The Nation: New Day A'Coming in the South

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Blacks in Hancock and across the South are creating a place for themselves, one that has been historically denied them. Although deep-seated feelings change slowly, the region's whites are learning at last to accept this new place for the blacks in their midst. It is not surprising that this process has taken so long, for though it lost the Civil War, the South succeeded at spiritual secession. In other words the South has been isolated from the national experience. Notes Historian C. Vann Woodward: "Success and victory are still national habits of mind." Or as Arthur Schlesinger puts it: "American character is bottomed upon the profound conviction that nothing in the world is beyond its power to accomplish." The Southern experience, on the other hand, is not with success, but with failure; its preoccupation is not with innocence, but with guilt. The Southern heritage is a very un-American one of poverty, frustration, humiliation and defeat. Because of this insecurity, the forgiveness, the innocence that is necessary for tolerance has eluded the Southern psychology. The meaning of Jimmy Carter, of the leaders like him and the people who elected them is that, at long last, all this is changing.

Making history—not living in its vainglories and myths—is the challenge and promise of the South today. The Southern frontier closed in that awful moment when the first man came to the South in bondage, locking the Southern experience into its tragic course. Three and one-half centuries later, the thrall can be broken, the frontier reopened. The South can grow rich while there is still time to safeguard the land from despoliation. It can acquire once more the political power of the sons who helped articulate the nation's independence. Above all, it has a chance to shed its old hatreds and show the U.S. the way to a truly integrated society.