The Resilience of Southern Identity

Why the South Still Matters in the Minds of Its People

Christopher A. Cooper, H. Gibbs Knotts

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781469652160, 9781469631059
• eBook ISBN: 9781469631066
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The American South has experienced remarkable change over the past half century. Black voter registration has increased, the region’s politics have shifted from one-party Democratic to the near-domination of the Republican Party, and in-migration has increased its population manyfold. At the same time, many outward signs of regional distinctiveness have faded — chain restaurants have replaced mom-and-pop diners, and the interstate highway system connects the region to the rest of the country. Given all of these changes, many have argued that southern identity is fading. But here, Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts show how these changes have allowed for new types of southern identity to emerge. For some, identification with the South has become more about a connection to the region’s folkways or to place than about policy or ideology. For others, the contemporary South is all of those things at once — a place where many modern-day southerners navigate the region’s confusing and omnipresent history.

Regardless of how individuals see the South, this study argues that the region’s drastic political, racial, and cultural changes have not lessened the importance of southern identity but have played a key role in keeping regional identification relevant in the twenty-first century.

CHAPTER ONE

The Roots of Southern Identity

On the hot, clear evening of June 17, 2015, a twenty-one-year-old South Carolina native named Dylann Roof, walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and asked to speak with the Pastor. The Reverend Clementa Pinckney invited the young man to sit down at the long table that formed the physical centerpiece of their weekly bible study. Roof, the only white person in a room of twelve blacks, obliged, but didn’t say much or contribute to the discussion that was underway. About an hour after he entered the church, Roof pulled out a .45 caliber Glock semiautomatic pistol that he had concealed in his fanny pack, emptied its magazine, reloaded, and emptied it four more times. By the time Roof fled, he had killed nine people. He escaped, gun in hand, and the manhunt to capture him began soon after. Roof was arrested in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, less than fourteen hours after committing one of the worst terrorist attacks in South Carolina history.

As the details of the attack and the attacker’s motivations emerged, it became clear that this was not a random act of violence, but one borne out of racism, and a particularly abhorrent understanding of southern identity. In Roof’s mind, this shooting was a defense of a natural racial hierarchy—a racial hierarchy that he connected in part with his identity as a white southerner. One of Roof’s high school friends even characterized his penchant for racist jokes as an outward manifestation of “southern pride.” Roof took pictures of himself with the Confederate battle flag, and his four-door Hyundai Elantra featured a Confederate States of America license plate on the front bumper.

It is likely because of these views of southernness that Roof chose Charleston, a city over ninety miles from his home in Lexington, South Carolina, as the site to execute a racially charged terrorist attack. Charleston is a beautiful city, but one that is replete with reminders of the region in which it’s located. There are museums in buildings where slaves were once sold, and antebellum plantations lie just outside of town. Even the city’s famous culinary offerings are undeniably southern, and it’s certainly not unusual to see a Confederate flag or two while walking around town. It’s also a city that is known fondly as “Holy City,” a reflection of both the number of churches in town, and also the reverence with which its residents hold religion.

And perhaps no other place reflects the multiple sides of this city than the Emanuel AME Church. “Mother Emanuel” as many call it, counts Denmark Vesey, the architect of one of the largest slave revolts in U.S. history, among its founders. While the historic church holds a key place in African American history, it sits on a street named for John C. Calhoun, a former politician and political theorist who famously proclaimed on the floor of the U.S. Senate that slavery is a “positive good.” Calhoun’s body rests about seven blocks away.

As details of the attack were made public and the community came together after the tragic events, another side of the South, and of southern identity, began to emerge. Many observers were moved by the southern hospitality that was extended to Roof when he entered Mother Emanuel. As Felicia Sanders, mother of shooting victim Tywanza Sanders, noted during Roof’s first court appearance, “We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with open arms” (Stewart and Pérez-Peña 2015). The nation also watched in amazement as other members of the victims’ families offered forgiveness to Roof, just two days after he committed the attacks. In another moving tribute, thousands of southerners from various racial groups joined hands on the Arthur Ravenel Bridge, forming a “Bridge to Peace.” The community’s response even caught the attention of President Obama, who spoke in considerable detail about the grace that was displayed in the aftermath of the shootings during his eulogy for Reverend Pinckney.

This tragedy caused many white and black southerners to openly discuss the meaning of southern identity itself. South Carolina Republicans, ranging from Tea Party stalwart Governor Nikki Haley to State Senator Paul Thurmond, grandson of notorious segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond, called for the Confederate battle flag to be removed from the South Carolina State House grounds. Similar sentiments soon spread around the South as Republican governor of Alabama Robert Bentley, Republican governor of North Carolina Pat McCrory, and Republican senator from Mississippi Thad Cochran, among others, called for removal of the flag from some government property in their respective states. Patterson Hood, the musician we profiled briefly in the introduction, responded with a New York Times op-ed, standing up for the notion of southern identity, but arguing that “truly honor(ing) our Southern forefathers” can best be accomplished not by flying the Confederate flag, but rather by “moving on from the symbols and prejudices of their time and building on the diversity, the art and the literary traditions we’ve inherited from them” (Hood 2015).

THE CHARLESTON TRAGEDY and the political aftermath raise important questions and can serve as a springboard for a broader discussion about southern identity. Most clearly, the events show that southern identity is not merely an interesting sideshow in American discourse, but instead often plays a central role in helping us understand modern society. Revisiting the Charleston shooting raises a number of issues that we address in this chapter, particularly the role of race in the formation and maintenance of southern identity. The church shootings and their political aftermath also illustrate how southern identity can mean different things to different people. In this tragic example, Roof used his racialized southern identity to justify hatred and violence, but a different strand of southern identity was used by others as a source of strength, a way to find forgiveness, and a mechanism for enhancing community bonds.

For readers new to the topic of southern identity, it is important to note that scholars and professional observers of the South have debated, argued, and waxed poetic about the region, how southerners identify with it, and what nonsoutherners think about the South for many years. Here we highlight some of this work and show how the existing literature helps us develop the three primary questions we explore in this book.

As a first step, it is useful to place southern identity within the larger context of regional identity. There are, of course, many identifiable regions out there, both within the United States and around the globe, and many of the people living in these regions grapple with regional identity in ways that can help us understand southern identity and the South.

Next, we then turn our attention to the literature on southern identity and distinctiveness more specifically. Though our primary focus is southern identity, not southern distinctiveness, there is good evidence that distinctiveness (or at least perceived distinctiveness) is a precursor to identity. As a result, we address the issue of southern distinctiveness in this chapter by focusing on two topics near and dear to the hearts of many southerners: food and politics.

As we noted above, one of the main objectives of this book is to explore the similarities and differences in the ways blacks and whites identify with the South. To do this, we also discuss some of the existing literature that explores the complicated role of race and southern identity and attempt to disentangle the word “southerner” from any implicit connection to “white southerner.” Black southerners have no doubt always considered themselves southerners, and this has only become more relevant in the decades following the civil rights movement.

As the Charleston attack reminds us, there is certainly a dark side of southern identity, an issue we also explore in this chapter. We investigate this phenomenon by looking back at some political examples, focusing particularly on the “Dixiecrat” movement, George Wallace’s political rise, Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” and the political use of southern symbols like the Confederate flag.

Last, it is important to grapple with the theoretical underpinnings of southern identity before embarking on our own investigation of the topic. Therefore, we borrow a few insights about social identity from sociologists and social psychologists to gain a deeper understanding of the reasons people choose to self-identify as southerners. We investigate the natural tendency for humans to self-categorize and the propensity for social comparison between in-groups and out-groups. Familiarity with the basics of social identity theory can help us better understand southern identity, provide a framework for our subsequent analyses, and give meaning to our findings in the chapters that follow.

Regional Identity

Regional identity is not a uniquely southern phenomenon. Stories about regional identification can be told around the nation and around the world (Paasi 2003). Regional identification explains why people throughout much of New England rally behind the Boston Red Sox and why members of the Basque community in Spain once cheered for the professional cycling team Euskaltel-Euskadi. Regional identity can also explain political battles, such as the fight over Quebec’s independence in Canada and the divisions between the Wallonia and Flanders regions of Belgium (Ceuppens and Foblets 2008).

Given its ubiquity and importance, it is not surprising that many have tilled the soil of regional identity. Among social scientists, geographers have perhaps the longest tradition of examining region as an important construct influencing how people perceive their place in the world and how they relate to it. Most geographers have moved past static, political definitions of region and instead argue that region is best understood as a social construct exemplified by the idea of a vernacular region. Vernacular regions are “the product of the spatial perception of average people … neither something created by governmental, corporate, or journalistic fiat, nor the scientist’s artifact, however sophisticated or otherwise, contrived to serve some specific scholarly or pedagogic purpose” (Zelinsky 1980, 1). In other words, vernacular regions are determined by average people; taken together, vernacular regions describe how people relate to the world around them.

In this work we underscore the fact that regions and regional boundaries exist regardless of the political boundaries that may officially define a place. For example, the state of Delaware sits within the U.S. Census Bureau’s official definition of the South but lies decidedly outside of most people’s vernacular definition of the American South. If we follow the assumption that vernacular regions are socially constructed and not necessarily exclusive, an individual may reside simultaneously in multiple vernacular regions. This is certainly true of us: we both reside in the South, but, at the same time, one of us sits in North Carolina’s southern Appalachian Mountains while the other lives in South Carolina’s Lowcountry.

In just one demonstration of overlapping vernacular regions, we conducted a survey of a unique area of the country—the twenty-three westernmost counties in North Carolina. What makes this area unique and important for our purposes is that residents of this area may identify as being members of multiple regions. They might call themselves “Appalachians,” “North Carolinians,” “Southerners,” or “Americans” (Cooper and Knotts 2013). What we found, however, was that most people didn’t make a choice between regional identities, but instead professed to be a member of multiple regions simultaneously.

This book, and much of our research agenda over the past decade, argues that regional identity serves a purpose. Ascribing to, or eschewing, a regional label—whether it be “Southerner,” “Appalachian,” “Midwesterner,” “Yankee,” or “Basque”—helps people make sense of their place in the social world. For some, identification with a region allows them to feel more connected to their familial roots, while for others it provides a means to connect to cultural values they associate with the region. Sociologist John Shelton Reed (1983, 11) calls regional identity the “cognitive entity that people use to orient themselves,” again reinforcing that regional identity does not always overlap perfectly with actual political boundaries. He explains that “the criteria for membership in a regional group have more to do with identification than with location” (Reed 1982, 13), reflecting the notion that vernacular regions may be more useful for understanding social behavior than regions defined by states, counties, or other political borders. Because regional identification is socially constructed, the valence and intensity of an individual’s regional identity may vary across her lifetime as she moves and encounters people from other places (Shortridge 1987).

Southern Identity and Distinctiveness

Although it originally began as a politically defined region, the South today has morphed into what can best be considered a vernacular region—with fuzzy (and often-debated) boundaries. Whether it is because of its political interest, its historical importance, or its unique culture, we cannot be sure, but for whatever reason, the South is the most studied region in America.1 Perhaps the most appropriate starting place for any exposition of southern identity and distinctiveness is with W. J. Cash’s monumental The Mind of the South ([1941] 1991). A Gaffney, South Carolina, native, and a longtime resident of North Carolina, Cash knew the South well and wrote an article called “The Mind of the South” in October 1929. After a small bit of prodding, Cash agreed to write a full-length manuscript with the same title, and, twelve years later, The Mind of the South was published and the attention of the country turned once again to the region. In this treatise, Cash argued that “a unified and continuous set of distinctively southern values and attitudes had not only defied but actually fed upon the upheaval of Civil War and Reconstruction and then persisted through four decades of the twentieth century despite the economic and demographic transformations accompanying urbanization and industrial expansion” (Cobb 1999, 44). Cash’s southerner was defined more by continuity than change, by tradition than progress.2

While some, like historian C. Vann Woodward (1958), later argued that the South (and presumably southern identity) was not as static as Cash suggested, others like historian Carl Degler (1997) and John Shelton Reed (1982) agreed with Cash that southerners would always be defined, at some level, by the Civil War and Reconstruction.3 In the words of historian John Inscoe (2011, 15), “Regional identity has long been a more integral part of southerners’ self-definition than is often true elsewhere.”

Sociologist Larry Griffin summarizes the sources of this collective regional identity, noting that the South was “exceptional in its fierce commitment to slavery, in its failed experiment with secession and nationhood, in its military defeat and occupation by a conquering power, in its poverty, cultural backwardness, and religiosity, and in its pervasive, prolonged resistance to racial justice.” But, “just as the history of the South is contradictory and contested, so, too, is the identity of southerners” (Griffin 2006, 7).4

We have already established that southern identity, like regional identity more generally, is not defined solely by political or geographic boundaries, but also by personal connection. Region, therefore, must exist in the collective memory as much as it does on a map. Said differently, “if there is a South then the people who live there should recognize their kinship with one another and, by the same token, those who live outside the South ought to recognize that southerners are somehow different from them” (Degler 1997, 7–8). This recognition that southerners are somehow different is an important part of southern identity. At the same time, we want to be careful navigating between perception and reality when it comes to southern distinctiveness. Though we will cite literature and show empirical measures highlighting a continuing southern distinctiveness, there is an even stronger case to be made that people living in the region perceive the South to be different. Were the South not a distinct place (at least in people’s minds), the taxpayers of Mississippi would likely withdraw their support from the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Charleston South Carolina’s award-winning restaurant Husk (which markets itself as offering “a celebration of southern ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Roots of Southern Identity
• Chapter Two: Signs of the South
• Chapter Three: Southern Identity by the Numbers
• Chapter Four: Talking with Southerners
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index