Essay: The End of the South

"The time is coming, if indeed it has not already arrived, when the Southerner will begin to ask himself whether there is really any longer very much point in calling himself a Southerner." So the great Southern historian C. Vann Woodward began his seminal essay on "The Search for Southern Identity" in 1958. Woodward then and now answers his own question with a qualified, though brilliantly emphatic, yes. I can't and don't. The South as South, a living, ever regenerating mythic land of distinctive personality, is no more. At most, it is an artifact lovingly preserved in the museums of culture and the shops of tourist commerce precisely because it is so hard to find in the vital centers of the region's daily life.

This is not to be confused with yet another fatuous proclamation of yet another New South. Nor is it to ignore those regional backwaters where the old ways are almost as entrenched as the communities are irrelevant. Nevertheless, the South that was is dead, and the South some had hoped would take its place never grew out of the cradle of old dreams. What is lurching into existence in the South is purely and contemporaneously mainstream American, for better and for worse.

That was not the way it was when I was born in New Orleans 55 years ago. Then there could be no serious debate about the existence of an entity called "the South" or a state of mind called "Southern." Nor was it that way in the Mississippi to which I returned in 1959. It and the entire South could still be bound by an old set of propositions. It segregated the races by law and custom, was poor in every index except natural resources, and held fervently to a one-party politics whose ultimate, if often obscured, objective was the perpetuation of a class and caste system distinctly different from the . national ideal.

It was the most rural of all the regions of the U.S., its people the least likely to move far from home if white and most likely to migrate northward if black. It was the one region, as Woodward so tellingly noted, whose people knew what it meant to lose a war and understood there was nothing inevitable about progress. It was, finally, the least changed demographically of all the nation's geographic subdivisions. Black and white Southerners alike had been relatively unchanged by new waves of migration, voluntary or involuntary, for more than 100 years. Regional population growth was minimal.

Over the past three decades, all that has changed.

In the South of the late 20th century, segregation by law has been destroyed, and segregation in fact is no more peculiar to Jackson, Miss., than it is to Jackson, Mich. On the other side of the coin, there is more school integration in the South than in any other section. Racism remains, but the nation now understands that race is the American dilemma.

One-party politics is deader than all-white politics. More black politicians hold office in the South than anywhere else. More white votes, as a percent of the total, were cast for Governor Douglas Wilder of Virginia and Congressmen Mike Espy of Mississippi and John Lewis of Atlanta than were cast for Mayors David Dinkins of New York City and Wilson Goode of Philadelphia. Democrats and Republicans contend in a game whose outcome is increasingly uncertain but whose winners' political allegiance is national rather than regional.