Southern Cultures

The Fifteenth Anniversary Reader

Harry L. Watson, Larry J. Griffin, Harry L. Watson, Larry J. Griffin

• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780807858806, 9780807832127
• eBook ISBN: 9780807886465
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

What does “redneck” mean? What’s going to happen to the southern accent? What makes black southerners laugh? What is “real” country music? These are the kinds of questions that pop up in this collection of notable essays from Southern Cultures, the journal of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Intentionally plural, Southern Cultures was founded in 1993 to present all sides of the American South, from sorority sisters to Pocahontas, from kudzu to the blues.

This volume collects 27 essays from the journal’s first fifteen years, bringing together some of the most memorable and engaging essays as well as some of those most requested for use in courses. A stellar cast of contributors discusses themes of identity, pride, traditions, changes, conflicts, and stereotypes. Topics range from black migrants in Chicago to Mexican immigrants in North Carolina, from Tennessee wrestlers to Martin Luther King, from the Civil War to contemporary debates about the Confederate flag. Funny and serious, historical and contemporary, the collection offers something new for every South-watcher, with fresh perspectives on enduring debates about the people and cultures of America’s most complex region.

Contributors:
Derek H. Alderman, East Carolina University
Donna G'Segner Alderman, Greenville, North Carolina
S. Jonathan Bass, Samford University
Dwight B. Billings, University of Kentucky
Catherine W. Bishir, Preservation North Carolina
Kathleen M. Blee, University of Pittsburgh
Elizabeth Boyd, Vanderbilt University
James C. Cobb, University of Georgia
Peter A. Coclanis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Joseph Crespino, Emory University
Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University
franklin forts, University of Georgia
David Goldfield, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Larry J. Griffin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Adam Gussow, University of Mississippi
Trudier Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Patrick Huber, University of Missouri-Rolla
Louis M. Kyriakoudes, University of Southern Mississippi
Melton McLaurin, University of North Carolina at Wilmington
Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina
Steve Oney, Los Angeles, California
Theda Perdue, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dan Pierce, University of North Carolina at Asheville
John Shelton Reed, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Mart Stewart, Western Washington University
Thomas A. Tweed, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Timothy B. Tyson, Duke University
Anthony Walton, Bowdoin College
Harry L. Watson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Charles Reagan Wilson, University of Mississippi
C. Vann Woodward (1908–1999)

Part 1: A Moveable Mason-Dixon Line

Where is the South? Which South?
Where isn’t the South?

Chapter 1: Southern Distinctiveness, Yet Again, or, Why America Still Needs the South

Larry J. Griffin

Juxtaposing America and the South in a way that focused attention almost exclusively on the region’s racial crimes quite possibly stunted the rest of the nation’s willingness to confront its own racism. Rally at the state capitol, Little Rock, Arkansas, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

In 1976 the Democratic Party nominated a true blue son of the South—Jimmy Carter—to be its presidential candidate. During that campaign, and especially after Carter’s election, things southern—from rednecks and bornagain Protestantism to potlikker and red-eye gravy—were the journalistic rage. Southerners did things differentially, they—we—spoke differently, we ate different kinds of food, we believed and acted differently, and, during those early Carter years, the national media seemed entranced by the “southernness” of it all, believing themselves, I suppose, called first to understand the South and then to help the American people—or at least the nonsoutherners among us—understand it too. I was finishing graduate school in Baltimore at the time, and I remember my Yankee friends asking me an inordinate number of questions about the South, about being southern. Of course, I was neither the first nor the last southerner to have enjoyed that particular pleasure: southerners have been explaining, telling about, the South for generations.¹

We saw some of the same curiosity—this attention to southernness—in the 1992 presidential election, but by then the novelty of a southerner sitting in the White House had worn off, and, anyway, Arkansan Bill Clinton gave the country other things to talk about. And if sometimes-southerner Al Gore wins the 2000 election, I doubt very much that the region will again be scrutinized and stared at as it was in the late 1970s. Still, Gore’s “real but delicate” Tennessee roots, as the Los Angeles Times puts it, have motivated some media attention already, and I suspect more is to come. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner once said, and I think he’s right.² In the South, to be sure, the past is not past, but even in America, the past is not even past, if the topic is the South.

The reasons for this are easy enough to understand. All know that until quite recently—say, the 1970s—the relationship between the South and America was strained, to say the very least, and it had been so for two centuries or more: from the antebellum slavery debates through the Civil War and Reconstruction to the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, region and nation were at odds. Indeed, the South and America fought—politically, legally, culturally, and even militarily—and that conflicted, sorrowful past is not easily forgotten. As the title of a 1998 New York Times article has it, “The South’s History Rises, Again and Again.” No culture, of course, exists only in the present: all draw on, hark back to, a past significant precisely because of its continued moral, identity, and emotional utility. In this the South is no different, but what is unusual is how explicitly, how routinely, and how pervasively the region’s history, that very particular southern past, is evoked in the present: the South of then is recreated and oddly memorialized, concretized in a sense, in the South of now.³

Images abound of the South’s past continuing to rise again and again, and some of those most sharply etched—in particular, those that portray in one way or another the conflict between nation and region, or the South’s outcast nature—are found in today’s newspaper. A special section of the very first issue of the New York Times to appear in the new century, titled “Reflections on the Century Past and the Decades Ahead,” included interviews with individuals for whom the twentieth century’s “signal moments” remain “vivid memories” and with those who, according to the Times, “inherit this history.” Not surprisingly, the people interviewed were from places with histories heavy with drama and death, shame and struggle, pain and possibility: India, Cambodia, and Germany, Russia and China, South Africa and the Middle East, and Detroit and the American South. Two southerners were interviewed about the past and future of race and rights in the region, and, perhaps paradoxically suggesting continuity amidst change, were from localities about as opposite in cultural trajectory as one could imagine, that New South symbol (or perhaps the “No-South” symbol), Atlanta, and what historian James Cobb has called “the most Southern place on earth,” the Mississippi Delta.⁴

A cursory Lexis-Nexis search of selected newspapers published in the last few years revealed a very large number of similar articles. A handful of such titles appear here, roughly grouped by whether the article is largely about the past itself (“Old Times Are Not Forgotten”), reports significant current events by evoking, or linking them to, the region’s past (“The Past in South’s Present”), or makes analogies between the history of the South (in this case, just Mississippi) and happenings, past or present, in other localities. Where the meaning of the story’s title is not self-evident, I have included brief excerpts and emphasized particular passages from the article to suggest its flavor.

OLD TIMES ARE NOT FORGOTTEN

1. “Revisiting a Watershed Era; Photo Show Reflects Turmoil of the Civil Rights Battle,” New York Times, 18 January 1999.

2. “Fighting an Enemy Called Segregation. World War II Army Captain Recalls a Different Battle: Breaking Racial Barriers,” Kansas City Star, 24 February 1999.

“But neither had [Benjamin Dennis] experienced segregation and intense racial discrimination until arriving at Camp Van Dorn in Mississippi in 1943.… ‘I’d grown up in a good state,’ Dennis said, ‘but when I got to Mississippi and saw signs for ‘colored’ restrooms and ‘colored’ water fountains, you can bet your life I didn’t try anything else.… Southern England was just like Mississippi (in terms of discrimination).”

3. “A New Lesson Plan; Area Schools Take Black History Seriously,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 28 February 1999.

“When Chris Reuter started to teach his students … about the civil rights movement, he didn’t plan to follow the textbook’s cue that it was born from Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat.… The catalyst was the death of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was beaten to death in Mississippi by white supremacists. It happened Aug. 28, 1955.”

4. “Trying to Understand Racial Tension,” Dublin Irish Times, 1 March 1999.

“I recently watched again the excellent 1988 film Mississippi Burning.… The film movingly depicts the racial tensions and the hatred directed against black people in Mississippi in the early 1960s.”

5. “Ride Recalls Mississippi Slayings; Atlanta Among Stops as Caravan Travels South,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 19 June 1999.

6. “In Memory of Emmett,” Chicago Sun-Times, 23 August 1999.

“A 14-year-old Chicago boy, Emmett was brutally murdered on Aug. 28, 1955, ostensibly because he had whistled at, or made a flirtatious remark to, the wife of a white store owner in the town of Money, Miss.… The crime, and the kangaroo trial that followed … were galvanizing events in the fight for civil rights.”

7. “A Witness to History,” Chicago Sun-Times, 2 January 2000.

“[In 1962] I watched a crowd of heckling but good-humored young Americans turn into a murderous mob that heaved bricks at U.S. marshals with no more thought than that of a small boy breaking windows in a greenhouse.… Beyond the park is the Lyceum Building, the main administrative offices of ‘Ole Miss’.… At first, no one seemed in a bad mood. The crowd was enjoying itself, milling about and chanting: ‘Two, four, six, eight, we don’t wanna integrate.’ But things got meaner.”

8. “Project Understanding: As Part of a Freshman Class Project, Seward High Students Learn that Racism and Hatred Exist Outside of the Midwest,” Omaha World-Herald, 4 January 2000.

“Twenty-four freshmen, led by their teacher, solicited accounts of racism from across the country and tacked them on their classroom bulletin board.… after reading John Howard Griffin’s” Black Like Me, “a book in which the white author darkens his skin to appear black and travels through Mississippi. He finds that racism goes deeper than cross burnings. It’s in the way people look at and speak to blacks.”

9. “ ‘And Justice For All’; New Play Explores Message in Death of Young Civil Rights Martyr,” Houston Chronicle, 15 January 2000.

THE PAST IN THE SOUTH’S PRESENT

10. “In Mississippi, a New Look at Old Hostilities,” The Washington Post, 20 March 1998.

“Since the secret files were first made public Tuesday, Sarah Rowe-Sims, a state archivist here, has watched the faces of the steady stream of visitors who have searched a thick book containing names of activists and just plain folks who were spied on by the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission during the civil rights movement. ‘There’s a look of disbelief when they see their name,’ said Rowe-Sims. The initial reaction sometimes is followed by tears.”

11. “Justice Catches Up With KKK Killer 32 Years On; The Family of a Black Civil Rights Activist Has Seen Him Avenged at Last—After Four Unsuccessful Trials,” London Observer, 23 August 1998.

12. “Ex-Klansman Charged in ’66 Race Slaying Dies,” New York Times, 20 September 1998.

13. “Too Slowly for Many, Mississippi Faces a Hurtful Heritage,” Washington Post, 24 October 1998.

14. “Civil Wrongs; Pressure Builds to Reopen the Unsolved Murders of Rights Activists in 1960s,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 21 February 1999.

15. “In Miss, a Bombing Reopens Racial Wounds,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 15 March 1999.

16. “NAACP Tours Sites of Alleged Army Slaughter; Writer Brings ww ii Legend into Limelight,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 23 March 1999.

17. “Activists Converge on S.C. Capital,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 7 January 2000.

“[A member of the] Sons of Confederate Veterans … said if the [NAACP] succeeds in forcing down the flag in South Carolina, it next would target the Confederate emblem incorporated into the Georgia and Mississippi state flags. ‘We’ve got to hold the line somewhere. They want to eradicate all of our heritage,’ [he said]. ‘That is why all of the (old) Confederacy is so concerned about South Carolina.’ ”

MISSISSIPPI: EVOCATIONS, ANALOGIES, METAPHORS

18. “No Kennedy Likeness,” Journal of Commerce, 9 January 1998.

“The massacre of 45 Tzotzil Indians … in the southern [Mexican] state of Chiapas … [is compared] with the U.S. civil rights struggle in the early and mid-1960s. ‘It would be a fair comparison to say this is like the Old South, and Chiapas is Alabama or Mississippi,’ political scientist Federico Estevez recently told The New York Times.”

19. “Secret Files Unlocked: Spies Hounded Black Activists; Mississippi Ran a Stasi-style Network that Targeted 1960s Civil Rights Campaigners,” London Guardian, 19 March 1998.

20. “Horror and Fear Haunt Streets of Race-murder Texas Town; The Brutal Killing Had the Hallmarks of the Movie Mississippi Burning,” London Guardian, 12 June 1998.

21. “Flare-up of Racial Tension in Oakland; Outrage over Remarks by Schools’ Adviser,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1 March 1999.

“Oscar Wright [who] ignited a debate about anti-Semitism because of his remarks … [on] the struggle over who runs the Oakland schools … was born into a sharecropper family on a Mississippi plantation where black boys were not allowed to go to school.”

22. “Protests in Police Killing of Diallo Grow Larger, and More Diverse,” New York Times, 25 March 1999.

“Blocking the door was a group of 17 elderly white women, including Carolyn Goodman, 83, whose son, Andrew, a civil rights worker, was murdered in Mississippi in 1964.”

23. “When Justice Is a Game,” New York Times, 23 January 2000. “This book about the life and trials of Rubin Carter recalls much of what was good and terrible about the United States during the last four decades: racism that was as virulent in New Jersey as it was in Mississippi.”

When the cumulative weight of these titles and articles is tallied, one very much has the sense that the South’s past, especially its racial past, is, to quote Faulkner again, “not even past.” Indeed, that past—a past of racial injustice and brutality, of freedom rides and anti-desegregation riots by white university students—is recycled, and then recycled again. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the Irish Times article “Trying to Understand Racial Tension” (#4), which is a 1999 commentary on a 1988 movie, Mississippi Burning, about Mississippi’s 1964 Freedom Summer. Because the South’s past is seemingly ever renewed in the present, that past becomes an important lens, possibly one of the most important lenses, through which particular contemporary moments or events are cognitively and emotionally apprehended, thereby framing how readers make moral and intellectual sense of current happenings both in the South and elsewhere. The headlines of a London newspaper, for example, compared the infamous 1998 murder by dragging of James Byrd Jr. in Texas to Mississippi Burning (#20), and articles (#’s 21 and 22) situate recent racial incidents in Oakland, California, and in New York City in the context of Mississippi’s troubled racial past, possibly as a moral compass to orient readers or perhaps simply to make the stories more dramatic.

The region’s past, too, is sometimes linked, historically or metaphorically, to deliberately inhumane circumstances elsewhere, thereby both projecting onto the South a particular (and, obviously, near-barbaric) meaning and, by that very process, enabling readers to evaluate morally those nonsouthern situations. The “January 1, 2000” issue of the New York Times mentioned earlier does this subtly by grouping the South with other horrific twentieth-century hotspots across the globe (Germany, Cambodia, South Africa, etc.). Less nuanced are the pieces explicitly likening racism in New Jersey (#23) and in southern England (#2) to that in Mississippi. But much more pointed examples include the article in which a Mexican political scientist, commenting on the murders of forty-five Tzotzil Indians in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, stated that “it would be a fair comparison to say this is like the Old South, and Chiapas is Alabama or Mississippi” (#18), and the one titled “Secret Files Unlocked” (#19), in which the London Guardian equated (probably accurately) Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s to East Germany during the Communist era because both regimes established elaborate state structures to spy on their own citizens and to punish those deemed insufficiently loyal.⁵

These stories represent only a fraction of the hundreds of functionally equivalent articles I turned up for just the last few years using only two keywords to guide the Lexis-Nexis search: “race” and “Mississippi.” With more diligent searching, using, say, the names of all ex-Confederate states and going back a decade or two, I suspect I could have found literally thousands of such articles. Add to all this the wide geographic scope of these newspapers—from London and Dublin to New York, Chicago, Kansas City, and San Francisco—and the extraordinarily high prestige of many of them, and one has a clearer sense still that the South’s past must retain profound moral significance, for the region, the nation, and beyond. In a very special and important way, then, that past can’t die, can’t become fossilized, can’t be relegated to history books or museums; it can’t become simply “past.”

One thing most of these titles suggest is how seriously aberrant the South (or at least Mississippi) was from “American” public life, and they thus signal, yet again, the conflict between region and nation. At root, this conflict revolved around differences in definitions and practices, around what it meant to be southern, and how southerners acted, and what it meant to be American, and how Americans acted, or were supposed to act. So significant, in fact, were these differences that the search for the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Southern cultures: The Fifteenth Anniversary Reader
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Front Porch
• Part 1: A Moveable Mason-Dixon Line
• Part 2: Intractable Identity
• Part 3: The New Days of Yore
• Part 4: Colliding Cultures
• Part 5: Regional Stereotypes
• Part 6: Southern Traditions
• About the Contributors
• Index