I’ve been obsessed with the American South, as only a northerner can be, for most of my life. It charms and appalls. I suppose it began in college, when I took a two-semester course called The History of the South, taught brilliantly by a young professor named Murray Murphy. The books assigned were memorable and I’ve re-read them throughout my life: C. Van Woodward, W.J. Cash, Mary Boykin Chestnut (“Mulberry, Home Again!”), John Dollard; the heart-searing oral histories of formerly enslaved people in Lay My Burden Down. About that same time Willie Morris, son of Mississippi, began editing the Texas Observer—recently shuttered, sadly—and then Harpers Magazine, which may have been the most compelling publication I’ve ever read. Morris had a coterie of great southern writers—Marshall Frady, Larry King, Ronnie Dugger, Billy Lee Brammer, William Styron, others—and they had a distinctive passionate, at times purple, style. The South was always a purple place, not in the bipartisan political sense—but in the emotionally overwrought, dark and juicy, half-crazed, inbred passions of the land.
The South was different. It was more primal, violent, emotional and yet formal than the north. It contained nasty, full-blown bigots like Bull Connor, George Wallace and Strom Thurmond. It was the primary arena for the founding American sin of slavery; and then, in my college years, it was the place where black churches were bombed, and protesters beaten (and killed, in Mississippi), where vicious, snarling dogs—I’ll never forget the image—were loosed on children. It was also the heart of the black church, whose leaders—Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy—were to be idolized and emulated. My earliest view of black people was that they were morally superior to whites. They also had better music and a fabulous, embroidered sense of language (Amiri Baraka’s Blues People explained why that was true). Later, by the time I graduated from college, the anger of their younger generation of leaders was more eloquent and telling—and intelligent—than the eternal, witless sneer of the rednecks.
The South was the only part of the country that had ever lost a war, as Woodward wrote in The Burden of Southern History—which made it the only part of the country to fantasize and romanticize its pre-war past; it was the home of a moldy, racist American nostalgia. This made its sensibility particularly vital in the 1970s, when the rest of the country lost its first war—Vietnam—and a national nostalgia took hold. I was a staff writer for Rolling Stone magazine by then and the south was open for exploration. My first piece was a profile of George Wallace. There was one soft, steamy southern night when I drove around Lynchburg, Virginia, looking for Jerry Falwell’s mega-church, where Wallace would be speaking the next day, and I understood how impossibly sexy it all was—and wondered if the swampy yearnings of a night like this led to the race-mixing so feared by the evangelicals, to the ugliness they worked overtime to deny, to the lynchings that exorcized their guilt.
My first cover story for Rolling Stone was about Jimmy Carter’s young southern staffers, Hamilton Jordan (that’s Jerd’n to you, pal) and Jody Powell. I opened the piece with a quote from W.J. Cash about the slouchy, undisciplined and utterly lethal nature of the Confederate soldier. Hamilton came from a family of religious southern liberals; his favorite song was Dylan’s The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, about a black Maryland maid gratuitously murdered by a white aristocrat. (In his teens, Hamilton would drive up to Macon and pick up a little-known singer named Otis Redding to perform at Albany High School dances.) Carter’s southerners—liberal Southerners—were a revelation to me. To this day, they remain among my closest friends; Hamilton’s buddy, Jay Beck, is my youngest son’s godfather.
The New South, it was called. I remember it as polyester and leisure suits, and new factories—like the BMW plant on I-85 in Greenville, SC—and the hope of liberation from an ugly past. You could see blacks and whites eating lunch together in the cafes. Later, I sat next to Jesse Jackson at a speech given by Barack Obama in Mississippi. “Look at this, crowd, Reverend,” I said. “Blacks and whites sitting next to each other, talking to each other.” Jackson smiled wickedly and said, “That’s not all they’re doing with each other.” (Only he used more picturesque language.) Miscegenation—sex and danger and, all too often, brutality—was always very close to the heart of the Southern racial equation. The temptation was everywhere, on both sides of the divide. But we’re not supposed to acknowledge things like that.
Another thing we’re not supposed to acknowledge is the ethnic nature of the white south. I’ve written several times about David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, in which he traces four colonial English migrations to America. Virginia and the coastal Carolinas was settled by the aristocratic younger sons of England’s southern districts and their indentured servants—and eventually, of course, their slaves; the Appalachian interior was settled by the wild Scots-Irish borderlanders. (New England and the Mid-Atlantic were settled by prissy Puritans and prim Quakers, who were far less rowdy). The Scots-Irish were coarse, combustible and tribal; they provided the heart and soul of the American military, but also the quick-to-fury blood feuds and gun-nuttery, the casual bigotry and brutality that marked the region. The juxtaposition of Scots-Irish and African-Americans at close quarters in one swampy, humid land gave the South its distinctive tension; and those Southern tensions have since bled into the rest of the country. They are at the heart of our national chasm.
All this history was brought to mind by a pair of recent essays, this one, by Tressie McMillan Cottum and this one by Theodore Johnson. Both are riveting, if flawed. They are far too pessimistic; neither acknowledges the tremendous progress that has been made, economically and socially, over the past 60 years; neither mentions the remarkable fact that Georgia has two Democratic U.S. Senators, one of them a black minister who stands in Dr. King’s pulpit in Atlanta’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. But Cottom writes an essential truth:
I keep my eyes on the South for a lot of reasons. This is my home. It is the region of this nation’s original sin. Nothing about the future of this country can be resolved unless it is first resolved here: not the climate crisis or the border or life expectancy or anything else of national importance, unless you solve it in the South and with the people of the South.
The South is more cosmopolitan, more sophisticated now than it ever was. The future looks a lot more like Georgia than it does like Tennessee. But it remains laced with bigots and AR-15s, with cults and militias and conspiracy theorists. In Jacksonville, Florida recently I saw a super-powered pickup truck—more a lifestyle statement than a working vehicle—with a huge decal in the back window: “I’m not a Democrat. I’m an American.” I wanted to ram the guy…or, at the very least, remind him of all the young Democrats who fought and got hurt and died in Iraq and Afghanistan. That slovenly, nitwit, paleface charade of “patriotism” has a home in the South. Let’s Go Brandon, indeed.
The culture war—the war for the soul of the country—will, as Cottom writes, be decided in places like Jacksonville and in Nashville. I keep my eyes fixed on the south, too, and hope for the best.
Sharpton Awakened
Al Sharpton and I crossed paths, and disagreed vehemently, in New York at the turn of the 1990s, when he was at his most outlandish. But the Reverend Al has changed. He’s always been whip-smart, but he’s more judicious now. And this speech sends an absolutely necessary message to his community—and to white liberals who tend to excuse black crime:
“Anybody that tells you they’re progressive but don’t care about dealing with violent crimes are not,” Sharpton said at the Sheraton New York hotel in Times Square. “Progressive for who?
“We gotta stop using progressive as a noun and use it as an adjective,” he said. “You’re labeled progressive but your action is regressive. I’m woke? You must think I’m asleep.”
He said he’s on board with [New York Mayor Eric] Adams on the need for “a national agenda around urban violence, urban crime and accountability.”
As Glenn Loury says, it’s time to stop romanticizing the Black Lives Matter group, which seems to think that the only black lives that matter are those killed by police. It’s time to start addressing the Culture of Poverty—which originated in the barbarism of slavery. If Black Lives Matter, then inner-city schools matter and inner-city health care and, above all, inner-city safety. Black Lives Matter is a good slogan, but a real effort to solve these problems is going to take more than slogans. It’s going to take hard, sustained work.
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Spoken like an arrogant, know-it-all Northerner. Well done, Joe.
So it’s been 158 years since slavery was abolished in the U.S. We’ve had 58 years of affirmative action. It’s time to stop playing the victimhood game. It’s time to stop playing the race card. There’s only so long a pity party can last. Those African Americans who are successful, contributing members of society are sick of the entitlements to which some of their brethren feel they are still entitled. Hard working black businesspeople have seen their shops burned and looted, their businesses forced to close. Black and brown neighborhoods are suffering as stores are moving out of their neighborhoods while those in the name of the BLM corporation (yes, corporation) destroy their cities all in the name of some sort of retaliation or reparations. And as police departments are increasingly defunded, black children have become disproportionately the targets of murder, as black on black crime rises exponentially.
Where is the Asian outrage over the internment of 125,285 of their Japanese ancestors during World War II? Their properties and businesses were seized by the U.S. government. They were forced to work without compensation (slavery), with inadequate medical care and poor nutrition, leading to the death of 1,862 internees. After the war, many were discriminated and excluded from jobs. Where is the outcry from the Japanese American community? Where are their victim cards? Where are their reparations? And now, Asians are the target of hate crimes, up 339% in 2021. As Asian-American commentator, Michelle Malkin, pointed out, the perpetrators are mostly “of color.”
Look, we get what we put into this world. It’s time to go back to a society based on meritocracy, not race, gender or sexual preference.