washington.]


    "The time is coming, if indeed it has not already arrived,
when the Southerner will begin to ask himself whether there is
really any longer very much point in calling himself a
Southerner." So the great Southern historian C. Vann Woodward
began his seminal essay on "The Search for Southern Identity"
in 1958. Woodward then and now answers his own question with
a qualified, though brilliantly emphatic, yes. I can't and
don't. The South as South, a living, ever regenerating mythic
land of distinctive personality, is no more. At most, it is an
artifact lovingly preserved in the museums of culture and the
shops of tourist commerce precisely because it is so hard to
find in the vital centers of the region's daily life.

    This is not to be confused with yet another fatuous
proclamation of yet another New South. Nor is it to ignore
those regional backwaters where the old ways are almost as
entrenched as the communities are irrelevant. Nevertheless, the
South that was is dead, and the South some had hoped would take
its place never grew out of the cradle of old dreams. What is
lurching into existence in the South is purely and
contemporaneously mainstream American, for better and for worse.

    That was not the way it was when I was born in New Orleans
55 years ago. Then there could be no serious debate about the
existence of an entity called "the South" or a state of mind
called "Southern." Nor was it that way in the Mississippi to
which I returned in 1959. It and the entire South could still
be bound by an old set of propositions. It segregated the races
by law and custom, was poor in every index except natural
resources, and held fervently to a one-party politics whose
ultimate, if often obscured, objective was the perpetuation of
a class and caste system distinctly different from the national
ideal.

    It was the most rural of all the regions of the U.S., its
people the least likely to move far from home if white and most
likely to migrate northward if black. It was the one region,
as Woodward so tellingly noted, whose people knew what it meant
to lose a war and understood there was nothing inevitable about
progress. It was, finally, the least changed demographically
of all the nation's geographic subdivisions. Black and white
Southerners alike had been relatively unchanged by new waves
of migration, voluntary or involuntary, for more than 100
years. Regional population growth was minimal.

    Over the past three decades, all that has changed.

    In the South of the late 20th century, segregation by law
has been destroyed, and segregation in fact is no more peculiar
to Jackson, Miss., than it is to Jackson, Mich. On the other
side of the coin, there is more school integration in the South
than in any other section. Racism remains, but the nation now
understands that race is the American dilemma.

    One-party politics is deader than all-white politics. More
black politicians hold office in the South than anywhere else.
More white votes, as a percent of the total, were cast for
Governor Douglas Wilder of Virginia and Congressmen Mike Espy
of Mississippi and John Lewis of Atlanta than were cast for
Mayors David Dinkins of New York City and Wilson Goode of
Philadelphia. Democrats and Republicans contend in a game whose
outcome is increasingly uncertain but whose winners' political
allegiance is national rather than regional.

    The oft-cited fact that white Southerners have voted
overwhelmingly for the national Republican ticket in recent
years means less, and more, than is usually attributed to it.
So have white Northerners. The instincts that prompt
Southerners to support Republican presidential candidates are
instincts that bind them in national, rather than regional,
solidarity.

    After the Vietnam defeat, Southerners are no longer the only
Americans who understand, in Arnold Toynbee's phrase, that
history is not something that happens only to other people.
Wrestling unsuccessfully with guilt and defeat is no longer a
Southern monopoly.

    Southern cities are growing faster than others, and
Southerners move more often than people raised elsewhere. The
two fastest-growing groups in the South today are Hispanics and
white Yankees. As first noted in the 1980 census, more blacks
are moving south than are moving north. In the 1988
presidential election, nearly 50% of those who voted in the
South were born elsewhere. The South is still poor, too poor.
But while some of the shine has gone out of the Sunbelt, in
1988 the Rocky Mountain States replaced the South as the region
with the lowest per capita income.

    These are facts whose cumulative, corrosive effect on
Southern distinctiveness is obvious. But there is also the mass
culture's relentless assault on the sense of context,
continuity and community in the South no less than elsewhere.
White Southerners of my generation were raised on the glories
of the Lost Cause. Our grandchildren are raised on
Saturday-morning cartoons and MTV.

    But there is more separating 1990s youngsters from the sense
of place and history that so clearly marked their parents'
childhoods. Most older white Southerners overtly or passively
supported massive resistance in the '50s and '60s. What can
they possibly say to their children to justify or explain, let
alone glorify, the wretched record of racial murders, political
demagogues, separate rest rooms and school closings? If the
South once venerated a past that would not die, it now has a
more recent past that must be denied -- or ignored.

    Not long ago, I asked an old friend who teaches at a
university in Mississippi whether he thought today's young
white Southerners had the same sense of the South that we had.
There was a pause, and then he offered a story he thought might
help frame the answer. During a recent history class, another
teacher was suddenly interrupted by a student, a white
Southerner, who looked up with a puzzled frown and asked, "Tell
me again, which side was Sherman on?"