The South Today

Cannonballs and antique china. The sword and uniform Robert E. Lee wore at Appomattox. Jeb Stuart's boots and the saddle on which he received his fatal wound at Yellow Tavern. Stonewall Jackson's cap. Three hundred battle flags. It was all there in the venerable "White House of the Confederacy"--the 158-year-old mansion where President Jefferson Davis lived at Richmond. Since the turn of the century, awed Southerners have walked through the hallowed building--along with curious Yankees. Together, they and the memorabilia helped to prolong the cliche of the South as a place where the clocks were frozen on the afternoon of April 9, 1865.

Now, suddenly, everything is altered. The old house has been closed and will be emptied; it will be restored and reopened, but no longer as the repository of sacred artifacts. A spanking-new museum has gone up near by, and it will be more than merely a shrine to tragic heroes and lost causes. There will be many new exhibits, including ones depicting the position of blacks under slavery. They will be designed for a rising generation that is less interested in venerating the past than in moving onward. Yet, inevitably, what will now exist is a gleaming new shell for old values.

Many people think that this is symbolic of what is happening across the South. But, in fact, the changes that are transforming the eleven states of the old Confederacy are far more basic and substantial. In what had long been the nation's poorest, most backward-looking region, business booms and economic, social and political opportunities abound. Cities thrust ever outward and upward. Racial integration proceeds with surprising smoothness. And a Georgian wins the Democratic presidential nomination, the Deep South's first major-party candidate for the presidency in 128 years. Small wonder that the rest of the country is looking to the South to see what it has been missing--and what it might learn.

True enough, a New South has been proclaimed in every generation since Journalist Henry Grady publicized the term after Reconstruction. In 1880 Poet Sidney Lanier envisioned an agrarian Utopia: "The New South means small farming ... meat and bread for which there are no notes in bank ... and grass at nothing a ton." In 1951 Historian C. Vann Woodward decided that the "New South is not a place name as is New England, nor does it precisely designate a period, as does the Confederacy. It vaguely sets apart those whose faith lies in the future from those whose heart is with the past." Arkansas Democratic Senator Dale Bumpers is even closer to the mark when he says, "I know they proclaim a 'New South' every few years. But it's not new yet. I guess the best term to use is maturing. It's maturing politically, socially, culturally and educationally."

This is the South that is examined in this special issue of TIME. It is, of course, impossible to assay completely any region of the nation. The South is particularly complex and contradictory, a mix of modern and ancient, traditional and futuristic. East Texas, for example, is as Deep South in feeling as Savannah, Ga.; West Texas is truly western. Miami Beach is as much a suburb of New York--or Havana--as a Florida city. Yet there is much that knits this land and holds it together, with its own special character and flavor and language. If the South cannot be totally explored, it can at least be seen as reality, not as legend.

Literature still provides the dominant myth of Dixie. Tennessee Williams' hostile parlors, James Dickey's blood rites. William Faulkner's epic feuds, Margaret Mitchell's antebellum aristocrats, Richard Wright's mangled blacks supply the melodramatic leads. Popular culture contributes the script. Barrelbellied redneck sheriffs and chanting, chain-gang Negroes have been staples of films since the '30s.

Nor has the image been entirely fictional--far from it. Yet V.O. Key had a point when he wrote in his definitive Southern Politics a quarter-century ago: "Northerners, provincials that they are, regard the South as one large Mississippi." Only now is that view changing. The South, of course, was never one large Mississippi. Indeed, Mississippi was never one large Mississippi.

The area of the old Confederacy embraces 55 million people. It sprawls from the porticoed mansions along the James River to the bare Martian surfaces of the Permian basin. It includes the clear alpine valleys of the Blue Ridge and the subtropical swamps of south Georgia. It boasts the 18th century architecture of Charleston, S.C., and the climbing glass silos by John Portman in Atlanta. Its exports include cotton and tobacco to the North, politicians to Washington, novelists to the world and rockets to outer space.

Twenty percent of its population are black. The other 80% are an amalgam of mint-julep aristocrats out of Faulkner's Sartoris clan, Mexican Americans from Texas, Roman Catholic Cajuns in Louisiana, Cubans and Jews in Miami, Vietnamese resettled on the Gulf Coast and Anglo-Saxon Baptists everywhere.

Flannery O'Connor wrote: ''A half-hour's ride in this region will take one from places where the life has a distinctly Old Testament flavor to places where the life might be considered post-Christian. Yet all these varied situations can be seen in one glance and heard in one conversation."

More and more, that conversation concerns tomorrow and not yesterday. Integration has a way to go in the South, but the ugly confrontations of the '50s and '60s, the bombings and Klan revivals, the school riots and statehouse harangues seem as remote as the Dred Scott decision. It is up North, in staid Boston, that the races clash and skirmish. Little Rock, Ark., scene of former Governor Orval Faubus' strident segregationist harangues, has thoroughly integrated its schools.

The cities above the Mason-Dixon line struggle with decay and impoverishment; Houston, Dallas and Atlanta are large-scale success stories. The tide of migration is reversing; the South is now receiving white-collar workers, middle management and an intellectual elite from the North.

Politically, the region is electing a series of fresh public servants--most of them young, some of them black. Culturally, the South lags behind most of the rest of the nation, but it has made major strides. Educationally, it is still a place of great expectations rather than great schools. They remain underfinanced, but literacy levels have risen, and doctoral degrees have roughly doubled. Above all, economically, the South continues to grow faster than any other region. Industrial output has more than doubled in the past decade.

Facing up to its history, less afflicted by racial fantasies, no longer carrying the burden of Southern history--the knowledge of past injustice, the two-fisted defensiveness and guilt--the South may be strong enough to take a national lead. There is always the risk of exaggerating and overglorifying the South's virtues; a great deal that is dark and narrow remains. Yet enough has truly altered to excite the nation's attention. More than 100 years afterward, an old prophecy still haunts. In 1869 a former Union Army officer named John William DeForest wrote of his trek through South Carolina: "We shall do well to study this peculiar people, which will soon lose its peculiarities." The study continues; the land and its people remain.

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