THAT NEW SOUTH

...Lerone Bennett, who combines the skills of journalist and historian as well as any American writer, goes to the heart of the newest New South conflict by pointing out in Ebony that "racism is the cornerstone of the Southern mystique," and "the harsh and unyielding truth [is] that the South cannot be changed at all if it is not changed totally...

...They are saying that race is irrelevant, that it is a dead issue, that it is time to quit our preoccupation with it and get on to more important matters...

...They say segregation is dead, the ideology of white racism is eroding, and pragmatism is dictating a rapprochement between whites and blacks...

...With every possible allowance for oversimplification, that still makes a sobering comparison, and it does not end there...

...When the controversy over busing was at its zenith last August, Askew told an audience in Gainesville: "You have the ability and the opportunity to seek the broad community desegregation and cooperation which will ultimately make busing unnecessary...

...Henry Grady, the foremost spokesman for the New South 100 years ago from his post as editor of the Atlanta Constitution, based his pitch on economics—new industry, tax exemptions, cheap labor...

...Even Mississippi has elected a self-styled racial moderate—William Waller...

...The South, rapidly losing the old defiance but with little in the way of new ideas, seems content to simply rejoin the Union, to fall in at the rear of the ranks, to blend in with the masses...

...However tempting it may be to draw the region in starkly simple blacks and whites, it just won't do...

...There is little doubt that the region is losing its separate identity...

...And not only is there a new political and social era dawning: The vital economic underpinning is also there, visible in almost every index of growth...

...The options Lerone Bennett cites—integration or disaster—may be for later on...

...Not altogether coincidentally, it was along about then that the Southern states also invented segregation...

...The emotional reaction to busing sounds the same in Pontiac and San Francisco as it does in the urban South...

...If there is another answer, I have yet to hear it...

...Freedom and opportunity and prosperity would solve everything, Grady said— never mind the inherent contradiction in all that, it would take care of itself...

...A year earlier, when he moved into the Virginia governor's mansion in Richmond, Holton displayed the same commitment as his Florida colleague: He simply enrolled his children in the public schools...

...In the primary election that launched Jimmy Carter on his successful drive for the governorship of Georgia, a self-proclaimed white racist, J. B. Stoner of the National States Rights Party, ran on a platform advocating one-way bus tickets for blacks to New York, "where everybody loves 'em and where the Jews and the niggers are already in political control...

...Throughout most of its history, the white South has had the appearance of a colony—at one stage it fought a war to become another country, and lost—and the black South has been its sub-colony...

...Kilpatrick, in a series of syndicated columns, concludes—as his forerunner Grady did in the last century—that "the visible evidence of a 'New South' is overwhelming...

...Lester Maddox is still Georgia's lieutenant governor, true, and George Wallace is back on the throne in Alabama, but even Wallace seems to be giving up his public image of unrelenting white supremacy...

...Now the jets go from anywhere to everywhere, taking Southerners out into the World, bringing in "outsiders" with their briefcases and account books to mingle with Southerners...

...There is still the rural South, where better than fifteen million people live...

...His book of profiles on the South, "A Mind to Stay Here," was published in 1970 by Macmillan...

...Confidence rises, and suspicion declines...

...In the middle of the Twentieth Century, we were forced to see that invention for what it was— another intolerable condition—and the civil rights movement, like the Civil War, compelled us to give it up...

...Nobody wins by "outniggering" the opposition anymore...

...The South I know just isn't equipped for existential voyages...

...But it is not the vision that lies there in the kudzu, glowing like fox fire...

...We want back in...

...Without going so far as to compare Richard M. Nixon with Rutherford B. Hayes or the Southern Strategy of 1968 with the Compromise of 1877—arresting comparisons in themselves—it is enough to ponder what Henry Grady and Harvie Blair had in common with, say, James J. Kilpatrick and Joseph B. Cumming...

...We must demonstrate good faith in doing just that...

...Regional differences, the peaks and valleys of a people once as diverse as the land itself, have been eroded, often blurred almost beyond recognition...

...Atlanta's airport used to be the hub of it all for the South, so much so that a traveler once quipped, "When Jesus Christ comes again, he'll have to change planes in Atlanta...

...or of Fayette, Mississippi, where Charles Evers is mayor, but much less is heard about Wilcox County, Alabama, or Fayette County, Tennessee, or St...

...Before either of those options becomes a reality, we are going to be seeing and hearing more about the showcase version of the New South—the modern, urban, industrial, post-segregationist, acquisitive, on-the-make South...

...We're through fighting the Civil War...

...With its virtues fading and its vices nationalized, the South is coming back to the mother country, coming back, as Joseph Cumming put it, with "a rush to normalcy in the spirit of pretending nothing has happened...

...His vision promised political and economic equality for Negroes, but not social equality...

...Television, the ubiquitous leveler, is subtly homogenizing almost everything from attitudes to accents...

...A few advocates of the New South, particularly two writers, Lewis Harvie Blair and Walter Hines Page, insisted that the whole movement was doomed to failure unless it guaranteed total equality for Negroes, but they were ignored...

...The Federal Government, the corporate giants, the professional sports teams—all of them are visible all over the South now...

...They ride the bus to a majority-black school downtown...

...Figures from the U.S...

...they are not pressing urgently on many people right now...

...A lot of people at both ends of the political and ideological spectrum, are going to be disappointed with this contradictory New South...

...He got three per cent of the vote...

...Only in this way will we put the divisive and self-defeating issue of race behind us once and for all...

...If the South's racial views have softened a bit, it may also be true that the North's have hardened, and their coming together amounts to nothing more than the nationalization of racism...

...It is a tantalizing and provocative theme, this New South creed...

...In contrast, Georgia's Governor Carter and Tennessee's Governor Winfield Dunn have bowed to political pressure and joined in the clamor for popular resistance to court decrees on busing...

...The South, as they see it, "is increasingly becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the United States...

...That is the New South in all its Sunday finery...

...But Cumming, a white Southerner who heads Newsweek's Atlanta bureau, had a different view of things in an article he wrote for Esquire: "The materialism of the New South has arrived...

...The United States is on a sameness trip, and the South is going along...

...Legalized segregation and overt racism may be over, but what remains is a style and pace and form of white advantage—a more sophisticated racism—that differs little from South to North to West...

...Even the problems seem more and more alike: School segregation in Atlanta is much the same as it is in Chicago or Boston...

...A lot of it is true the way they tell it...

...Askew and Holton, on the other hand, belong with a smaller group of Southerners whose vision of the New South is different...

...Politicians with fresh outlooks begin to surface, and the political system begins to function...

...Almost no one any longer denies or defends what it once was, and almost everyone acknowledges that it is not the same any more...

...One hundred and one Southern counties are majority-black, some thirty communities have black mayors, and there are forty blacks in the state legislatures...

...On balance, the picture is incomplete and inconclusive...

...On the economic front, the accelerating shift from agriculture to industry, from ruralism to urbanism, from an unskilled labor force to a skilled one, is in evidence everywhere...

...As there is a New South, so there is a new Kilpatrick...

...The contrast between Nashville's slums and its posh Belle Meade section is as great as that between Detroit's ghettos and its Grosse Pointe, and organized crime in New Orleans or Miami is basically the same as it is in New York or Philadelphia...

...Louis a generation ago...

...In Mississippi, thirty-seven per cent of the population is black, and Texas, which has the lowest proportion of blacks (thirteen per cent), also has the highest number (1.4 million...

...And in South Carolina, Governor John West's performance prompted a civil rights activist in Columbia to say the Federal Government "can deal with overt or stereotyped racists like [George] Wallace or [John Bell] Williams, but it is baffled as to how to deal with 'New South' governors like West...

...Yet the law demands, and rightly so, that we put an end to segregation in our society...

...They are saying to the nation, "The race game is over...

...A less sanguine—but perhaps more realistic—view of the New South amounts to little more than the death of the South as a distinct region...

...But what that New South is to be is not yet clear...

...And in the cities, where the marches and the mass jailings and perhaps even the riots are all over, the Northern patterns of urban decay and white flight have set in...

...Social scientists John McKinney and Linda Bourque, writing in the American Sociological Review, reach the same conclusion less subjectively, with the aid of data on urbanization, industrialization, education, and per capita income...

...But there is another side...

...The cities also are beginning to show patterns of urban decay and white flight to the suburbs that had their precursors in Detroit and Cleveland and St...

...Wallace, still the hero of anti-busing advocates nationwide, bragged in the same statement that "every child in this state can get on a bus in the morning in front of his home and ride to a trade school or college during the day and then ride back home in the afternoon...

...Francis County, Arkansas, where black majorities are virtually powerless...

...They are the Henry Gra-dys of the 1970s—men who want to talk about bringing the South back into the Union but not about bringing the Union, or their region, to a fundamental confrontation of its crisis of race and class...

...It was never as monolithic as its stereotype pictured it, and it still isn't...

...I sincerely hope that you will do that as well...

...With the exception of Reubin Askew in Florida and Linwood Holton in Virginia, the New South governors have been a keen disappointment...

...For the present, the South is too busy making it...

...Even the ones who never learned to pronounce the word "Negro" are in luck, now that "black" is considered proper...

...The South is still the poorest region, and its average gross personal income figure of $3,195 is barely more than eighty per cent of the national average, but the trend is up, and that in part is what prompts the new governors and other spokesmen to hail an economic rebirth...

...And the reason is simple enough: black political strength...

...This is fine...

...At several points along the way—most notably in the post-Reconstruction period almost 100 years ago— movements have been generated around the theme of a New South, a regional uplifting that would erase its inferiority and allow it to share fully in the largesse of the nation...

...It is time, past time, for a New South...

...The governors can be heard on television, extolling the region's assets: good climate, clean environment, rich natural resources, large labor force, friendly people...

...One hears of Greene County, Alabama, and Hancock County, Georgia, where black majorities have gained political control...

...All of that is likewise a part of the New South...

...John Egerton, a free lance writer based in Nashville, has written numerous articles on race, education, and the South...

...Before the rejoicing for the newest New South begins, we would do well to wait and see a few more developments...

...Revivalists of the creed say the South, at last, is rejoining the Union...

...In the contemporary re-enactment of the New South scenario, a haunting sense of deja vu prevails...

...The educational level rises, and people accustomed to being left out find themselves near the center of things...

...Most of the enthusiasm for the latest awakening centers around new white leadership, black political power, and economic growth...

...And there is the continuing problem of the schools: ersatz desegregation that perpetuates white privilege, flourishing segregation academies, and, in the cities, the furor over busing...

...In the eleven former Confederate states there are, in round figures, fifty million people, and ten million of them are black...

...Department of Commerce indicate that the South showed a greater rise in personal income in the past decade than any other region of the country, and twenty percentage points greater than the nation as a whole...

...It is desegregating, Bennett says, but not integrating, and in the process it is making clear how few men, North or South, are "willing to confront the exigencies of real integration...

...Atlanta and Houston could elect black Congressmen next fall, and other Southern cities may follow suit before long...

...It looks like a land somewhere between Utopia and the Old Plantation, like Akron and New Haven and Omaha and Pittsburgh and Spearfish, South Dakota, and a thousand other places...

...The white South is coming to terms with its black population, and simultaneously it is ending its long estrangement from the rest of America...

...And again in parallel with the past, we have had a second Reconstruction, and again we now have our prophets of a New South...

...The same sort of New South conflict thus has surfaced again, as it did 100 years ago...

...Other tools of mass culture, including movies and music, have a similar effect...

...The changes stimulate and reinforce one another: Racism diminishes, industry moves in, and the cross-migration of people accelerates...

...And white politicians, responding to that reality, have quickly become accustomed to campaigning for and among "all the people...

...the answer everywhere seems to be: "More than we're willing to pay...

...ten years ago he was writing "The Southern Case for School Segregation...

...Nobody really wants it—not you, not me, not the people, not the school boards, not even the courts...

...The South now has a large middle class—something it has not always had—and it has a growing labor movement, and it all dovetails neatly with the new racial and political realities...

...In the Mississippi delta, in the black belt of Alabama and Georgia and South Carolina, in west Tennessee and eastern North Carolina, in countless sharecropper shanties and migrant labor camps and backwoods towns, voiceless poverty and relentless white supremacy are still the norm...

...It lacks the Pilgrim soul...

...In the middle of the Nineteenth Century, an intolerable condition—slavery—led to the Civil War, and it was followed by Reconstruction...

...Reapportionment, a mini-revolution all its own, has been like a political thyroid pill for the black voter, and for the urban voter as well, and that has hastened the collapse of rural domination...

...And the South has changed, is changing, in some remarkable and encouraging ways...

...While the South—with Northern complicity—was undoing Reconstruction, the first of the New South heralds came forward, prophesying a glorious future for the South...

...They seem to be saying that race and class division remains the basic unresolved domestic issue facing the South and the nation, and that none of the other advances is really possible until we face that fact...

...Its separateness has been both self-imposed and forced upon it from without, and it has cut across virtually every manifestation of individual and collective character—political, economic, religious, social, and most of all racial...

...It is time, past time, for a New South...

...Now the New South creed is in full flower once again...

...Even in the smaller cities and towns, differences in dress and hair style are merely a matter of degrees and inches...

...Times columnist Tom Wicker, after a trip back to his native South, wrote that it "seems every year more nearly an interchangeable part of the vast, grim sameness of a nation that has discovered in mobility that no one need ever leave home because everything and every place can be made to look, taste, feel, and sound like every other thing and place...

...A bit of historical perspective is helpful to an understanding of all this...

...I would like to believe this version of the vision but I cannot...

...Almost no one any longer denies or defends what it once was, and almost everyone acknowledges that it is not the same any more...

...Gone are the days of rampant, unbridled white supremacy up and down the land, but the dream of a national renaissance of civility being generated in the South is still just that: a dream...

...The white leadership is personified by a lineup of young governors, Democrats and Republicans, which has taken over from the old-line segs...

...And only in this way can we re-direct our energies to our real quest—that of providing an equal opportunity for quality education to all of our children...

...For busing, certainly, is an artificial and inadequate instrument of change...

...To the question, "How much would it cost to rid this country of the lingering affliction of segregation and inequality...

...The continuation of racism in the classic, brutal sense—the sort of thing that has been happening recently in such out-of-the-way places as Butler, Alabama, and Ayden, North Carolina, and Sandersville, Georgia—will be largely unreported, invisible to all but its victims...

...There are only two options available to the South: integration such as this country has never known, or a retreat into tokenism and disaster...

...Things have changed there, too, for some of them, but for far too many the South of a generation ago still lives...

...Almost everywhere, there is a youth culture, a search for new life styles, a drug scene...

...Thanks largely to the Voter Education Project and other programs promoting minority political participation, there are now close to 3.5 million registered black voters in the eleven states...

...The Old South certainly needs renovating—it has been characterized by rampant white racism, class privilege, and pervasive poverty far too long, and its position as the retarded and underdeveloped back forty of the world's richest nation has left it with a scarred psyche...

...Orval Faubus is gone, and Ross Barnett, and Jimmy Davis, and Marvin Griffin, and in their places are Dale Bumpers in Arkansas, Jimmy Carter in Georgia, Reubin Askew in Florida, John West in South Carolina, Linwood Holton in Virginia...

...A recent New York Times report on the visual clutter of commercial strips along our highways concluded: "The sameness that has crept up on the country has rolled endlessly off the assembly lines of Detroit, bound the nation in concrete cords of interstate highways, marked the landscape from Long Island to San Francisco Bay with row on row of ranch houses and split levels...

...We need the money...

...The Northern press praised the movement, including its new tactic, "separate but equal," and the praise, seen in context, no longer seems strange: It was, after all, the North's system, too...

...In a statement he wrote at the request of Ebony magazine, the man who once vowed that he would never be "outniggered" again asserted that "the people in the South could be cited as an example to the rest of our country, because there is a lot of genuine good feeling between blacks and whites down here...

...Where towns once grew up at railroad crossings and along the rivers, they now spring to life in flashing neon color beside the highway cloverleaves and the airports...

...Such incidents may be largely confined to the rural areas, and their number and intensity may decline further, but they will still happen...

...Its prophets now, like their counterparts a century ago, are a mixed bag...

...The Census Bureau reports that one of every two black families in the rural South is below the poverty level in annual earnings...