The South as “Other,” the Southerner
as “Stranger”
By Orville Vernon Burton
When I met my wife, Georganne, I told her I was in Illinois
temporarily, that I would soon be going home to the South. Almost
two score years later, I am back home in South Carolina, but I find
that Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) was right: “you can’t go home
again.” Wolfe’s protagonist returns home to discover that no one can
go back to a life “which once seemed everlasting” but of course is
“changing all the time.”1 Life means change, and history is the study
of change over time.
Finally back in the South, I find that some of today’s best and
brightest young scholars argue that the South is no longer out of the
ordinary—that southern exceptionalism, as a recent collection of essays
contends, is a myth. “[T]he notion of the exceptional South has served
as a myth,” they argue, “one that has persistently distorted our understanding of American history.” 2
The debate about southern exceptionalism is not merely academic;
it has a direct and important implication for current and future public
policies that will shape America’s destiny for generations to come.
1
Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (New York, 1940), 706.
Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, “Introduction: The End of Southern History,”
in Lassiter and Crespino, eds., The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (New York, 2010), 3–22
(quotation on 7). See also Matthew D. Lassiter and Kevin M. Kruse, “The Bulldozer Revolution:
Suburbs and Southern History since World War II,” Journal of Southern History, 75 (August 2009),
691–706; and Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston, The End of Southern Exceptionalism:
Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). Angie Maxwell,
Todd Shields, and Jeannie Whayne, eds., The Ongoing Burden of Southern History: Politics and
Identity in the Twenty-First-Century South (Baton Rouge, 2012), explores continued southern
identity through politics and themes suggested by C. Vann Woodward. See also Dan T. Carter,
“More than Race: Conservatism in the White South since V. O. Key Jr.,” in Angie Maxwell and
Todd G. Shields, eds., Unlocking V. O. Key Jr.: Southern Politics for the Twenty-First Century
(Fayetteville, Ark., 2011), 129–59.
2
Mr. Burton is a professor of history and the director of the Clemson
CyberInstitute at Clemson University and University Distinguished Teacher/
Scholar Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He
delivered a portion of this paper on Friday, November 2, 2012, as the
presidential address at the seventy-eighth annual meeting of the Southern
Historical Association in Mobile, Alabama.
The Journal of Southern History
Volume LXXIX, No. 1, February 2013
8
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
As I was writing this essay, I served as an expert witness in four voting
rights or civil rights cases involving four southern states, cases in
which southern history retains a shocking relevance.
Nearly all the contributors to The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism
were born after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965. They grew up amid conflicts over affirmative
action, busing, and at-large elections, and not over separate restrooms
and drinking fountains, segregated schools and mills, and the right to
vote.3 Sadly, the idea that the South is an exceptional and racist
“Other” has functioned to allow white northerners to deny their own
racism, so these academics feel the need to prove the South is not the
exception. Instead, historians need to show how race works differently
in different regions.
Like most scholars, these mythbusters mostly are not from rural
areas or even small towns of the South but grew up in county seats or
cities or suburbs, of which they write so authoritatively. Perhaps those
urban American experiences have limited their understanding of a
wider picture.4 While cities and suburbs have grown exponentially,
the small-town and rural South should not be ignored. Get off the
interstates that link the big cities and college campuses in the region
today, turn on to one of the bobbing and weaving, rising and falling,
state roads, where people reckon their whereabouts by the local church,
or store, or cemetery, or the single stoplight up where the road forks and
where the oak tree used to be, and you’ll find all the exceptionalism you
can wish for.
It is perfectly reasonable that each generation of historians needs
to figure out its own interpretation, to bring its own perspectives to
bear on historical issues, and these scholars are right to do so. Our
experiences and circumstances provide different points of view, and
we can learn from each other. In that regard, I would like to pay
tribute to those who most influenced my own intellectual heritage.
3
Jonathan Tilove, “Can This Be ‘The End of Southern History?’” March 20, 2006, http://
jonathantilove.com/southern-history/.
4
Ibid. What sociologist Howard W. Odum noted in his classic 1910 study of race in the
South is still true: “The problem, in its immediate and practical aspects[,] is different in the
cities from that in the towns; that in the towns differs from that in the country; conditions in
the rural districts themselves vary widely.” Howard W. Odum, Social and Mental Traits of the
Negro: Research into the Conditions of the Negro Race in Southern Towns: A Study in Race
Traits, Tendencies and Prospects (New York, 1910), 16; Orville Vernon Burton, “The Rise
and Fall of Afro-American Town Life: Town and Country in Reconstruction Edgefield, South
Carolina,” in Orville Vernon Burton and Robert C. McMath Jr., eds., Toward a New South?
Studies in Post–Civil War Southern Communities (Westport, Conn., 1982), 152–92, esp. 158n7.
See also Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and
Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1985).
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
9
My two Ph.D. advisers were southerner F. Sheldon Hackney and
Yankee James M. McPherson, whose ideas remain just as relevant
today as when I was introduced to them in 1969. Arguing against
southern exceptionalism and placing the South and American history in global perspective, McPherson wrote that “perhaps it was
the North that was ‘different,’ the North that departed from the
mainstream of historical development; and perhaps therefore we
should speak not of Southern exceptionalism but of Northern exceptionalism.”5 According to Hackney, however, southerners “traditionally
have had to define themselves in opposition to a presumed American
norm.” 6 I contend that both sentiments are true and that, understood
together, the insights of McPherson and Hackney are key to explaining
southern exceptionalism.
I like to fish. My attempt to interpret the South is like trying to
untangle a fishing line. Just when I think I’m making progress, a
thread of thought breaks apart completely. Or I come across a particularly nasty knot, and sometimes that knot turns into a heap of
others. Nevertheless, I share the southerner’s compulsion to explain.7
In this address I explore the idea that the South is still an exceptional
“Other” and the southerner is still in many ways a “Stranger.” The
southern “Other” exists because the legacy of race has distorted
southern history; I look especially at the remembrance of Reconstruction. Moreover, the legacy of race has effected multitudinous
southern contradictions. In its role as “Other,” the South is often
portrayed by stereotypes, so I will present instead evidence in the
form of digital analyses and social media. In addition, I will look at
maps of demographic patterns. Finally, I will touch on the role that
the legacy of race holds in modern political developments and, in
particular, in current court cases. I do not claim to have unraveled the
various interconnections of the various knots, but I do offer them for
further examination.
A friend told me recently, “I know there is still a South; I know
it every time I go north.” 8 Someone who wrote to “Dear Abby” in
5
James M. McPherson, “Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old
Question,” Civil War History, 29 (September 1983), 230–44 (quotation on 242). This essay,
with slight revision, also appears in McPherson, Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the
American Civil War (New York, 1996), 3–23.
6
Sheldon Hackney, “The South as a Counterculture,” American Scholar, 42 (Spring 1973),
283–93 (quotation on 287).
7
As per C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1960); and
Fred Hobson, Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge, 1983).
8
Conversation with Walter Whitmire, June 2012.
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
10
July 2012 knows there is still a South; that person felt like a southern
“fish out of water” when coming face-to-face with the lack of manners in “the home of a 20-something Northerner.”9 North Carolinian
Charles Kuralt in “The Barbecue Blues” expressed the estrangement
of many expatriates who went North and discovered their southernness, warning others from his experiences: “Young folks, think on
that man’s folly, / Before you board that bus in Raleigh.”10
Many of us, like Kuralt, have felt like strangers in the North.
When Harriet Tubman crossed into a free state, she had conflicting
feelings: “I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming.
I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom,
I was a stranger in a strange land.”11 John C. Inscoe has noted, a little
dolefully, that students in his classes on “Southern Autobiography
as Southern History” do not see their upbringing within “a distinctly
Southern context,” but even these generic Americans, when they travel
outside the South, notice that they are singled out as “southern.”12
This sense of being the “Stranger” has affected my life after growing up near the rural farming and cotton mill town of Ninety Six,
South Carolina. Those who know me might say my omphalos is
Ninety Six, but it became so only when I left the South to become
a stranger in the strange land of New York City. It was 1967, and
I was a student at Furman University on my first trip north. There,
at Columbia University under the direction of Eugene Genovese, I
encountered a real American history course. (At Ninety Six High
School our teacher was the coach.13 ) This trip made me aware of my
region in a new way. Nonsoutherners made me very aware that I was
something Other.
At the University of Illinois, home of my Yankee wife and five
Yankee daughters, I continued to be the Stranger. In the Midwest
I was “a southern character”; to this day I am not sure why. Maybe it
9
Greenwood (S.C.) Index-Journal, July 1, 2012, p. 2C.
Charles Kuralt, “The Barbecue Blues,” in Charles Kuralt and Loonis McGlohon, North
Carolina Is My Home (Charlotte, N.C., 1986), 51–56 (quotation on 56).
11
Sarah H. Bradford, Harriet: The Moses of Her People (New York, 1886), 31. I have
changed the dialect Bradford used to reflect what Tubman actually said. Tubman invoked a
biblical metaphor; Moses in Midian felt like “a stranger in a strange land” (Exodus 2:22, King
James Version).
12
John C. Inscoe, “Feeling Awful Southern,” essay to be published by the University of South
Carolina Press in a forthcoming festschrift for Charles Joyner. Inscoe notes that students from rural
areas more often identify themselves as southern. He also finds that Macon and Savannah often
generate a stronger sense of southern identity than many other Georgia cities, including Athens,
and that “African American students seem better able to identify themselves with a particular
culture, often but not exclusively based on race.”
13
While we did not learn history, we did go on to win a state championship in football.
10
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
11
is the storytelling. Some of my nonsouthern friends think my stories
run on too long; they think I should “get to the point,” but they do
not understand what the point really is. Mary Hood, a white Georgia
author, asks us to imagine a northerner and a southerner watching a
man walking across a field and then being asked, “Who is that?” The
southerner would say, “Wasn’t his granddaddy the one whose dog
and him got struck by lightning on the steel bridge? Mama’s third
cousin—dead before my time—found his railroad watch in that eightpound catfish’s stomach the next summer just above the dam. Big as
Eunice’s arm. The way he married for that new blue Cadillac automobile, reckon how come he’s walking like he has on Sunday shoes,
if that’s who it is, and for sure it is.” The Yankee reply to the same
question, Hood writes, would be “That’s Joe Smith.” At this point the
southerner would think, but not be rude enough to say aloud, “They
didn’t ask his name, they asked who he is!”14
A storyteller among southern politicians in the past century was
Senator Strom Thurmond (1902–2003), of Edgefield, South Carolina,
who celebrated his region as a superior Other. He thought the South
was a place where people were friendlier and more willing to help a
person in need. He thought that “family life is sounder” and that
“families are held together better, generally speaking.” His family, of
course, did not. Ultimately, he concluded, “people down there seem
to think more alike.”15 One who does not think alike may board that
bus in Raleigh. Or one may take a stand more riveting, challenging,
and quite exceptional; one may go against the grain and demand
justice and equality, or blockade a schoolhouse door. For Thurmond,
the proper white southerner would not create a scene at the schoolhouse door but would resist integration.
Literary criticism offers one way of using the “Other” as an analytical tool. Edward W. Said, in his treatise on Westerners’ efforts to
grapple with the enigma of the Middle East (their “Orient”), has
influenced scholars attempting to get at southern identity.16 These
14
Mary Hood, “On Being a Southern Writer,” in Smithsonian Institution Festival of American
Folklife 1996 ([Washington, D.C., 1996]), 62 (Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections,
Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, D.C.), available online in Smithsonian Digital
Repository, http://hdl.handle.net/10088/8509.
15
Interview with Strom Thurmond by James G. Banks, July 20, 1978, A-0334, Southern
Oral History Program Collection #4007 (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), 83–85 (first and second quotations on 85),
55–57 (third quotation on 55).
16
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; reprint, New York, 1994). In 1995 I participated in
a faculty seminar at the University of Illinois where we read Said and Julia Kristeva, Strangers
to Ourselves, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1991). I drafted a paper from which
12
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Western efforts (which he calls Orientalism) are hindered by “the
sense of estrangement experienced by Orientalists as they dealt
with . . . a culture so profoundly different from their own.” Such
discourses, Said insisted, were “not ‘truth’ but representations,” “full
of condescension and bad faith.” His harsh judgment was that “every
European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently
a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”17 In the
following passages by Said, I have substituted the words northern
or Yankee for Said’s Orientalist, European, West, and the like, and
the words South or southern for Orient, Arab, (Mid)East, and so on;
all the other words belong to Edward Said: “Every statement made
by Yankees . . . conveyed a sense of the irreducible distance separating northern from southern . . . . [T]heir estrangement from the
South simply intensified their feelings of superiority about northern
culture . . . . [The] central argument is the myth of the arrested
development of the South. . . . [and] theses of southern backwardness, degeneracy, and inequality with the North.”18
John Green, in a YouTube “crash course” on world history, gives
a more egalitarian view: “The definition of ‘savage’ tends to be
‘not me.’”19 But in Said’s construction, if I substitute southern for
European and North for the Orient, it does not make sense, because
the prism of U.S. culture defines the South as the Other. Southern
literary critic Jefferson Humphries uses this assessment of Said’s
definition of the Other: “Said writes, ‘It is enough for “us” to set up
these arbitrary boundaries in our minds; “they” become “they” accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as
I have developed this essay, but since that time, scholars have further developed these ideas
of the “Other” with the South. See especially James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of
Southern Identity (New York, 2005); Jennifer Rae Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy
and the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 2010); David Robert Jansson, “Voices
of the Other(s): Internal Orientalism and the Construction of Southern Identities in the United
States” (Ph.D. dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 2005); and two articles by Jansson,
“Internal Orientalism in America: W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South and the Spatial Construction of American National Identity,” Political Geography, 22 (March 2003), 293–316, and
“American Hegemony and the Irony of C. Vann Woodward’s ‘The Irony of Southern History,’”
Southeastern Geographer, 44 (May 2004), 90–114.
17
Said, Orientalism, 260 (first quotation), 21 (second quotation), 315 (third quotation),
204 (fourth quotation). Margaret Atwood made the same points in her study of Canadian
culture, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto, 1972), published six years
before Said’s Orientalism.
18
These passages come from several different pages, recombined here with ellipses. Said,
Orientalism, 228 (first and second parts of the quotation), 260 (third part), 307 (fourth part),
206 (fifth part).
19 John Green, “The Agricultural Revolution: Crash Course World History #1,” January 26,
2012 (quotation at 8:27), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yocja_N5s1I.
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
13
different from “ours.”’ . . . [T]he opposition is therefore diametrical,
producing a single, symmetrical Other.”20
Without the legacy of race, there would be no southern history and
no southern “Other.”21 This is not to argue that Indians, Latinos, and
Asians are not integral players in the region’s history, but instead to
point out that the history of black and white supersedes the other in
the South. Attorney General Eric Holder reminded us, in what became
a controversial statement, that the whole nation has a legacy of race:
“In things racial we have always been, and I believe continue to be, in
too many ways essentially a nation of cowards.”22 And yet, the legacy
of race features most heavily in the American South. Maya Angelou
notes the key characteristic of southern history: “The black Southerner
and the white Southerner are locked to the land and to history,” she
says, “a painful history of guilt and cruelty and ignorance. It clings to
us like the moss on the trees.”23
That history began in the British colonies when enslaved African
workers arrived in 1619. But it was the instigation of war and defeat
in war that cemented the South’s role as the exceptional “Other.”
Visitors to the South today notice something exceptional and often
remark something along these lines: They are still fighting the Civil
War! This is a hard knot to untangle, but I think it means that many
of today’s white southerners want to deny that the Civil War was
about slavery. Historians have shown unequivocally that the war
was about slavery, but they have also shown that, in general, white
northerners fought for the Union and not for abolition and that white
southerners fought for the Confederacy and not for slavery. Nevertheless, in 1861 southern whites in their secession ordinances proclaimed
proudly that the cause of war was slavery; many white southerners
today prefer to ignore that part of southern heritage. It matters a
great deal whether the war was about slavery or about honor, or
something else. When slavery is left out, the history is distorted; and
20
Christopher L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago, 1985),
15, quoted in Jefferson Humphries, “The Discourse of Southernness: Or How We Can Know
There Will Still Be Such a Thing as the South and Southern Literary Culture in the TwentyFirst Century,” in Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe, eds., The Future of Southern Letters
(New York, 1996), 119–33 (quotation on 120).
21
Biologists, and I hope historians, know race is a social and cultural construct; there is
no such thing as different biological races. Whatever huge consequences its understanding has
had over the course of southern history, race is not a reality.
22
Eric Holder quotation, from remarks to Justice Department employees at a Black History
Month event, in “Perspectives,” Newsweek, March 2, 2009, p. 17.
23 Quoted in Charles Joyner, Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture
(Urbana, 1999), 25.
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
14
when history is distorted, people feel justified in harboring anger,
bitterness, and resentment.
One hundred years after the Civil War, Robert Penn Warren
offered an explanation of the southern “Other”: “In defeat the Solid
South was born—not only the witless automatism of fidelity to the
Democratic Party but the mystique of prideful ‘difference,’ identity,
and defensiveness.”24
Sons of the Confederacy might say the Civil War was a “War
Between the States.” But is this a difference in perspective, or is it,
as Big Daddy might say, “mendacity”?25 The phrase “War Between
the States” only came into general use in the South well after the
war itself.26 The National Park Service, which is usually careful to
get the history right, erred in using this wording. A 1991 National Park
Service document reads, “Like a bolt of lightning out of a darkening
sky, war burst upon the American landscape in the spring of 1861,
climaxing decades of bitter wrangling and pitting two vast sections
of a young and vigorous nation against each other. Northerners called
it the War of the Rebellion, Southerners the War Between the States.
We know it simply as the Civil War.”27 But from 1861 until 1920,
both sides called it the Civil War. The North Carolina War Between
the States Sesquicentennial Commission’s website on “Civil War or
War Between the States?” demonstrates that the terminology had come
into common usage by the 1920s, but it does not acknowledge that this
time frame coincided with the “nadir” of American race relations.28
We are in the sesquicentennial of our Civil War, when for four
years Americans killed one another. As I reminded a gathering in
Charleston, South Carolina, in April 2011 for the Fort Sumter commemoration, Americans remember December 7, 1941, when Japanese
24
Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial
(New York, 1961), 14–15 (quotation on 14).
25
Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), The Theatre of Tennessee Williams,
Vol. 3 (New York, 1971), 106–9.
26
John M. Coski, “The War between the Names,” North and South: The Official Magazine
of the Civil War Society, 8 (January 2006), 62–73; Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United
Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville, Fla.,
2003), 94–95. An Ngram for the phrase “War Between the States” shows clearly the usage
pattern (http://books.google.com/ngrams).
27 National Park Service, The Civil War at a Glance (Washington, D.C., 1991), http://www
.loc.gov/item/91685463 (under “Eastern Theater”).
28 North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission, “Civil War or
War Between the States?” http://www.ncwbts150.com/CivilWarorWarBetweentheStates.php.
See also Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901
(New York, 1954); and James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American
Racism (New York, 2005), 24–44.
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
15
forces fired on American flags at Pearl Harbor, as a “day of infamy,”
but we do not celebrate it. We remember September 11, 2001, when the
United States was under attack, but we do not celebrate it. And we can
remember the firing on the flag of the United States on April 12, 1861,
but we should not celebrate it.
Part of the tangled knot of race is the way the country remembers
Reconstruction, which is probably more important to public memory
than memory of the war itself. We should, but do not, celebrate
Reconstruction. And sadly, many black and white students do not even
get the history of Reconstruction in school. During Reconstruction,
many African Americans and whites actually tried to live together in
an interracial democracy. In the late 1860s and early 1870s nearly all
African American men exercised the right to vote. Whites and African
Americans throughout the South forged tentative but real economic
and social bonds. Despite tax revolts and hard times, a biracial political coalition proved viable at addressing issues of the day.
Yet white southerners, back in power after a successful, bloody
coup d’état, wrote new state constitutions in the 1890s that disenfranchised African Americans and legalized segregation. It was at this
stage in American history when African Americans were mostly
written out of the public memory of the South, including their vital
role in helping defeat the Confederacy. Black men and women fought
the new system—and were successful for a time in certain places—but
history books of this period, written by whites, were largely silent about
African Americans’ positive contributions though vocal in describing
African Americans negatively. This period also saw the blossoming of
an African American historiographical tradition.29
As the heritage of white supremacy took center stage throughout
the entire United States at this time, as the whole nation largely turned
its back on its African American citizens, as whites across the country
were also racist, why did the South continue as “Other”? One reason
is that the South, which adopted Jim Crow from northern custom,
institutionalized segregation to a greater extent and more overtly
29
Orville Vernon Burton, The Age of Lincoln (New York, 2007), chaps. 10–14; W. E.
Burghardt Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which
Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York,
1935); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York,
1988). For high school history books, see James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me:
Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York, 1995), esp. 149–63. On black
history and culture during the nadir, see W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago,
1903). Carter G. Woodson, the son of former slaves, founded the Journal of Negro History,
which began publication in 1916; the Harlem Renaissance flourished in the 1920s and 1930s.
16
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
than did most of America. Another source was the Confederate mythmaking of the Lost Cause, when southern writers such as Thomas
Dixon Jr. (1864–1946) and Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) presented
the story to the public.30 When, as a student at Bates College in
Lewiston, Maine, Benjamin E. Mays finally allowed himself to go to
the movies (he refused to attend segregated theaters), the first movie
he saw was The Birth of a Nation (1915), based on Dixon’s novel
The Clansman (1905). This future president of Morehouse College
and future mentor of Martin Luther King Jr. was deeply hurt by the
enthusiastic response of the New England audience; only his closest
white friends were outraged.31 Twenty-five years later, another film
about the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction took
the nation by popular storm, and many Americans today still think
Gone with the Wind (1939) is the true story of Reconstruction and
the best movie ever.32 Less popular recognition has attached to the
novel Jubilee (1966) by African American writer Margaret Walker,
but her story of Vyry, an enslaved and then free woman during
the Civil War and Reconstruction, was based on the life of Walker’s
great-grandmother.33
It was during the so-called Second Reconstruction—the civil rights
movement—when the southern “Other” again became the nation’s
focus. The domestic history of the United States became the history
of North/South relations during the Civil War era and during the civil
rights movement. Two things have changed the modern South: air
conditioning and the Voting Rights Act. Sadly, Americans understand
better how air conditioning operates than how the Voting Rights Act
works. Democracy is not static; it advances and retreats, sometimes
with all the contradictions inherent in life and politics.
30
Michele K. Gillespie and Randal L. Hall, eds., Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern
America (Baton Rouge, 2006); Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost
Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York, 1987); Charles Reagan
Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865– 1920 (Athens, Ga., 1980);
Cox, Dixie’s Daughters.
31
John Herbert Roper Sr., The Magnificent Mays: A Biography of Benjamin Elijah Mays
(Columbia, S.C., 2012), 67–68. Mays saw the movie in 1918 or 1919. See also Randal Maurice
Jelks, Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement: A Biography (Chapel Hill, 2012), 45.
32
Gone with the Wind (1936) author Margaret Mitchell was a major donor to Morehouse, and
she and Mays worked together on projects. See Ira Joe Johnson and William G. Pickens, Benjamin
E. Mays and Margaret Mitchell: A Unique Legacy in Medicine (Winter Park, Fla., 1996). On
Gone with the Wind, book and movie, in American culture, see Darden Asbury Pyron, Southern
Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New York, 1991), esp. 330–38, 374, 392–93, 457–60;
Pyron, ed., Recasting: Gone with the Wind in American Culture (Miami, 1983); and James F.
Tracy, “Revisiting a Polysemic Text: The African American Press’s Reception of Gone With the
Wind,” Mass Communication and Society, 4 (Fall 2001), 419–36.
33
Margaret Walker, Jubilee (Boston, 1966).
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
17
No other part of the United States shares the number of intriguing
contradictions that the South generates. James Cobb has written,
“I’ve always said that southern historians would simply be forced
to go out of business if we were no longer allowed to use any form
of the word ‘irony.’”34 I agree wholeheartedly, and since we do not
want to go out of business, let’s add contradiction and exceptional.
The South is both Tara and Tobacco Road, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and The Color Purple. The legacy of race feeds the idea that the
South is “Other,” and this exceptional South offers intriguing ironies
and contradictions that confuse and confound, titillate and testify.
Southern contradictions appeal to television audiences, and the
South of redneck humor and gothic horror has become the darling
of television. A current popular TV show plays upon the allure of
the southern “Other,” or maybe the southern “Weird.” Forget past
shows like The Andy Griffith Show (1960–1968) and The Waltons
(1971–1981), which portrayed southerners, all white, with solid
values of family and honest living without extreme affluence.
Forget the reality redneck shows, which portray southerners, again
all white, as dim-witted beer swiggers or cute, chubby Honey Boo
Boos. All the rage is the southern “Other” of the vampire. HBO’s
True Blood (2008– ), set in Louisiana, has a fascinating combination of white and black characters; the vampires are also both black
and white. The main protagonist vampire fought as a Confederate
lieutenant. When he spoke to the historical society at the church,
white southerners had to confront contradictory feelings of revulsion for vampires and honor for Confederate soldiers. In The
Vampire Diaries (2009– ), a show popular among teens, race relations are a throwback to the founding days of Mystic Falls, Virginia.
With no analysis or nuance, black characters are subservient to the
whites, whether vampires or townsfolk.
In the 2010 novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, author Seth
Grahame-Smith, who grew up in Connecticut, portrays southerners as
antidemocratic; as Jefferson Davis tells Abraham Lincoln, “vampires
are superior to man, just as man is superior to the Negro. It’s the
natural order of things, you see.” When Lincoln points out the contradiction of southern slavery and American democracy, Davis
points north and says, “America is that away, Mr. Lincoln. . . . You’re
34
Jim Cobb, “Forget Mint Juleps! It’s Bourbon and Irony for Me!” April 28, 2012, http://
cobbloviate.com/2012/04/forget-mint-juleps-its-bourbon-and-irony-for-me.html. Of course, the
classic is C. Vann Woodward, “The Irony of Southern History,” Journal of Southern History,
19 (February 1953), 3–19.
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
18
in Mississippi now.” The notion of a southern “Other” leads to
the popularity of this connection among southerners, Confederates,
and vampires.35
Southern contradictions are more intriguing in real life than on
television. One conundrum is southern patriotism. Kidnapped Africans,
transported here to be enslaved workers, did not want to come to
America. Only the southern states violently rebelled and tried to
leave the Union (until they were stymied in their plans for a nation
by another white southerner, Abraham Lincoln). Today the South is
the seat of super-patriotism. In a striking contrast to attitudes during
Reconstruction, southern states now love their military bases. Eighteen
of the thirty-six U.S. Army bases in the continental United States are in
the former Confederate states.36 In many communities those military
bases drive the local economy. Moreover, despite today’s conservative
political climate, where socialism is deemed the acme of all that is
un-American, these bases form a kind of heartland of socialism,
providing government-run single-payer health care, pensions, day care,
education, job training, antidiscriminatory housing, shopping, and
worship, better banking and car insurance—and even halfway decent
treatment for gays and lesbians. Some have called such installations
“Canada with guns.”
The South is declared the “Other” because its hospitality is so
grand. Well-meaning and sincere is the familiar phrase, “Y’all come
back now.” Many southbound travelers notice a change in friendliness as they head into southern states, in willingness to help with
car troubles or to engage in a friendly hello. Before his role as mayor
of Charlotte and before his candidacies against Jesse Helms for a
seat in the U.S. Senate representing North Carolina, Harvey B. Gantt
was a college student interested in architecture in a state that did not
offer that discipline at a black college. When he became the first
student in the state of South Carolina to integrate any school since
Reconstruction, he remarked, “If you can’t appeal to the morals
of a South Carolinian, you can appeal to his manners.” 37 Other
African Americans who tried to integrate schools were not treated
politely, and certainly the civil rights movement was a time of brutality and violence.
35
Seth Grahame-Smith, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (New York, 2010), 251–52.
“USNORTHCOM,” http://www.army.mil/info/organization/usnorthcom/ (counting “forts”),
accessed November 20, 2012.
37
Jack Bass and W. Scott Poole, The Palmetto State: The Making of Modern South Carolina
(Columbia, S.C., 2009), xiv. Gantt integrated Clemson University in 1963.
36
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
19
Indeed, southern hospitality has always existed next to southern
violence. Among the ten states with the highest murder rates in 2009,
five are former Confederate states.38 A colloquial saying is that a
southerner will be polite to you up until the very moment he or she is
mad enough to kill you. The historical necessity to enforce enslaved
labor made violence an integral part of southern culture. School systems throughout the United States allow corporal punishment, but
those in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama are the most likely to
apply “the paddle.”39
Violence shaped gender relations in the antebellum South. It was
the interaction of black and white and the need for white dominance
that defined, or warped, white southern men’s understanding of
manhood. To keep the slave system in place, the white South needed
white supremacy, violence or the continuous threat of violence, and
a hierarchical and patriarchal society. A defense of southern manhood and family honor famously led to the beating of a senator on
the floor of the U.S. Senate.40 The tradition of masculinity and violence, I suggest, also helps the South excel at football. Chris Trainor,
writing for the Greenwood (S.C.) Index-Journal, notes about football
season: “It can’t get here soon enough.” “Unlike other areas of the
country,” he writes, “in the South, college football is directly tied to
the identity of the region. We live it, we breathe it.” Asked why he
thought this was so, Trainor answered with southern pride: “when
Alabama went and played Michigan, they weren’t just playing for
themselves, by God, they were playing for THE SOUTH.” 41 Figures 1
and 2 provide empirical evidence for the success of southern football.
Figure 1 depicts the eleven former Confederate states; Figure 2 also
includes Oklahoma and Kentucky. Each graph charts the percentage
of southern states and the percentage of the population living in
southern states against the percentage of southern college football
38
“Table 308. Crime Rates by State, 2008 and 2009, and by Type, 2009,” http://www
.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0308.pdf. These statistics show the murder rates
per 100,000 population. The five states are Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina,
and Tennessee.
39
Center for Effective Discipline, Columbus, Ohio, “U.S.: Corporal Punishment and Paddling
Statistics by State and Race [2005–2006 School Year],” http://www.stophitting.com/index.php
?page=statesbanning. These tables rely on data from the U.S. Department of Education, Office for
Civil Rights, http://ocrdata.ed.gov/.
40
On southern honor see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the
Old South (New York, 1982). On Preston Brooks, see Burton, In My Father’s House Are Many
Mansions, 93–95.
41
Chris Trainor, “It Can’t Get Here Soon Enough,” Greenwood Index-Journal, August 12, 2012
(first, second, and third quotations); Chris Trainor e-mail to the author, August 12, 2012
(fourth quotation).
20
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Figure 1. College football teams in former Confederate states by rankings,
1940–2010. Source: “Past Rankings: AP, UPI, USA Today, Harris,” http://www
.collegefootballpoll.com/polls_1936_present.html.
teams ranked in the top ten or top twenty each year since 1940
(except for two years during World War II).42 Even before integration, when the great African American players had to play at historically black colleges in the South or play on integrated teams outside
the South, southern football teams have been consistently top-ranked,
more so than the region’s population would suggest. I assume southerners are not larger or faster than other players, so I would contend
that the legacy of violence, and the threat of violence from slavery,
just made them meaner.
The masculine characteristics of derring-do that we think of as
southern characteristics in football are also on exhibit in stock-car
racing, where the skill and courage of individual drivers are more
important than the speed of the machinery. Almost any white adult
southerner today can tell about when Dale hit the wall and describe
the scar it left on the fan’s own life.43 Long before that, Tom Wolfe’s
42
The years 1943 and 1944 were not included because football teams on military bases
during World War II skewed the results. Also, note that the proportion of southern states to the
rest of the nation changed with the addition of Alaska and Hawaii in 1959. Listings of top-ten
and top-twenty college football teams are found at http://www.collegefootballpoll.com
/polls_1936_present.html. For many years the southern states did not have a professional football
team to identify with, and that might also account for both the emphasis on high school and
college football and the strong sense of identity and community surrounding the high school and
college teams in the South.
43
Dale Earnhardt Sr. crashed at the 2001 Daytona 500 and died from his injuries. Seth
Livingstone, “Dale Earnhardt: 10 Years after Crash Killed NASCAR Star,” USA Today, February
8, 2011, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/motor/nascar/2011-01-31-dale-earnhardt-senior_N.htm.
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
21
Figure 2. College football teams in former Confederate states, Kentucky, and
Oklahoma by rankings, 1940–2010. Source: “Past Rankings: AP, UPI, USA Today,
Harris,” http://www.collegefootballpoll.com/polls_1936_present.html.
“Last American Hero” (1965) portrayed Junior Johnson as the hardcharging king of the stock-car world. One of the good ol’ boys memorialized in literature and country music, a romantic and individualistic
type W. J. Cash described as a “hell of a fellow,” Johnson exemplified
the white southern male.44 At its start in 1948, NASCAR was a
southern phenomenon. Today, its website declares NASCAR to be a
national sport, but the fan base is focused more heavily in the South.45
Although NASCAR allows women drivers, racing is still considered
a masculine sport. The film Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky
Bobby (2006) offers a spoof of the masculine redneck culture that
begat NASCAR. Similarly, Burt Reynolds, playing a daredevil driver
in Smokey and the Bandit (1977), tells Sally Field’s character that
what he does best is show off. Masculine show-offs were also there at
Cemetery Ridge, Gettysburg.
Southern men are prone to such exceptionally self-defeating
efforts because of a warped sense of the need to control. Tom Wolfe’s
44
Tom Wolfe’s classic profile of driver Robert Glenn Johnson Jr. is “The Last American Hero,”
in Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (New York, 1965), 126–72.
For the “hell of a fellow” type, see W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York, 1941), 46.
45
NASCAR.com; “NASCAR Fan Base Demographics [2010],” http://www.dkmsm.com/pdf
/2010%20NASCAR%20Fan%20Base%20Demographics.pdf. See also Randal L. Hall, “Before
NASCAR: The Corporate and Civic Promotion of Automobile Racing in the American South,
1903–1927,” Journal of Southern History, 68 (August 2002), 629–68; Hall, “Carnival of Speed:
The Auto Racing Business in the American South, 1930–1950,” North Carolina Historical
Review, 84 (July 2007), 245–75; and Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s
(Chapel Hill, 2000), 91–120.
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
22
character Charlie Croker, in A Man in Full (1998), embraces this attitude in one of his “cardinal rules”: “In dealing with subordinates and
women, never justify, never explain, never back off.” 46 Patriarchal
southern culture exaggerated stereotypes of masculinity, including
the necessity to protect helpless women. As Langston Hughes wrote
to a “Southern gentle lady” in 1949, “They’ve hung a black man / To
a roadside tree / In the dark of the moon / For the world to see / How
Dixie protects / Its white womanhood.” The universal excuse for
lynching, the rape or attempted rape of a white woman by an African
American, has been shown to be untrue in most cases; this white
reaction to the presence of African Americans, however, set the
tone for the role of white women in the South. Feminist scholars
have found that “national as well as regional discursive needs . . . to
represent the South as Other, have used gender as a tool.” 47
The southern belle on the pedestal has been a symbol of southern
white civilization.48 Southern belles were supposed to be passively
beautiful—admired from afar and even up close; southern women
from the mid-nineteenth century, however, took this icon and gave
it their own analysis. Over time white southern women took the
image of belledom and gave it an agency that their menfolk never
intended. Southern women writers as diverse as Augusta Jane Evans
and Sherwood Bonner insisted that the protagonist belle have her own
thoughts as well as her own way. Famous southern belle Lucy Pickens
wrote a novel in 1854 in which her women characters had brains and
wisdom even as they proclaimed no ambition but that of a helpmeet
for a fine southern gentleman.49
While southern belles, like southern ladies, were thought in the
antebellum period to come only from the elite white classes, other
southern women have incorporated the belle’s arts of fascination even
46
Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full (New York, 1998), 230.
“Silhouette,” in Langston Hughes, One-Way Ticket (New York, 1949), 56 (first
quotation); Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, eds., Haunted Bodies: Gender
and Southern Texts (Charlottesville, 1997), 3–4 (second quotation). Jane Turner Censer
has written extensively on this issue, and I thank her for her help with this essay; see
especially Censer, The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895 (Baton
Rouge, 2003).
48
Humphries, “Discourse of Southernness,” 127–28. See also Nina Silber, The Romance
of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, 1993); LeeAnn Whites,
The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens, Ga., 1995);
Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction
(Urbana, 1997); and Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics
(Chicago, 1970).
49
Orville Vernon Burton and Georganne B. Burton, eds., The Free Flag of Cuba: The Lost
Novel of Lucy Holcombe Pickens (Baton Rouge, 2002).
47
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
23
in the more hardscrabble lives they lived and worked. For these “steel
magnolias,” the image of the belle is only the window dressing.
To be sure, the image of the belle has lived on so long that some
recent versions appear more burlesque than historical. A modern advice
giver to would-be belles suggests that fake bosoms, eyelashes, and
smiles are acceptable, “but your pearls and your silver must be real.”
According to A Southern Belle Primer, one cannot become a belle
without the proper background: “Real southern tradition is taught at
birth by doting mothers, aunts, and grandmothers and passed down
from generation to generation.” One of the rules is “Never chew gum
in public and never smoke on the street.” Another is “Buy low. Sell
high.”50 The Internet today offers similar tips: “Never talk or gossip
about people. Southern belles would call that ‘tacky.’” Basically, the
advice is to be a good person: “Remember to always be polite to
everyone, dress well, smile, and have a nice charm.”51
Today’s southern charmer has expanded opportunity in the proliferation of beauty pageants. In June 2012 girls in Alabama had
twenty-seven pageants to choose from; girls in Kansas only three. The
website Pageantcenter.com listed twenty-one pageants in Georgia, two
in Wisconsin. Among Texas’s thirty beauty pageants was a “Father &
Son Swagger Competition.”52
On a more meaningful level, the Center for American Women and
Politics reports that of the nine states with the fewest number of
women in their state legislatures in 2012, five were in the South, with
South Carolina ranking fiftieth. Yet in 2012 South Carolina had
a sitting woman governor, as did North Carolina and Oklahoma,
three of six states that had women governors.53 Like other southern
contradictions, gender attitudes are perplexing. The South has always
had women in the workforce, including agricultural labor on the
family farm and mill work since before the Civil War. In North
Carolina in the early 1970s, Crystal Lee Sutton was fired for trying
to organize a union in the textile plant; her story is better known
from the film Norma Rae (1979), starring Sally Field. Lilly M.
50
Maryln Schwartz, A Southern Belle Primer: or Why Princess Margaret Will Never Be a
Kappa Kappa Gamma (New York, 1991), vii (first and second quotations), 18 (third quotation),
28 (fourth quotation).
51
“How to Become a Southern Belle,” http://www.wikihow.com/Become-a-Southern-Belle,
accessed July 11, 2012.
52
“Pageant Calendars: Find Pageants Near You!” http://pageantcenter.com/pageant_calendar
/pageant_calendars.html, accessed July 5, 2012. California had the most competitions at thirty-five.
53
Center for American Women and Politics, “Women in Elective Office [2012],” http://
www.cawp.rutgers.edu, accessed August 12, 2012.
24
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Ledbetter of Gadsden, Alabama, who lobbied long and successfully for
the Fair Pay Act, is the symbol of both gender discrimination and of
the fight against it.54
One of the contradictions troubling to me, as a person of faith, is
southern religion.55 While the New England colonies were founded
for religious purposes—to be a city upon a hill, to show the rest of
the world how to live—the South was generally not considered a
religious section of the nation during the colonial and Revolutionary
eras. Now it is the Bible Belt and seat of religious fundamentalism.56
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has a website that
shows maps of religions and religious beliefs by state. The evangelical Protestant tradition clearly has a southern home and is
heaviest in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.57 This Bible Belt
is pro-life but offers staunch support of capital punishment. According
to death penalty opponent and activist the Reverend Joe Ingle of
Nashville, “The Bible Belt is also the ‘Death Belt.’”58 Between 1976,
when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the reinstatement of capital
punishment, and late September 2012, 943 inmates in the eleven
former Confederate states have been put to death, compared with 364
elsewhere in the nation.59
People in the Bible Belt tend to give the most to charity, and many
people tithe. The ten most generous states are in the southern Bible
54
Ledbetter sued her employer for discrimination. Lilly M. Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire &
Rubber Co., 550 U.S. 618 (2007). President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay
Act into law in 2009.
55
On a trip from Houston to Galveston, Texas, in 2003, I noticed a dichotomy of religion
and hedonism. On that busy highway were two prominent billboards, almost side by side. One
was the sign for Heartbreakers strip club; the other, posted by the Abundant Life Christian
Center, proclaimed, “Jesus Heals the Broken Hearted.” See Laura Elder, “Heartbreaker’s vs.
Abundant Life,” November 17, 2009, Galveston Daily News blog, http://galvestondailynews
.com/blog/2783.
56
Richard Florida, “The Real Boundaries of the Bible Belt,” March 29, 2012, The Atlantic
Cities: Place Matters, http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2012/03/real-boundaries-bible
-belt/1617.
57
Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey [based
on 2007 data],” http://religions.pewforum.org/maps. Gallup recorded that nine of the
top ten religious states are southern. (Yes, the other is Utah.) Frank Newport, “Mississippi
Is Most Religious U.S. State: Vermont and New Hampshire Are the Least Religious
States,” March 27, 2012, http://www.gallup.com/poll/153479/Mississippi-Religious-State.aspx.
See also Neal Jones, “The Jesus of Christianity, or of Stingrays,” Columbia (S.C.) State,
April 18, 2012.
58
Amy Green, “Death Penalty Popular in Bible Belt,” Bowling Green (Ky.) Daily News,
March 19, 2000, p. 7A.
59
Death Penalty Information Center, Washington, D.C., “Number of Executions by State and
Region Since 1976; Last Updated September 26, 2012,” http://deathpenaltyinfo.org/number
-executions-state-and-region-1976, accessed October 5, 2012. See also Death Penalty Information
Center, “Facts about the Death Penalty: Updated: September 26, 2012,” http://www.deathpenaltyinfo
.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf, accessed October 5, 2012.
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
25
Belt, the Dakotas, and strongly Mormon Utah. Although it is one of
the poorest states in the country, Mississippi often leads the nation
in per capita charitable giving. In 2000 Mississippi topped one list
with an average itemized charitable contribution of $4,070, despite an
average adjusted gross income of $31,056, which ranked forty-ninth
in the nation. “Mississippians give freely of their time, efforts, talent
and finances to help others in need,” Mississippi governor Ronnie
Musgrove said.60
Religion is part of that tangled fishing line that is particularly hard
for me to unravel. Why would the most religious part of the country,
the most charitable part of the country, be so opposed to a food-stamp
program to feed those in need? Be so opposed to admitting that our
own blessings are by the grace of God and that we need to be blessings
to others? One might expect the stereotypical Yankee to be the one
saying, I made it on my own and do not want to help anyone else. But
how can a southern religious person say such a thing? How can an
audience of southerners applaud the idea that someone who cannot
afford hospitalization should simply be left outside, possibly to die?61
How can we accept that of the thirteen states that have 25 percent or
more of their children in poverty, nine are in the former Confederacy,
that the eleven states with the highest infant mortality rates are
Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, South Carolina, North
Carolina, Maryland, Georgia, Delaware, Oklahoma, and Arkansas?62
60
Associated Press, “Mississippi First, Massachusetts Last in Charity Survey,” Lawrence
(Kans.) Journal World, September 19, 2000, http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2000/sep/19
/mississippi_first_massachusetts. The survey was compiled by the Urban Institute’s National
Center for Charitable Statistics. The 24/7 Wall St. website offered different results. It looked
at charitable giving per capita and at the number of people who make more than $200,000.
This study shows that the states with more rich people tend to give the most to charity. One
exception was Utah; though the state claims fewer super-rich, it was the most generous.
Besides Utah, Georgia and Alabama are also exceptionally generous, but so is Kansas. This
study uses data from the Internal Revenue Service; poor people are less likely to use Schedule
A to deduct charitable giving, so the data are skewed toward the economically middle class
and above. “America’s Most (and Least) Charitable States,” December 15, 2011, http://
247wallst.com/2011/12/15/americas-most-and-least-charitable-states/.
61
Amy Bingham, “Tea Party Debate Audience Cheered Idea of Letting Uninsured Patients
Die,” September 13, 2011, http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/tea-party-debate-audience
-cheered-idea-of-letting-uninsured-patients-die.
62
For child poverty statistics—Mississippi (33 percent), New Mexico (30 percent), Arkansas
and Alabama (28 percent), Louisiana (27 percent), South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky,
and Texas (26 percent), North Carolina, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Georgia (25 percent),
see Annie E. Casey Foundation, Kids Count Data Center, “Data Across States: Children in
Poverty (Percent)—2000,” http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/acrossstates/Rankings.aspx?loct
=2&by=v&order=a&ind=43&dtm=322&tf=133; for infant mortality, see Kaiser Family Foundation,
State Health Facts, “Infant Mortality Rate (Deaths per 1,000 Live Births), Linked Files,
2006–2008,” http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparemaptable.jsp?ind=47&cat=2&sort=a.
The District of Columbia has the highest infant mortality rate.
26
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
The dilemma of rugged individualism versus good of the community is a national one: Do your best, take care of yourself and your
family, but be willing to lend a helping hand. Today’s political climate,
however, calls for a model of individualism that takes little account of
community good.
People can do better; people can say no to cruelty. We historians
can talk about ironies and burdens and contradictions, and historical
context is essential. Ultimately, however, context does not mitigate
immorality or inhumanity. Ultimately, history needs to trace out the
complexity of choices, looking at all the ways the ripples expand.
When I was the stranger in Illinois, my religious faith put me outside
the academic box. Now that I am at Clemson, no one assumes a
diminished intellect simply because of spiritual belief, but sometimes
it seems that southern Christian faith is an easy label without any cost
of commitment or analysis about what it means in daily life and attitude. How sad that this is true, especially, in the religious South.
Before the Civil War, when white southerners talked of community,
they included everyone in the locale. Some elite white southerners
mythically viewed their plantation as an extended family, “our family,
white and black.” 63 Slavery, of course, required integration; it could
not exist without the interaction of blacks and whites, with whites
serving a policing or military role. With increased segregation after
emancipation, especially in the growing cities and towns, even these
defective interactions ceased. W. E. B. Du Bois was one of several
scholars who noted that as the New South began to urbanize and as the
older generations of whites and African Americans who had interacted
under the slave system passed away, blacks and whites had less
knowledge of each other, that is, had become strangers to each other.64
63
Eugene Genovese, “‘Our Family, White and Black’: Family and Household in the
Southern Slaveholders’ World View,” in Carol Bleser, ed., In Joy and in Sorrow: Women,
Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830–1900 (New York, 1991), 69–87. My
summary is very much an oversimplification. The point is that many southern whites in the
1850s believed in this patriarchal mythology and that women, children, and slaves were
dependents. For an examination of one slaveholder and his household ideals, see Judith N.
McArthur and Orville Vernon Burton, A Gentleman and an Officer: A Military and Social
History of James B. Griffin’s Civil War (New York, 1996).
64
W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, ed., Some Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia
(Atlanta, 1904); Vernon Burton, “Race and Reconstruction: Edgefield County, South Carolina,”
Journal of Social History, 12 (Fall 1978), 31–56; Burton, “Rise and Fall of Afro-American Town
Life”; Orville Vernon Burton, “Race Relations in the Rural South Since 1945,” in R. Douglas
Hurt, ed., The Rural South Since World War II (Baton Rouge, 1998), 28–58. There is a large
literature on the changing nature of race relations in the American South. The classic work is
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1955); see also Woodward’s
insightful essay, “The Strange Career of a Historical Controversy,” in Woodward, American
Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (Boston, 1971), 234–60. See
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
27
And for the most part, despite the legal end of Jim Crow, America
remains segregated. So community across racial lines is hard to find.
The South as “Other,” the exceptional South, the contradictory
South—all offer fodder for overstatements and anecdotal evidence.
And while we historians of the postmodern generation weave our
own interpretations, I hope we also know that these interpretations,
these constructions so to speak, have to be built on a solid foundation
of historical data, on evidence. I remember the three little pigs and
the difference that building materials made for them. We historians
have tried analyses that are both metaphorical and metaphysical, so I
decided to use an analysis that is meta-phantasmagorical—that is, I
decided to go for the magic of digital. I wanted to show hard evidence
from computing and quantitative techniques.
First was my use of Google to see what people say about the
South. Renee DiResta has created an interactive map to show the
adjectives that most people apply to each state. Start typing, “Why
is Illinois so . . .” and Google will fill in with a suggested word: on
the day I tried it, the word was corrupt because the search algorithm
showed that most people in a particular period typed “corrupt.” Among
states with the word racist as the top choice were South Carolina
and Alabama. With racist among the top four autocomplete suggestions were Georgia, Mississippi, and Kentucky—and Arizona. Another
term commonly used with the southern states was backwards. These
responses are simply making predictions based on what others have
searched for. Is this evidence? Certainly it is not evidence that Georgia,
Mississippi, Kentucky, and Arizona are the most racist states, but it is
evidence that, on a certain date, people who Googled the question
thought they were. I put in, “Why do southerners . . . ?” and that day
Google filled in, “hate northerners.” I put in, “Why do northerners . . . ?”
and Google filled in, “hate southerners?” When I put in “Why are
southerners so . . . ?” Google suggested the following: fat, dumb,
religious, conservative, mean, nice, patriotic, slow, rude, proud.65
Next was a digital analysis of the concept of “the South” using the
Google Books Ngrams feature. Figure 3 graphs the usage of the
phrase “the South,” which shows an increase beginning in the 1820s
also Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South
Since Emancipation (New York, 1984); and Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South:
Life After Reconstruction (New York, 1992).
65
Will Oremus, “Google Autocomplete Reveals the Fattest, Boringest, and Most Racist
States in the Union,” Slate, August 13, 2012, http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012
/08/13/google_autocomplete_interactive_map_of_state_stereotypes_the_fat_boring_and_racist
_states_of_america.html. I conducted my trial for every state on August 23, 2012.
28
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Figure 3. Google Books Ngram, “The South.” Source: http://books.google.com
/ngrams/graph?content=the+South&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus
=15&smoothing=3. Accessed September 9, 2012.
with the intensification of abolitionist rhetoric and the response that
“slavery is a positive good.” A significant spike in references to “the
South” occurs during the Civil War period, and usage steadily
increases between 1880 and 1940; another spike in the 1960s correlates to the civil rights movement of that decade. The last forty years
have witnessed a decline in the relative number of references to that
phrase in Google Books’s database. This graphing tool, while not
hard to employ, produces simply a snapshot that is limited in its
usefulness because it divorces the words from their context and represents a raw count rather than a detailed analysis.
For a more complicated and nuanced analysis, my team at the
Clemson CyberInstitute turned to HathiTrust, an archive that contains
the single most comprehensive digitized collection of printed discourse.66 The goal for our project was to explore how attitudes
expressed in print about slavery, southerners, and nonsoutherners have
changed over both time and space. We are searching for the changing
views of the Civil War and examining such questions as how the
“Lost Cause ideology” was born, evolved, and spread, and how
stereotypes of southerners, both whites and African Americans, have
66
Simon Appleford, associate director for humanities computing, leads the Clemson
CyberInstitute team on these projects. Kalev H. Leetaru, a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate
School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
is developing the computer programs for the HathiTrust analysis.
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
29
changed over time. The HathiTrust Digital Library contains approximately one million works relevant to these questions, a number
impossible for a scholar to explore adequately without the benefit
of computational techniques. Our team is working with computer
scientists to develop algorithms that will make such large explorations possible. While this approach has exceptional potential for
the research of future scholars of southern history, computing comes
with its own set of frustrations as well. Problems of obtaining the
HathiTrust data, the issues of getting it on the computer, and the time
it takes for analysis (literally months of running on a supercomputer)
have meant that, whereas I had hoped to include some findings from
this work in my address, we are only now beginning to see some
early results.
We are, for example, developing a computational tool that will
allow researchers to type into the computer a word or phrase and pick
a time period to generate a map of the locations of writers during that
period who were most closely associated with that particular word or
phrase. Computer algorithms were used to process all 67,000 books
published during Reconstruction (1868–1878) available to us and to
identify every mention of a location (from the name of a city to the
name of a hill or creek). Every mention of the words Confederate,
Confederates, and Confederacy was identified in each book, and a list
was made of all place-names appearing within two sentences of any
mention of the Confederacy. Taking into account the size and overall
discussion of each city, Map 1 shows the locations that Reconstructionera authors most closely associated with the Confederacy, and it also
captures the emotional response—that is, whether the writing was positive or negative. This so-called heat map primarily reveals the locations
of the major Civil War battles and the hometowns of major northern
units who fought against the Confederacy in those battles. The very dark
areas show negative feelings. Though we did not learn anything new
about the South or the Confederacy, our first venture into the HathiTrust
data suggests that the technique will offer powerful new insights to the
concept of what it means to be “southern.”
The fourth and final digital analysis is an exciting new way of
ascertaining popular opinion by analyzing social media. This type of
analysis is very difficult to conduct. Most scholars researching social
media rely primarily on user-specified hashtags to narrow the size of
their datasets to posts that are immediately relevant to the topic under
discussion. When attempting to study a concept such as “the South,”
however, this methodology is not adequate. As the majority of users
do not tag their casual online conversations with these types of
30
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
MAP 1
TONAL HEAT MAP
MENTIONS OF CONFEDERACY IN RECONSTRUCTION-ERA
BOOKS (1868–1878) IN HATHITRUST
OF
Map prepared by Eric Shook and Kalev Leetaru. Source: HathiTrust.
metadata, we have to use different strategies.67 For example, we had
to limit use of “Souths” such as South America, South Africa, South
Chicago, South Pole, South Park, and so on. In a drill down of discussion captured after the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte
in September 2012, we saw that many Twitter users questioned Bill
Clinton’s accent and wondered if he was from the South. Putting
together the Tweets, Facebook postings, and other social media for
three months, we were able to see that southern history is significantly
less important to users of social media than southern food! Positive reactions to the South include Food, and very positive was Culture. Negative
on the South was History and Religion, and very negative was Gender.
Figure 4 shows a word cloud summary of the most used words
across all social media profiles for the American South. The more
frequent the word, the larger it appears in the cloud. Associated with
67
We use software designed by the company Radian6 for business analytics. Again, Simon
Appleford, associate director for humanities computing at the Clemson CyberInstitute, leads
this analysis. Currently, Clemson is the only academic institution that has a center for the
analysis of social media.
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
31
Figure 4. Word cloud showing frequently used words on social media for
“The South” topic profile, July–September 2012. Prepared by Simon Appleford,
Clemson University Social Media Listening Center.
southern are words such as family, accent, life, and free. Figure 5 shows
words associated with southern food: blessing, family, and home. This
social media analysis will continue to develop as researchers at Clemson
investigate ways of improving methods of collecting, visualizing, and
evaluating data.
Popular perceptions as seen in social media support the idea of
an exceptional South. Yet, discussion that the South is no longer an
exceptional “Other” is manifold. Within the last three decades, part of
this fashionable debate is the argument that the South’s increasing
prosperity and its growing cities have led to an in-migration of people
who were not born or reared in the South. Many theories suggest that
a South with increasing urban and suburban areas looks much like
any other place in the United States.
Migration statistics from the American Community Survey (ACS)
and Internal Revenue Service tax data do reveal massive migrations
into the South. And yet, while the economic and political consequences of these migrations should not be underestimated, focusing
32
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Figure 5. Word cloud showing frequently used words on social media for “Southern
Food” topic profile, July–September 2012. Prepared by Simon Appleford, Clemson
University Social Media Listening Center.
on migration into the South may blind us to a larger and just as significant event: migration within the South. South Carolina serves as
an example. A Deep South state, South Carolina has a conservative,
anti-union, business-friendly reputation that has brought corporations
from across the country and around the world to the state, and the
state’s Sea Islands and beaches are an attraction for retirees. The ACS
one-year migration estimates suggest that nearly 153,000 people who
lived in South Carolina in 2010 lived somewhere else the previous
year. Of the newcomers, 58 percent—88,000 people—migrated to the
state from the sixteen-state region the U.S. Census defines as the
South. Even when making allowances for a smaller geographic South
than the census version, migration into South Carolina from other
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
33
MAP 2
Map prepared by Jonathan D. Hepworth. Source: 2010 Census. See also note 69.
southern states is significant. The Deep South states of Alabama,
Georgia, and Mississippi contributed some 20,000 people to the
Palmetto State—more than the combined contributions of the three
leading northeastern states, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania,
which sent a collective 17,500. Some 20,000 North Carolinians moved
to their southern sister state, more than all that came from the censusdefined Midwest.68
The pattern holds true for the entire southern region.69 Map 2 shows
by county the percentage of residents who were born in the same state
as the county. For example, in Lee, Union, and Williamsburg Counties
in South Carolina, at least 75 percent of residents in 2010 were born
somewhere in South Carolina. On the opposite end of the spectrum, in
68
U.S. Census Bureau, “State-to-State Migration Flows: 2010 [dataset: 2010 American
Community Survey 1-Year Estimates],” http://www.census.gov/hhes/migration/files/acs/st-to-st
/State_to_State_Migrations_Table_2010.xls. The U.S. Census defines the South as the states of
the former Confederacy plus Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and the
District of Columbia.
69
Maps 2 and 3 are taken from 2010 census data and show nativity to state and nativity to
region in the southern United States. The research for these maps and for the information in
the following paragraphs was done by Jonathan D. Hepworth, “Making Census of It”
(unpublished paper), using U.S. Census Bureau, “Selected Social Characteristics in the United
States: 2006–2010 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates,” Table DP02, http://
factfinder2.census.gov.
34
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
MAP 3
Map prepared by Jonathan D. Hepworth. Note: This map uses the sixteen-state census-defined
South. Source: 2010 Census. See also note 69.
2010 fewer than 25 percent of residents in Chattahoochee County, in
west central Georgia, were born in Georgia. Chattahoochee County is
home to Fort Benning, and military bases affect the in-state residencies across the South; for another example see Coryell County in
Texas, adjacent to Fort Hood.
Map 3 shows the percentage of each county’s population that was
born in the South rather than in that state. The differences between the
two are dramatic. With the elimination of the state-by-state distinction,
some counties near state borders are now darker because most of their
residents were born in the South if not the state the county is in. For
example, Map 2 indicates that a minority of the population in De Soto
County, Mississippi, was born in Mississippi. Map 3, however, shows
that over 75 percent of that county’s population was born in the
South. Chattahoochee County, with Fort Benning, similarly registers a
majority of southern-born denizens.
It becomes apparent from these maps that people born in the
South still outnumber those born outside the region. The counties
for major cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, Houston,
Dallas, Jacksonville, and Nashville all have southern-born populations of 50 percent and higher. Metro D.C. counties and the Florida
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
35
peninsula are the lone exceptions where southerners fall into a
minority, but southern-born residents still make up at least 25 percent of those populations. Even in 2010, save for the D.C. area and
Florida, southern-born residents made up the majority of the South’s
population, even in urban areas, which remain the likeliest place to
find a wayward Yankee.70
These maps lead to three conclusions. First, while today’s South is
much more fluid than the region was fifty years ago, much southern
migration has occurred within the South. Second, this interior migration does not support the idea that southern exceptionalism is at an
end. Consider the “flag flaps” in 2000 when South Carolina removed
the Confederate battle flag from its statehouse dome and in 2001 when
Georgia removed the symbol from the state’s flag.71 Southern-born
people made up an even greater majority of the population of those
states at the start of the twenty-first century than they do today; whatever role outsiders may have played, the removal of the battle flag must
be credited to the vast majority of southerners who opted for change.
Third, the migration among southern states has contributed to a
homogenization of southern culture between the states; distinctions
among the various subregions that once characterized much of the
South may be in decline. The Mississippi Delta, the South Carolina
Lowcountry, the Blue Ridge of North Carolina, the Virginia Tidewater,
the Alabama Wiregrass, the Georgia piedmont, and the Arkansas Ozarks
are widely different areas—yet in all of them one can eat standard
southern fast food from Zaxby’s, Shoney’s, and Chick-fil-A.
The South’s otherness may have declined because more Hispanics
are moving into the region. The total U.S. Hispanic population was
50.5 million in 2010; in the South it was 18.2 million.72 The numbers
70
Hepworth also examined and collected the data for 1990 and 2000. As with any presentation of large statistics, there is a problem with this data. These maps show counties by percentage
and not actual numbers. One urban county might have a larger nonsouthern population than
several small counties. The wide distribution of counties with more than 75 percent may give
the false impression that nonsoutherners are an extreme rarity, but some counties have a large
number of non-southern-born citizens. A state could easily have seventy-nine counties with
populations of a thousand people, three-quarters of whom are southern, and have one county
with three million people, half of whom are southern. As a result, counties in the state look
overwhelmingly southern, but in population the state is nearly half and half. These maps show
the overall distribution of high to low southern percentages, but they do not reveal how many
southerners and nonsoutherners are present overall.
71
John M. Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem
(Cambridge, Mass., 2005), esp. 183–291 (quotation on 183).
72
Kevin Fagan, “South, Midwest Tops in Hispanic Growth,” San Francisco Chronicle,
June 1, 2011, p. A1, available online at http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Hispanic-population
-growing-fast-in-South-Midwest-2369770.php.
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
36
are such that some are shouting “No More Juan Crow” and calling for
more attention to the “[s]ystemic discrimination against Latinos in
the region.”73 Sociologist Barbara Ellen Smith and geographer Jamie
Winders suggest an approach to southern history that looks beyond
the powerful binary of black and white relationships. They contend
that a focus on southern slavery, the Civil War, segregation and
Jim Crow, and civil rights movements “render[s] immigration invisible.”74 Winders also questions the effect of immigration on southern
history when that history, “which is so central to understanding the
place of the South,” is not familiar to newcomers, “who may or may
not identify, or be identified, as ‘southern.’” In a study of Nashville,
Winders has found that new immigrants showed no inclination to define
themselves as “southerner”; they defined themselves as “American.”75
One might surmise that as immigration continues, southern distinctiveness will lessen. And yet, that pattern again is changing.
Immigration from Mexico has almost stopped. Moreover, with the
current bad economy in the United States, some Mexican families
are returning to Mexico, so the most recent numbers may show a net
loss.76 Demographer Jeffrey Passel at the Pew Hispanic Center has
said, “I don’t think we will ever get back to the levels we saw in 2000.
I doubt that we’ll get no immigrants, but I would be very surprised if
it ramped up a lot in the future.”77 Winders, however, points out that
“even when numbers leveled off in the Midwest, the South continued to
see growing immigrant populations.”78 We’ll have to wait and see. It is
possible that the influx of new residents will change the southern
“Other.” We also need to pay attention to whether the region shows
73
Jennifer E. Brooks, “‘No Juan Crow!’: Documenting the Immigration Debate in Alabama
Today,” Southern Cultures, 18 (Fall 2012), 49–56 (first quotation on 52); Southern Poverty
Law Center, “Under Siege: Life for Low-Income Latinos in the South,” April 2009, http://
www.splcenter.org/get-informed/publications/under-siege-life-for-low-income-latinos-in-the-south
(second quotation).
74
Jamie Winders and Barbara Ellen Smith, “New Pasts: Historicizing Immigration, Race,
and Place in the South,” November 4, 2010, Southern Spaces, http://southernspaces.org/2010
/new-pasts-historicizing-immigration-race-and-place-south. Winders is a geographer at Syracuse
University; Smith is a sociologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
75
Jamie Winders, “Re-Placing Southern Geographies: The Role of Latino Migration in
Transforming the South, Its Identities, and Its Study,” Southeastern Geographer, 51 (Summer
2011), 342–58 (quotations on 351, emphasis in original).
76
Paloma Esquivel and Hector Becerra, “Report Finds Wave of Mexican Immigration to
U.S. Has Ended,” Los Angeles Times, April 24, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/24
/local/la-me-immigration-20120424. This article cites research from the Pew Hispanic Center.
See also Helen B. Marrow, New Destination Dreaming: Immigration, Race, and Legal Status
in the Rural American South (Stanford, Calif., 2011).
77
“Pew Report: Mexican Migration into U.S. Has Slowed,” PBS NewsHour, April 24, 2012,
transcript at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june12/migration_04-24.html.
78
Jamie Winders e-mail to the author, July 12, 2012.
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
37
its face of southern hospitality and graciousness or its face of xenophobia to future immigrants.79
It is also possible that the South is less of a distinct “Other” because
African American expatriates are moving back into the region. The
majority of African Americans throughout the nation’s history have lived
in the census-defined South. On the eve of the Civil War, 95 percent of
all black people lived in the South, composing one-third of the South’s
population; in the non-South, the other 5 percent of African Americans
represented only 1 percent of the population.80 By 1900, even though
Jim Crow was strengthening its grip across the South, 90 percent of
African Americans still lived in the former Confederate states. And
while African Americans left during the great migrations surrounding
World War I and World War II for both jobs and the civic ability to cast
a vote, African Americans are now moving into the South.81
In 2010, 57 percent of black Americans lived in the censusdefined South, and 47 percent lived in the former Confederate
South.82 More significant, African Americans make up a larger
proportion of most southern states’ population than they do of
northern states’. The proportion of African Americans ranges from
a low in Texas of about 12 percent to 15 percent of the population
in Arkansas, 30 percent in Georgia, 32 percent in Louisiana, and
37 percent in Mississippi. Of the twenty-five counties whose black
population increased most over the decade from 2000 to 2010,
three-quarters are in the South.83
79
Leon Fink, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (Chapel
Hill, 2003); Altha J. Cravey and Gabriela Valdivia, eds., “Carolina del Norte: Geographies of
Latinization in the South,” Southeastern Geographer, 51 (Summer 2011), 213–363.
80
McPherson, Drawn with the Sword, 15.
81
Larry Copeland, “For Blacks, a Return to Southern Roots,” USA Today, July 1, 2011,
p. 1A, available online at http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2011-06-30-black
-south-census-migration_n.htm.
82
Sonya Rastogi et al. for the U.S. Census Bureau, “The Black Population: 2010,” p. 7,
http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-06.pdf. For the African American population
in the former Confederate states, the research was done by Ryan Conway, who used census data
(http://quickfacts.census.gov) to find the percentage of total black population, and then divided
that by the population in the eleven former Confederate states.
83
Rastogi et al., “Black Population: 2010,” p. 8 (state-by-state data); Sabrina Tavernise and
Robert Gebeloff, “Many U.S. Blacks Moving to South, Reversing Trend,” New York Times,
March 25, 2011, p. A1; Carol Stack, Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South
(New York, 1996). Some midwestern states have higher proportions of African Americans in
their populations than does Texas: Ohio (12.4 percent), Michigan (14.3 percent), and Illinois
(14.8 percent). These numbers represent a proportion to the state’s population, so a larger
percentage does not necessarily mean there are more African Americans living in the state.
Thus California is home to about 2.5 million African Americans, but they make up only
6.6 percent of the state’s total population of 37.7 million. U.S. Census Bureau, “State and
County QuickFacts,” http://quickfacts.census.gov.
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
38
One new black southerner, who moved to suburban Atlanta from
Maryland, reported that “moving South felt a little bit like coming
home. ‘There’s a piece of me that is Southern, that thing of speaking
to everybody I see.’” According to James Sims, a retiree from New
York City, “We’re all like family here.”84 When African American
writer Denene Millner and her family moved in 2005 from New Jersey
to a small town outside Atlanta, none of her friends could understand
why they would move South, “infamous for enslaving, subjugating
and killing humans with brown skin.” But her family has decided
it was the right move: “It is in the South that we found peace.”85 The
actor Morgan Freeman could hardly wait to get back to his home in
Clarksdale, Mississippi: “[O]f any place I’ve ever been, this feels
most like home. When I come here, when I hit Mississippi, everything
is right.”86 It reminds me of the song by Alabama called “Down
Home”: “Down home where they know you by name and treat you
like family / Down home a man’s good word and a handshake are all
you need / Folks know if they’re fallin’ on hard times they can fall
back on / Those of us raised up down home. / When I was a boy I
couldn’t wait to leave this place / But now I wanna see my children
raised / Down home.”87
These sentiments are true for southern blacks and whites, just as
southern music that extols family and religion is an amalgam of black
and white. Music contains the contradictions and strangeness of the
South as nothing else. Country singers like Lee Greenwood and Hank
Williams Jr. are symbolic of the simultaneous assertion and desertion
of southern; and nothing speaks to the paradoxes and contradictions
of southern history like the blues. Blues lyrics suggest that the South is
an Other within itself. That is, the counterpoint is not perhaps so much
an alien or outsider culture, such as the “North,” but itself in constant discursive tension with its development, its history, its culture
of self-expression, examination, and explanation, and even its generations of remembrance, something a little beyond tension or contradiction or paradox or irony. As Lead Belly sings in his great
refrain: “Home of the brave, land of the free / I don’t want to be
mistreated by no bourgeoisie!”88
84
Copeland, “For Blacks, a Return to Southern Roots.”
Denene Millner, “The Great (Reverse) Migration,” Ebony, 67 (November 2011), 124–31
(quotations on 124–25).
86
Andrea Sachs, “Morgan Freeman, Down Home,” Washington Post, November 13, 2005,
Travel section, p. 1, available online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article
/2005/11/11/AR2005111100606.html.
87
Alabama, “Down Home,” Pass It On Down (RCA Records, 1990).
88
Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly), “Bourgeois Blues,” first recorded in 1938.
85
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
39
African Americans coming to the South feel more down-home and
no longer will accept mistreatment. With the success of the civil
rights movement, the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the
1965 Voting Rights Act, and the one-person/one-vote U.S. Supreme
Court ruling (Baker v. Carr [1962]), African Americans have served
on school boards, county and city councils, and in state legislatures.
Today more African Americans are elected and appointed, at all
levels—local, state, and national—in the South than in any other
region.89 Moreover, the American South now benefits from the
contributions of these minority citizens to the civic dialogue as they
bring both their perspectives and their resources.
At the same time, heavily black areas have an influence on how
whites in the area self-identify. The U.S. Census last recorded ancestry
and ethnicity in 2000. In the North, respondents selected different
ethnicities: German, English, Mexican, Irish, Chinese, and so on.
In the South, however, most whites across the southern states, and
particularly near areas of black predominance in the population, felt
that the only ancestry they needed to claim was American, that is to
say, of the non-African variety.90 This distribution mirrors closely a
89
Because the black population is concentrated in the South, more African Americans are
elected officials in the South compared with other regions. But, though African Americans have
always been concentrated in the South, they were not able to win elections until after the votedilution litigation and enforcement of Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act brought about
changes from at-large districts to district elections, mainly in the 1980s and 1990s. See David A.
Bositis, “Black Elected Officials: A Statistical Summary, 2000,” Joint Center for Political and
Economic Studies, Washington, D.C., January 2001, http://www.jointcenter.org/research/black
-elected-officials-a-statistical-summary-2000; “National Roster of Black Elected Officials,” Joint
Center for Political and Economic Studies, Washington, D.C., November 2011, http://www
.jointcenter.org/research/national-roster-of-black-elected-officials; Charles S. Bullock III and Ronald
Keith Gaddie, The Triumph of Voting Rights in the South (Norman, Okla., 2009), 56, 329–41; and
Lisa Handley and Bernard Grofman, “The Impact of the Voting Rights Act on Minority
Representation: Black Officeholding in Southern State Legislatures and Congressional Delegations,” 335–50, esp. 338, and Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman, “The Voting Rights
Act and the Second Reconstruction,” 378–87, esp. 381–84, both in Chandler Davidson and
Bernard Grofman, eds., Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights
Act, 1965–1990 (Princeton, 1994). For more on African American officeholders, see Marcus
D. Allen and Marvin P. King, “The Geography of Black Candidate Success,” American
Review of Politics, 31 (Fall–Winter 2010), 333–56. The Gender and Multi-Cultural Leadership Project (http://www.gmcl.org/maps/national/federal.htm) provides an interactive map,
using July 2005 census estimates, that shows each state’s elected officials of color at the
federal, state, and local levels (for the most part the data shows officeholders in 2006).
90
Angela Brittingham and G. Patricia de la Cruz for the U.S. Census Bureau, “Ancestry:
2000,” p. 6, http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/c2kbr-35.pdf. Ethnic self-identity posed
some problems for the Census Bureau. In 1980 some Mexican Americans thought the question
about Mexican-American origin confusing. Thinking they had to decide between Mexican and
American, they chose American. N. R. McKenney and C. E. Bennett, “Issues Regarding Data
on Race and Ethnicity: The Census Bureau Experience,” Public Health Reports, 109 (January–
February 1994), 16–25, esp. 23. The census corrected this ambiguity but is always at work to
clarify these kinds of issues.
40
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
MAP 4
Map prepared by Jonathan D. Hepworth. Sources: 2000 Census; John Shelton Reed with James M.
Kohls and Carol Hanchette, “The Incredible Shrinking South,” in Reed, Surveying the South:
Studies in Regional Sociology (Columbia, Mo., 1993), 51–65, esp. 64, figure 7.
1988 study by John Shelton Reed. To explore where a southern identity began to eclipse an American one, Reed conducted a study of the
identifiers “American” and “southern,” as used by businesses listed in
phonebooks.91 Map 4 overlays the 2000 census ancestry map with
that done by Reed twelve years earlier. The areas that used “southern”
as the identifier in 1988 match closely with the areas that used
“American” in the 2000 census.
For myself, I know the South is still an exceptional “Other” because
of my current work trying to rectify some of the historical experiences
of our southern history. When South Carolina, which had been first
in nullification and first in secession, was also the first state to
challenge the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act in 1966,
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren noted the long history of racial discrimination in the voter registration process in
South Carolina. He quoted directly some of the most outrageous
remarks Benjamin R. “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman made at the 1895
91
John Shelton Reed with James M. Kohls and Carol Hanchette, “The Incredible Shrinking
South,” in Reed, Surveying the South: Studies in Regional Sociology (Columbia, Mo., 1993), 51–65,
esp. 64, figure 7.
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
41
disenfranchising constitutional convention as evidence of the discriminatory purpose of the literacy test suspended by the act. Warren stated,
“The constitutional propriety of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 must be
judged with reference to the historical experience which it reflects.”92
History finally caught up with South Carolina and the South.
In cases today, those fighting the Voting Rights Act ask, which is
more probative: historical evidence from the 1960s or more recent
evidence? They consider population shifts and the end of institutionalized Jim Crow as the beginning of a postracial South, a consideration implied by some scholars today. Southerner Stephen Colbert, on
The Colbert Report, said that rewriting history is a good thing because
we can make it better. He facetiously recommended that now that an
African American is president, we can say that slavery never
existed.93 Although Colbert spoke in humor, there are indications that
in the court of popular opinion, as well as with some judges, this is to
some degree happening. The Chicago Tribune asks, “Does the election
of a black president mean racism is no longer a factor in American
politics? And are civil rights laws outdated in the age of Obama?”94
That article examines legal briefs filed in a tiny jurisdiction in Austin,
Texas, that challenged the constitutionality of a section of the Voting
Rights Act, as reauthorized in 2006. The jurisdiction lost at the trial
court level and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Chief Justice John
Roberts authored the 8-1 opinion, in which the Court found that the
jurisdiction was entitled to opt out of the Voting Rights Act. That
decision allowed the Court to dodge the issue of constitutionality while
disparaging the preclearance requirements under Section 5 of the act.
Echoing traditional states’ rights rhetoric used to defend slavery, segregation, and disenfranchisement, Roberts wrote that the Voting Rights
Act “also differentiates between the States, despite our historic
tradition that all the States enjoy ‘equal sovereignty.’” Unlike the
Warren Court, which believed that the equal protection of individuals against racial discrimination was one of the principal duties of
the U.S. Supreme Court, the Roberts Court argued that the Court’s
role is more to protect the rights of the states to deal with voting as
92
South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301 (1966), at 308–9 (quotation on 308), 310–11n9,
329–30.
93
“The New Deal—Jonathan Chait,” The Colbert Report, March 16, 2009, http://www
.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/221837/march-16-2009/the-new-deal- - -jonathan-chait.
94
Peter Wallsten and David G. Savage, “Voting Rights Act Opponents Point to Barack
Obama’s Election as Reason to Scale Back Civil Rights Laws,” Chicago Tribune, March 15,
2009, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-03-15/news/0903140356_1_civil-rights-laws-voting
-rights-act-voting-districts.
42
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
they wish. Chief Justice Roberts continued, “But a departure from the
fundamental principle of equal sovereignty requires a showing that a
statute’s disparate geographic coverage is sufficiently related to the
problem that it targets.” And, “Things have changed in the South.” In a
not so veiled threat to overturn Section 5, he stated, “Whether conditions continue to justify such legislation is a difficult constitutional
question we do not answer today.”95 Conservative opinion seemed to
agree, as reported by the Chicago Tribune, that “Obama’s election
heralds the emergence of a colorblind society in which special legal
safeguards for minorities are no longer required.”96
I think we know better than that. Racial polarization, an oversimplification of which is that whites tend to vote for whites and blacks
tend to vote for blacks, proves that a color-blind society has not
arrived. Civil rights advocates have presented state-by-state data that
shows persistent racial polarization in the Deep South and elsewhere.
Expert testimony in voting rights cases supports the view that southern
states have far higher rates of racial polarization in voting, though
voting is also highly polarized outside the South. (In 2008 Barack
Obama won a majority of white voters’ votes in only eighteen of the
fifty states. None were in the South.) Historians need to remember
that the former Confederate states undermined the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments after Reconstruction. It took the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to reestablish those
rights and the vigorous enforcement through litigation throughout the
American South since to ensure that African Americans and minorities
in the South have a meaningful vote, the very essence of citizenship.
Revolutions can and do go backward, especially in economically difficult times, as in the great depression of 1873 into the 1890s; racial
justice is often sacrificed when the economic pie shrinks.97
95
Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, 557 U.S. 193 (2009), final
pagination pending (first and second quotations on 8, third quotation on 7, fourth quotation on 16
of the slip opinion), available at http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/NorthwestAustin
MunicipalUtilityDistrictNumberOnev.Gonzales.php. Other ongoing challenges to Section 5 are
the Shelby County v. Holder (Alabama) and Nix v. Holder (North Carolina) cases. Both the South
Carolina and Texas voter identification cases, Texas v. Holder and South Carolina v. Holder, will
probably go to the Supreme Court and challenge Section 5. I was asked by National Public Radio
(NPR) to comment on a similar case from North Carolina, Bartlett v. Strickland, 566 U.S. 1 (2009).
In that case, decided March 9, 2009, the Supreme Court with a 5-4 decision struck down a North
Carolina redistricting plan that would have preserved minority voting power in a district where
African Americans were a significant minority, 39 percent.
96
Wallsten and Savage, “Voting Rights Act Opponents Point to Barack Obama’s Election
as Reason to Scale Back Civil Rights Laws.”
97
In addition to the eighteen states, Obama won a majority of white votes in the District
of Columbia. Racial polarization is often defined as groups voting differently. Generally, it
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
43
Just as I was about to start working on this presidential address,
I had a call from officials at the NAACP (National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People) in Texas asking for help in a
challenge to the state’s redistricting plan; I had given such aid to
them and LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) in
2003. The U.S. Justice Department also objected to Texas’s redistricting
plan because it diminished minority voting strength. The three-judge
panel of the District Court for the District of Columbia has now ruled
that in this case the state’s plans were drawn with the purpose and intent
of diluting the minority vote in Texas, but of course, Texas will appeal
to the Supreme Court.98
Just as that case finished up, I received a call from the Georgia
Black Legislative Caucus, also fighting the redistricting plans of that
state’s Republicans. This time the U.S. Justice Department did not object
to the plan because it did not reduce the number of black-majority
districts, but only white Democratic districts. The Georgia Republican
plan was not retrogressive on race in itself; however, since most black
representatives are Democrats, African Americans will have less influence in Georgia politics because of fewer white Democratic allies.
Just as that case finished up, I received a call from civil rights
attorneys who were representing a Mr. Albert Woodfox, whose tragic
refers to a voting pattern in which a majority of non-Hispanic whites vote to elect the majority’s
preferred candidates and to defeat the candidates preferred by African American voters. Racially
polarized voting, which can be measured statistically with some precision, occurs whenever the
difference between, for example, the proportion of non-Hispanic whites and African Americans
who vote for a black candidate is statistically significant. Study after study, based on polling
data as well as aggregate election results, has found that racially polarized voting persists and
has even recently strengthened. Evidence shows that in the Deep South, voting patterns in
the presidential election of 2008 remained as racially polarized as ever; southern whites voted
overwhelmingly against Obama, who was supported overwhelmingly by African American
voters, and as a result, Obama failed to carry any of those states. Polarization was lower in the
upper South, and as a result Obama carried Virginia and North Carolina in 2008. See Stephen
Ansolabehere, Nathaniel Persily, and Charles Stewart III, “Race, Region, and Vote Choice in
the 2008 Election: Implications for the Future of the Voting Rights Act,” Harvard Law Review,
123 (April 2010), 1386–1436, esp. 1422–23; David A. Bositis, “Resegregation in Southern
Politics?” Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Washington, D.C., November 2011,
http://www.jointcenter.org/research/resegregation-in-southern-politics; David A. Bositis, “Blacks
and the 2008 Elections: A Preliminary Analysis,” Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies,
Washington, D.C., December 2008, http://www.jointcenter.org/research/blacks-and-the-2008
-elections-a-preliminary-analysis; Bullock and Gaddie, Triumph of Voting Rights in the South;
and especially the review essay of Bullock and Gaddie’s book, Richard L. Engstrom, “Race and
Southern Politics,” Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy, 10 (March 2011), 53–61.
See also Jonathan Tilove, “Can This Be ‘The End of Southern History?’”; and Adam Nossiter,
“For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics,” New York Times, November 11, 2008, p. A1.
98
Texas v. United States (case number 1:11-cv-01303 D.D.C.), decided August 28, 2012;
final judgment (case number 1:11-cv-01303-RMC-TBG-BAH, document 231) and other documents related to this pending case are available at http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation
/TexasvUS.php.
44
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
case I had heard about on NPR.99 The novelist John Grisham could not
have created a more bizarre and strange story than that of Mr. Woodfox,
who has been in solitary confinement since 1972. The attorneys wanted
help with the habeas proceeding of Woodfox’s claim of racial discrimination in the selection of the grand jury foreperson, the only appeal
available as a constitutional issue. Woodfox was indicted by a grand
jury in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, and a second time in 1993, in
connection with the 1972 murder of white corrections officer Brent
Miller at Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola prison.
This time I had to say no; I explained that I had no time to do this
case because I had to write this essay for the Southern Historical
Association. That night, however, I had one of the worst nightmares
of my life; I was on death row and innocent, and my daughters would
not allow my grandchildren to visit so that their last memory of me
would not be of me in prison. That nightmare plus some prayer time
changed my mind. Race relations profoundly affect this Louisiana
case; it appears that Woodfox is guilty only of organizing a Black
Panthers group in the prison. Part of my report for that case was
to explain how a good person, a southern white judge in Louisiana
who was “moderate” on race issues in the 1990s, still might be
uncomfortable placing an African American in charge of whites on
a jury. In eighteen cases in West Feliciana Parish, the judge had only
once appointed an African American as the grand jury foreman. Two
attorneys from New York, part of Mr. Woodfox’s counsel, were too
fearful of the South as “Other” to spend the night in that rural parish,
instead insisting on the fifty-five-mile drive back and forth from
Baton Rouge. This was in 2012, not the 1970s. The case was heard
in May, and as of early November, there still had not been a ruling.
With that case over, I had the summer to work on my presidential
address, a tighter time squeeze than I wanted, but manageable. Then I
received a call from two of my heroes, Armand Derfner and Laughlin
McDonald, both civil rights attorneys. They wanted me to help in an
effort to stop the South Carolina voter identification law. How could
I say no? In The Age of Lincoln, I argued that the forces of repression,
that those who overthrew the South’s first attempt at an interracial
99
For the three-part series by Laura Sullivan on All Things Considered, see “Doubts Arise
About 1972 Angola Prison Murder,” October 27, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story
.php?storyId=96030547; “Favors, Inconsistencies Taint Angola Murder Case,” October 28, 2008,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96199165; and “Why Did Key Angola
Witness Go to the ‘Dog Pen’?” October 29, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php
?storyId=96255685.
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
45
democracy, were a minority of white southerners. The problem was
that the majority, usually law-abiding, did nothing to stop them.100 At
the end of August I finished testifying in that case before a three-judge
panel in Washington, D.C. On October 12, 2012, we learned the judges’
decision. The panel blocked enforcement of the law until after the 2012
election. Moreover, based on the Justice Department’s objections, the
judges specified the importance of a provision that people without IDs
may still vote if they sign affidavits stating any reason why they do not
have voter identification. The South Carolina voter ID law transitioned
from one of the most stringent to one of the most lenient, where even
those without identification are eligible to vote.101
An important factor in understanding the motivation behind these
voter identification laws is the integral link between race and party in
the South. The development of the modern Republican Party is inextricably tied to distinguishing Republicans from the heavily black
Democratic Party. Since the 1960s, the South has undergone a
remarkable political revolution. The party of white supremacy was
the Democratic Party, and southern whites would supposedly vote
for a yellow dog before they would vote for a Republican, the party
of Lincoln. Until the 1960 election, most southern African Americans
were Republicans, even if they could not register to vote in the South.
After passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, while the Democratic
Party welcomed black voters to counter the growing number of Republican voters, white Democrats were nevertheless reluctant to create
majority-minority districts where black candidates could be elected.
It seems odd, but the Republican Party in the South was more willing
to work with civil rights organizations like the NAACP to create
more majority-minority districts from which African Americans
could be elected. Initially, white Democrats fought these efforts
instead of accepting that elected African Americans were also part
of the Democratic Party.
In 1964 the Republican Party’s nominee for president, Senator
Barry Goldwater, announced that he did not support the Civil Rights
Act of 1964. As he told a group of Republicans from southern states,
100
Burton, Age of Lincoln, esp. 301–3.
South Carolina v. United States (case number 1:12-cv-00203 D.D.C.), decided October 10, 2012. I was gratified that the Justice Department cited my initial report when it objected
to the South Carolina voter ID law. Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general, U.S. Department of Justice, to H. Christopher Bartolomucci, June 29, 2012, South Carolina v. United States,
case 1:12-cv-00203-CKK-BMK-JDB, document 118-1. This and other documents relating to
this case are available at http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/SCvUS.php. I could not
have done this report without the help of Beatrice Burton.
101
46
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
it was better for the Republican Party to forgo the “Negro vote” and
instead court white southerners who opposed equal rights. Historians
agree that Goldwater “sought to create a general polarization of
southern voters along racial lines.” The effectiveness of what was
called the southern strategy during Richard M. Nixon’s presidency
had a profound effect on the development of the nearly all-white
modern Republican Party in the South. In 1980 candidate Ronald
Reagan spoke in Neshoba County, Mississippi, place of the brutal
murders of three civil rights activists in 1964. Without mentioning
any civil rights, Reagan used the term states’ rights, long recognized
as a code word, and thus reassured white southerners of the direction
of the Republican Party. By the 1990s—as a result of decades of
racial polarization—the Republican Party in the South was almost
exclusively white, and African Americans who wanted input in
the political process had no practical alternative to the Democratic
Party. Racial polarization means that efforts to diminish the vote
among Democrats, and particularly poor Democrats, will automatically strike at the African American community. With strong racially
polarized voting in a state, any reduction in African American turnout benefits that state’s Republican Party. Conversely, significant
gains in African American voting strength are a threat to the state
Republican Party’s electoral success.102
Of the eleven states that require photo identification to vote, in
effect for 2012, four are southern states.103 Of the six additional states
with laws on the books but not in effect for 2012 because of legal
challenges or no implementation, four are southern. The Department
of Justice can object to these laws only for the states under the jurisdiction of the Voting Rights Act’s Section 5, the automatic “trigger.”
Seven of the nine states covered by this trigger are southern because
the trigger requires a proven history of discrimination.104 Frank Parker,
102
Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York, 1995); Dan Carter, “Unfinished
Transformation: Matthew J. Perry’s South Carolina,” in W. Lewis Burke and Belinda F. Gergel,
eds., Matthew J. Perry: The Man, His Times, and His Legacy (Columbia, S.C., 2004), 238–61
(quotation on 251). See also James W. Loewen, “Racial Bloc Voting and Political Mobilization
in South Carolina,” Review of Black Political Economy, 19 (Summer 1990), 23–37. For a brief
description of the southern strategy, see also Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, 2010), 43–44 and notes.
103
National Conference of State Legislatures, “Voter Identification Requirements,” Table 1:
State Requirements for Voter Identification, http://www.ncsl.org/legislatures-elections/elections
/voter-id.aspx#2012, accessed October 11, 2012.
104
Also covered are certain counties in Florida, North Carolina, California, New York, and
South Dakota and certain townships in New Hampshire and Michigan. If the Department of
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
47
a voting rights attorney, used to his advantage a prevailing northern
attitude of disparaging southern race relations when working for
passage of the Voting Rights Act. He wrote that Section 5 of the
1965 Voting Rights Act, the crucial preclearance clause that requires
the Justice Department to approve changes in election laws, was
passed only because the South was portrayed as “Other”: “We could
always get a majority of Congress to beat up on the southern minority.”
He knew it would have been impossible to pass the law if it included
northern states, and that is why he fought against amendments to make
the coverage nationwide.105
The Voting Rights Act is crucial for protection of minority voting,
but I see no guarantees that it will continue into the future. When it
was passed in 1965, the act had considerable bipartisan support, and
the same has been true for its re-passage. Today the partisan divisions
in Congress are too intense to predict the future for voting rights.
Already it is difficult for me to believe that in 2012 we saw purges of
voter lists and draconian voter ID laws that discriminate against poor
people, minorities, the elderly, and the disabled. These tragedies
should have been left behind in the nineteenth century, but a powerful
element in the United States today, while not taking away the right to
vote, is taking away the ability to vote.
Some of the questions I was asked in my depositions remind me of
historians’ arguments for the end of southern history. In Louisiana and
South Carolina, I was asked why the elections of the first minority
governors in the states’ histories, that is, of Bobby Jindal and Nikki
Haley, both of South Asian (Indian) heritage, did not mean that
race was no longer an issue in either state. There is no probative value
in the racial or ethnic heritage of Louisiana’s or South Carolina’s
governor. Historically Louisiana and South Carolina have not had a
history of racial polarization and discrimination against people from
Asia. Louisiana State University and Clemson University allowed
foreign students from Asia to attend long before African Americans,
and the University of Mississippi allowed foreign students to attend
long before James Meredith.106 A parallel example is the situation of
Justice finds discriminatory election laws in states not listed under Section 5, it has to pursue a
remedy under Section 2. U.S. Department of Justice, “About Section 5 of the Voting Rights
Act,” http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/sec_5/about.php.
105
Frank Parker to Vernon Burton, 1990, letter in possession of author.
106
Peter Wallenstein, “Introduction: Higher Education, Black Access, and the Civil Rights
Movement,” in Wallenstein, ed., Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement: White
Supremacy, Black Southerners, and College Campuses (Gainesville, Fla., 2008), 1–16, esp. 6–8;
48
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Chinese Americans in Mississippi. Mississippi had a Chinese American
mayor before the Voting Rights Act, but no one would claim that
white supremacy and black voter suppression were not common in
Mississippi in 1965.107 There is an old tradition of so-called honorary
whites that predates the Civil War in the South. By not being black in
the South, one may become white.
Rather than a white/black binary to focus the legacy of race, some
suggest a more accurate and useful binary is a white/nonwhite or—often
much better—a black/nonblack binary. This category changes through
southern history, depending on locale and issues of education or housing or marriage. As scholars have noted, this was one reason that antiSemitism was less prevalent in the South as compared with the North,
and there were a number of Jewish leaders elected to offices in the
Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972
(Athens, Ga., 1995), 262; Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College,
Catalogue, 1900–1901 (New Orleans, 1901), 85; Louisiana State University, University Bulletin,
ser. 2 (May 1904), 89; Jerome V. Reel, The High Seminary. Vol. 1: A History of the Clemson
Agricultural College of South Carolina, 1889–1964 (Clemson, S.C., 2011), 220, 261–62, 389–90.
Not much scholarly literature exists on Asians in the American South, and there is very little
on Indian Americans in the region. See James L. Peacock, Grounded Globalism: How the U.S.
South Embraces the World (Athens, Ga., 2007), 26–27, 95–97, 249, 266–67n6; Sarah Gualtieri,
“Becoming ‘White’: Race, Religion, and the Foundations of Syrian/Lebanese Ethnicity in the
United States,” in Pippa Holloway, ed., Other Souths: Diversity and Difference in the U.S. South,
Reconstruction to Present (Athens, Ga., 2008), 89–116, esp. 97–98; Chidanand Rajghatta, “Across
the Black Waters,” India International Centre Quarterly, 33 (Winter 2006–Spring 2007), 116–27;
and Shana Walton and Barbara Carpenter, eds., Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi: The Twentieth
Century (Jackson, Miss., 2012), esp. Devparna Roy and Lola Williamson, “The Changing Face of
Hindu Identity in Jackson, Mississippi,” 284–308. See also Pei-te Lien et al., “The Voting Rights
Act and the Election of Nonwhite Officials,” PS: Political Science and Politics, 40 (July 2007),
489–94; Jay Nordlinger, “‘Pioneers,’ ‘Rangers,’ Indians! A Flourishing American Ethnic Group
Gets a Little Political,” National Review, December 27, 2004, pp. 38–39; Ajantha Subramanian,
“Indians in North Carolina: Race, Class, and Culture in the Making of Immigrant Identity,”
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 20, nos. 1–2 (2000), 105–14;
Amitabh Pal, “Extreme Makeover, GOP Style: Nikki and Bobby’s Slick Transformations,” The
Progressive, 74 (October 2010), 28–30; and Ferrel Guillory, “The South in Red and Purple:
Southernized Republicans, Diverse Democrats,” Southern Cultures, 18 (Fall 2012), 6–24, esp. 19.
V. S. Naipaul, A Turn in the South (New York, 1989), does not mention Indians in the South,
though he does mention Chinese immigrants (pp. 167–68). For a map of Asian American elected
officials by state (2004), see the Gender and Multi-Cultural Leadership Project, http://gmcl.org
/maps/AsianElectedOfficials.gif.
107
James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Cambridge,
Mass., 1971), 96; Interview with Luck Wing by Jung Min (Kevin) Kim, August 26, 2010,
Chinese Grocers in the Mississippi and Arkansas Deltas, Southern Foodways Alliance Oral
History Project, http://southernfoodways.org/documentary/oh/chinese_grocers/luck_wing.shtml;
“Mayors of Three Towns in Mississippi [Delta] Are Chinese,” Meriden (Conn.) Morning
Record, June 8, 1972, p. 9 (reporting that two mayors in Mississippi and another in nearby
Arkansas were the only Chinese American mayors in the United States). See also Lucy M.
Cohen, Chinese in the Post–Civil War South: A People Without a History (Baton Rouge, 1984);
and Emily Erwin Jones and Frieda Quon, “Mississippi Delta Chinese,” in Walton and Carpenter,
eds., Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi, 144–71.
THE SOUTH AS “OTHER”
49
South.108 The story of black/nonblack in the South exposes in a very
raw way issues about ethnicity, race, and power, issues that are at the
heart of our democracy nationwide. The black/nonblack divide highlights questions that remain unanswered.109
In a rebuttal to my two reports on the South Carolina voter ID law,
political science professor Scott E. Buchanan sounded remarkably like
scholars who believe that the in-migration of northerners has helped
end southern history. He argued that it was the in-migration to South
Carolina of people from the Northeast, who are more likely to be
Republican, that has changed the partisan composition of the state,
that it was not the southern strategy of race. But as shown above,
most of the migrants to South Carolina are from other southern
states, not from “New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania,” as stated
by Professor Buchanan.110
These cases show, again and again, that there is an exceptional
South. What we have in the South is black and white as proxies for
ethnicity, and what plays out in power issues is racial politics. I learned
a valuable lesson when I was an expert witness in the mid-1990s in
El Centro, California. There only 3 percent of the population was
African American, but African Americans were elected to the city
council and school board; Hispanics made up more than 40 percent
of voting-age citizens but were not elected in the at-large elections.
The issue was not white and black, but white and brown. The convergence of ethnicity and class, and how those play out historically, is what
has made race a critical ingredient in the southern political arena.
In the South today, despite dramatic transformations in many areas,
old perceptions of the South’s racial “Otherness” are closer to the
108
Frederic Cople Jaher, A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of AntiSemitism in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 119–29, 177–84, 187. See also Thomas F.
Pettigrew, Racially Separate or Together? (New York, 1971), excerpted in Ellis Cashmore and
James Jennings, eds., Racism: Essential Readings (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 2001), 141–53, esp. 149;
Leonard Dinnerstein, Uneasy at Home: Antisemitism and the American Jewish Experience
(New York, 1987), 95–98; and Michael Curtis, “Antisemitism: Different Perspectives,”
Sociological Forum, 12 (June 1997), 321–30, esp. 322–23. Most scholars agree that in the
antebellum period southerners were less anti-Semitic than northerners. Some argue that it was
not until the mid-twentieth century, with the civil rights movement and desegregation, that the
South became more anti-Semitic.
109
Peter Wallenstein, “Identity, Marriage, and Schools: Life along the Color Line/s in the
Era of Plessy v. Ferguson,” in Stephanie Cole and Natalie J. Ring, eds., The Folly of Jim Crow:
Rethinking the Segregated South (College Station, Tex., 2012), 17–53; Peter Wallenstein, “Did
Homer Plessy Die a White Man? Race and Southern History—The State of the Field,” Georgia
Historical Quarterly, 94 (Spring 2010), 62–96.
110
“Declaration of Scott Eugene Buchanan, Ph.D.,” August 6, 2012 (filed August 8, 2012),
p. 18, South Carolina v. United States, case number 1:12-cv-00203-CKK-BMK-JDB, document 157-2,
available at http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/SCvUS.php.
50
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
mark than some realize or want to acknowledge. The peculiar history
of the South, of blacks and whites, of the mix and timing of folks’
arrivals and the frictions along the way, made the South the “Other,”
and continues to do so.
Just as a tangled fishing line needs a close look, the issues of
American democracy need a focused examination. Whether as a
reflection or as a contrast, southern history illuminates U.S. history,
and even world history.111 The important issues that the United States
has confronted and still confronts are drawn in stark relief in the
American South—individual rights versus liberty, independence versus
community. Some embrace their history, celebrate it, and take it
uncritically: my history, my country, my region, right or wrong. But
many, and certainly those of us white southerners who came of age
with segregation and the civil right movement, have been tormented
by the tragedy and the horror of our region’s history, especially the
racial injustice and terror inflicted on African Americans by whites.
Neither is an adequate way to read history, and I want to suggest that
an ambiguous reading is much better than either of these alternatives.
Rather than using a loaded word like exceptionalism, historians need
to recognize commonalities and distinctions. There is much we can
learn from the lessons of southern history. How do we live in this world,
where do we draw lines, where do we find our place? I believe in data,
in evidence, but evidence alone does not tell the entire story. We
historians need to look at the people, their personal choices, their misfortunes and joys, their grief and laughter, their dreams and nightmares;
people made, and make, the South the place it is.
111
Darlene Clark Hine has written about how “the thread of race makes southern history our
American history.” Hine, “The Corporeal and Ocular Veil: Dr. Matilda A. Evans (1872–1935)
and the Complexity of Southern History,” Journal of Southern History, 70 (February 2004),
3–34 (quotation on 34). See also Laura F. Edwards, “Southern History as U.S. History,” ibid.,
75 (August 2009), 533–64.