The End of the South

By Hodding Carter III Hodding Carter III, a former Mississippi newspaper editor, runs a television production company in Washington.

"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.

The oft-cited fact that white Southerners have voted overwhelmingly for the national Republican ticket in recent years means less, and more, than is usually attributed to it. So have white Northerners. The instincts that prompt Southerners to support Republican presidential candidates are instincts that bind them in national, rather than regional, solidarity.

After the Vietnam defeat, Southerners are no longer the only Americans who understand, in Arnold Toynbee's phrase, that history is not something that happens only to other people. Wrestling unsuccessfully with guilt and defeat is no longer a Southern monopoly.

Southern cities are growing faster than others, and Southerners move more often than people raised elsewhere. The two fastest-growing groups in the South today are Hispanics and white Yankees. As first noted in the 1980 census, more blacks are moving south than are moving north. In the 1988 presidential election, nearly 50% of those who voted in the South were born elsewhere. The South is still poor, too poor. But while some of the shine has gone out of the Sunbelt, in 1988 the Rocky Mountain States replaced the South as the region with the lowest per capita income.

These are facts whose cumulative, corrosive effect on Southern distinctiveness is obvious. But there is also the mass culture's relentless assault on the sense of context, continuity and community in the South no less than elsewhere. White Southerners of my generation were raised on the glories of the Lost Cause. Our grandchildren are raised on Saturday-morning cartoons and MTV.

But there is more separating 1990s youngsters from the sense of place and history that so clearly marked their parents' childhoods. Most older white Southerners overtly or passively supported massive resistance in the '50s and '60s. What can they possibly say to their children to justify or explain, let alone glorify, the wretched record of racial murders, political demagogues, separate rest rooms and school closings? If the South once venerated a past that would not die, it now has a more recent past that must be denied -- or ignored.

Not long ago, I asked an old friend who teaches at a university in Mississippi whether he thought today's young white Southerners had the same sense of the South that we had. There was a pause, and then he offered a story he thought might help frame the answer. During a recent history class, another teacher was suddenly interrupted by a student, a white Southerner, who looked up with a puzzled frown and asked, "Tell me again, which side was Sherman on?"