NORTH CAROLINA: The South's New Leader

North Carolina, observed Historian Arnold Toynbee in 1939, enjoys a "springlike burgeoning of life" because, unlike other Deep South states, it is not "a country living under a spell." The most important new fact about the U.S. South in the spring of 1959: burgeoning North Carolina, too busy in pursuit of 20th century economic development to be inhibited by diehard last stands against school integration, has quietly taken over the mantle of Southern leadership that Virginia wore so long, so proudly.

Springlike Tarheel vigor was at work last week from Kitty Hawk to Cherokee, from missile plant to church pulpit, reshaping a landscape once principally adorned by loblolly pine, flue-cured tobacco and two-room farm shacks. Near Laurinburg, Presbyterians broke ground for a new college, a few weeks behind the Methodist groundbreaking for a college at Rocky Mount and three years behind the brand-new $19 million campus of Baptist-affiliated Wake Forest College in Winston-Salem. All were additions to Dixie's best college complex, fed by Dixie's best public school system. In the center of the Piedmont, engineers mapped sites for nuclear, chemical and industrial research labs in a new, 4,000-acre "Research Triangle." East of Charlotte's booming suburbs, Alcoa let $40 million worth of contracts to expand its aluminum plant. Over the South's best highway net, semitrailers snorted day and night to serve a state economy so vigorous that it kept right on growing through the late recession.

Up from Segregation. In the solid granite Capitol in Raleigh, white-haired Governor Luther Hartwell Hodges, 61, businessman turned politician, totted up some headline statistics that proved the vigor behind his fondest dream: from January to March, industry built some $25,000,000 worth of new plants in North Carolina to add 5,600 new jobs (up 40% over 1958) paying $16 million a year (up 46%) to the state's payrolls. Showing its heels to its industry-hungry neighbors, North Carolina would almost certainly better its 1958 total of $253,000,000 in new-plant investment, tops for the South.*

Behind the thriving economy lay an even greater achievement: a state of mind and spirit that recognized long ago that good schools, expanding culture and economic development were too vital to be stopped short by a fight over integration. Like all Southern states, North Carolina met its toughest test after the Supreme Court's 1954 decision. But guided by able leadership, it did not panic. Instead it plotted minimum but legal compliance, went on to more important business—and in so doing soon put the crisis in reasonable perspective. Part of the credit was due to Governor Hodges and his sharp eye for business; part of it was due to the special heritage of the state that produced both Hodges and the kind of climate that he could operate in.