The New South Rises Again

...Tompkins was not the first to have such fevered dreams...

...He preached from the same pulpit where King had once proclaimed, "If you just keep on loving a man, ultimately you will get down to the God that's in him Ultimately, the most prejudiced mind in Montgomery, the most prejudiced mind in America, will become a loving mind...

...The first is economic, the second moral...

...Continued spread of the habit threatens the Negro population, and the white South in its relation to the Negro population, with a menace unmistakably grave...

...And twenty-five years from now, men will look back and laugh...

...Case, an Alabama populist, infuriated his colleagues at a constitutional convention in 1901 by proposing with a wry sense of irony that the first article in a law of disfranchisement read as follows: "That all men are created free and independent...

...Perhaps those times are past us forever, but I am not so sure...

...He received a standing ovation when he said, "The American scene is not like an unfrayed blanket, one piece of unbroken cloth, one texture and one color...

...The few spectators who witnessed the spectacle were visibly affected by the gruesomeness...

...With Mississippi leading the way, through its constitutional convention of 1890, the South began a systematic disfranchisement of its black citizens...

...Jesse Helms, for example, the Republican Senator from North Carolina, was trailing badly in his race for reelection—until he launched a red-baiting attack on the memory of Martin Luther King...

...The New South is now the Sunbelt, hightech and modern, with the promise of even greater prosperity to come...

...Crime rates soared, sometimes four or five times as high as those in Northern states, and it became an article of faith in the racism of the day that blacks—depicted as drug-crazed and menacingly subhuman—were responsible for the problem...

...For what is the difference between those Klansmen and a U.S...

...Today's New South shares with its predecessor of seventy-five years ago a preoccupation with economic progress...

...President who presides illegally and personally over the mining of harbors and the killing of peasants in a small communist nation...

...The weapons variedpoll taxes, grandfather clauses, and all-white primaries— but the result was the same: The black power and progress that followed the Civil War were swept aside by a repression so cruel and total that many Southern blacks found it worse than slavery...

...The darkest forces in the Southern experience seemed to be released in that period...

...When Wallace finished his own sermon, speaking in moving terms about the redemptive power of suffering, the organ played "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and the congregation wept and reached out for him as the now crippled governor was wheeled from the church...

...Later, with money raised from conservatives across the country, Helms bought television spots aimed at his opponent, North Carolina's moderate governor, Jim Hunt, the upright son of a New Deal farmer, heir to a stubborn strain of progressivism...

...But Helms saw in the Senate debate an opportunity to smear the civil rights leader, telling the nation that "King harbored a strong sympathy for the Communist Party and its goals...

...A stark and fateful choice can be seen in the Helms-Hunt election: an indication of whether the newest New South will be defined by the decency bought with blood over the last thirty years, or by the residues of the South's violent history...

...That execution in 1909 bore a grisly similarity to one in Alabama a year or so ago, when 7,500 volts of electricity, delivered in three separate jolts, seared the flesh of another black convict...

...The Negro who takes cocaine beomes temporarily crazed and there is no crime which he will not commit...

...But today's New South is only the latest in a line, and other symbols are more disturbing...

...asked Helms in one commercial...

...I opposed the Martin Luther King holiday...

...There were, of course, a few scattered voices of opposition in the South...

...Frye Gaillard, an editorial writer and columnist for The Charlotte Observer, is a frequent contributor to The Progressive...

...It has virtually accepted the ideas of the South...

...The second attempt proved unsuccessful in breaking the condemned man's neck, death resulting in fifteen minutes from strangulation...

...It was scant comfort to Southern blacks that the region's racism and bitter notions of white supremacy were merely a caricature of national policy, no different in kind from the assumption of a "white man's burden" in American foreign policy from Cuba to the Philippines...

...Avera had sprung the trap and the body had dropped six feet...

...They have been hard won, and there is impressive evidence—statistical as well as anecdotal—of moral progress in recent generations...

...For years before the turn of the century, the most prominent Southern editors—chief among them Henry Grady of The Atlanta Constitutionhad been preaching the gospel of industrialized growth...

...Tompkins, a South Carolinian by birth, who moved to N e w York to get an education and came back home with a vision in his head: His idea, he explained to all who would listen, was of a "New South"—a land in transition from agrarian poverty to industrial prosperity, a modern, vibrant place that would preserve the best of old values in a wholly new age of economic progress...

...Yet every piece of thread fits somewhere...

...For blacks who strayed beyond white bounds, the penalties were brutal...

...in many Southern cities...

...But it's as pressing today as it ever was: 'What are we going to do about the issue of race?' " Seventy-five years ago, Southerners thought they knew...

...Lamar of Mississippi, Wade Hampton of South Carolina—who spoke out against the New South's repression...

...We have tried various schemes to make it go away...

...The issue last October was a national holiday in King's honor...

...But the South, like most places, learns slowly from its mistakes, and if you spend a little time in a newspaper morgue poring over the microfilmed record of the South in transition, you find two essential themes weaving through the region's pursuit of tomorrow...

...It was a time not altogether different from today, when the forces of reaction held positions of power, and when the violent excesses of the South were a crude metaphor for the thrust of national policy...

...As The Charlotte Observer put it in 1909: "Within recent years the cocaine habit among Negroes has grown to be a great evil...

...And while hopeful signs appear on that front, there is also another wave of racism...

...Helms and a few others are riding the crest—buoyed, I think, by the genial heartlessness of the national Administration...

...There is a power and a truth in symbols such as those...

...The defeated white South, humiliated by the war and even more so by the radical changes and vast corruptions of Reconstruction, had reasserted itself with a vengeance...

...It's a question we don't like to think about," says Will Campbell, the Mississippi author and civil rights advocate who has served as a kind of unofficial Southern conscience for the last thirty years...

...The reelection of Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms would, at least in some parts of the region, give momentum to the darker side of the Southern mentality...

...We're more of a quilt with many pieces and patches and many colors...

...The echoes of their sermons still reverberate, of course...

...Last January, a Presidential candidate from South Carolina, a black man, Jesse Jackson, spoke to the legislature in his home state...

...W.E.B...

...The Republican Party," wrote John W. Burgess, a turn-of-the-century professor at Columbia University, "in its work of imposing the sovereignty of the United States upon eight millions of Asiatics, has changed its view in regard to the political relations of races...

...that they are endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights...

...And at the heart of the latter is a terrible question that has haunted the South since it was born...

...DuBois, for example, pointed out that slaves and their masters sometimes "lived in the same home, shared in the family life, often attended the same church, and talked and conversed with each other...

...And there were at least a few aristocrats of conscience— L.Q.C...

...Policemen dread him as they dread nothing else, for he has both a maniac's strength and a maniac's fury...

...And last April's acquittal of the North Carolina Klansmen and Nazis who had gunned down a group of communists on the streets of Greensboro was the latest Southern caricature of national mood and policy...

...Where do you stand, Jim...

...I don't mean to minimize the improvements of the last seventy-five years...

...But now, he said, under the new caste system the South had built, there was "little or no intellectual commerce" between whites and blacks...

...In Alabama not too long before, George Wallace— once the preeminent symbol of self-destructive defiance—appeared at the former church of Martin Luther King Jr...

...BY FRYE GAILLARD Seventy-five years ago...

...But for the most part, their voices were lost in the onslaught of Jim Crow, the demeaning new laws backed by race riots and lynchings that took an average of 100 black lives a year in the first decade of the century...

...Two days after its cocaine editorial, The Observer gave this account of a piece of Southern justice: "Marshall Lewis, colored, was led back upon the crudely constructed gallows, blood flowing from his mouth and begging for water, after Sheriff L.C...

...The publisher of The Charlotte Observer, the paper where I now make a living, was a prominent Southerner named D.A...

...The Administration in Washington reigns indifferent to black progress, and, simultaneously, violence and the fear of violence are once again rampant...