Impact of the LQC Lamar Society - NSSP - Printable Version

Winter: Impact of the LQC Lamar Society

A speech by former Mississippi Gov. William F. Winter
The American South Symposium, University, MS
Nov. 18, 2004

It is entirely fitting that this symposium should be convened here in Oxford this week, for this is the home and last resting place of L.Q.C. Lamar. In an article in the New South magazine in the summer of 1970, Tom Naylor, native Mississippian and then of Duke University, tells how he, Jim Leutze, Mike Cody, Hodding Carter, Willie Morris, Brandy Ayers, and a few others conceived the idea of an organization of young Southerners who would provide a more reasonable and responsible voice than that coming from most Southern politicians.

Naylor relates how former Congressman and historian Frank Smith of Greenwood, Mississippi, who had been one of the South's most courageous but least appreciated public officials of the 1950's and 60's, suggested that the new organization be named for Lamar, who had helped to reconcile the races and unify the nation following the Civil War.

I shall not trespass further on the program scheduled for tomorrow on the history of the Lamar Society, but I want to emphasize how this coming together today is the realization of a long-delayed plan for the reunion of these now not so young architects of an earlier new South. The lifting of their voices thirty-five years ago helped create a whole different way of thinking about the South - by Southerners and by the rest of the country. It is the kind of forward-looking, progressive, visionary thinking that again is badly needed today.

Perhaps, the most direct initial impact of the Lamar Society came about in the spring of 1971 when at a symposium of the Society in Atlanta chaired by Brandy Ayers, former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford, then the president of Duke University, laid down a monumental challenge.

The year before in 1970 a remarkable group of so-called "New South" governors had been elected across the South. Running on platforms promoting racial equity, educational quality and economic development, they brought a new tone to the political arena which had been dominated for so long by the one issue of race. Their names would soon be known across the nation -- names like Jimmy Carter of Georgia, Reubin Askew of Florida, Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, John West of South Carolina, and Linwood Holton of Virginia.

It was into this atmosphere that Governor Sanford brought his message. There was a heady, up-beat feeling across the region that the South was about to come into its own. Indeed, the decade of the seventies was to bring to the fore the concept of the South as the Sunbelt, where the rest of America would finally discover its cultural richness and where unparalleled opportunity awaited those who invested their talent and their money in this long neglected part of the country.

Sanford referred to all of the reasons why the South was on its way to unprecedented growth and progress - untapped natural and human resources, a benign climate, an exemplary work ethic, a developing infrastructure of modern transportation and communication facilities, unlimited sources of energy and now, what was so vital, a people not preoccupied with maintaining the old Southern status quo based on race and class.

Perhaps the most prescient of his comments, though, was his sobering admonition that the South in its pursuit of economic development not forfeit its birthright - not sacrifice the qualities that made the region so distinctive and so attractive as a place to live. Sanford pointed to other regions of the country - New England and the Middle Atlantic Seaboard, the industrial Mid-West, the teeming cities of Southern California - as places where unplanned growth had diminished the quality of life for the people who lived there.

He foresaw that the same unhappy result would be the fate of many areas of the South, particularly its burgeoning cities, if strong and effective policies were not put into effect to mitigate that process.

"The major challenge we are faced with," he told his Atlanta audience, "is to avoid making Northern mistakes in a Southern setting."

Without wise, courageous and visionary political leadership Sanford thought that by the end of the century the region would be in danger of becoming just like every other part of the country - the victim of urban sprawl, deteriorating inner cities and public school systems neglected and in disarray.

He thought there was a way to avoid some of that, and so he proposed the creation of an official interstate Southern Growth Policies Board to provide ideas and help states and cities develop programs to manage the growth that was surely coming to the Sunbelt.

Now thanks to this effort which has been directed over the intervening years by some truly dedicated and creative Southern leaders, the South has managed to come through this unprecedented period of change in much better shape than it might have otherwise. But many of the same problems persist in a South that has changed much in thirty years.

Now it is time to talk about what we are called on to do in this latter day South. Now it is time for us to have an accounting of just where we are.

I would first cite some of the obvious transforming forces that have marked the progress of the region in the last three decades. They are first of all the impressive advances which have been made in race relations since the tumultuous 1960's when the South was freed from the burden of defending the indefensible system of racial segregation. For that we Southerners and especially we white Southerners owe a huge debt to valiant civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and John Lewis and Medgar Evers and so many others.

When I was Governor of Mississippi in 1983 we had a dinner at the Governor's Mansion in Jackson in honor of Mrs. Myrlie Evers, the widow of Medgar Evers. I said to her on that occasion, "Mrs. Evers, we white folks owe your martyred husband as much as black folks do, for he helped free us, too."

All of us were prisoners of a system that enslaved us all and that dictated how we lived our lives. It caused us all to live in fear and mistrust and ignorance of each other.

The tragedy is that freeing ourselves of that bondage took so long and caused so much needless and useless suffering and violence. William Faulkner spoke of this at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in Memphis in November, 1955. He and Dr. Benjamin Mays, then the distinguished president of Morehouse College, addressed an integrated audience at the Peabody Hotel, that in itself being a major breakthrough. The fever of massive resistance was rising in the South, and both of these celebrated figurers spoke eloquently on the evil of segregation:

Faulkner concluded with these words:

We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last
these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept
what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, "Why
didn't someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time."

In the light of that haunting question, let us hope that the next generation of Southerners will not have to ask the same thing about us as we confront the new challenge of an increasingly multiracial society. Let us be reminded, therefore, that there is still much for us to do to complete the task of racial reconciliation. I shall come back to that in a few minutes.

The second great transforming development in the South in this period has been our coming together around the recognition that if the region is going to do well in the future it will be based on a total commitment to establishing a world class system of education that sees to it that nobody gets left out. No other area of the country, beginning in the 1980's, has done more to make that commitment as much a reality as our resources would permit.

We do now have truly world class universities across the South, some of the world's most advanced scientific and medical research is now being carried out here, and scholars have found here a new appreciation of intellectual attainment that did not exist earlier.

Tremendous strides have been made in every state in raising the level of performance of the public schools, and the South has been in the forefront of the national efforts to provide the best possible education for every child. But in spite of that record we find huge gaps to be made up. Much more effort and investment of resources are going to be required of us to close those gaps.

The third great transforming development in the South has been the change on both ends of the economic spectrum. On the one hand in the three decades from 1970 to 2000 the South outpaced the nation in job and population growth, and in that same period the region's per capita income rose from 83 per cent of the national level to 90 per cent.

During this time there was an unprecedented movement to and formation in the region of some of the world's largest industrial and financial enterprises and research centers. Three of the ten largest banks in America are now headquartered here in the South. Internationally acclaimed scientific research laboratories now abound across the region and form the basis for unbelievable discoveries in every area of human knowledge. The information age finds the South able to compete in the global market place of ideas and innovation. That is the good news.

The bad news is that in the last 20 years we have seen a steady dismantling of much of the manufacturing structure, as textile, clothing, metal fabricating and furniture plants have moved to Latin America or Asia. In the last six years alone the South has lost more than 600,000 manufacturing jobs. Most of the replacement jobs have been in the service areas, many of them paying little more than minimum wage. In the meantime the income gap between the affluent and the poor continues to widen.

All of this simply means that while we affirm that the South has been able to put behind it most of the old negative provincial attitudes that limited its progress for so long, we have a continuing challenge to sustain the progress that we have made. Now we must look at what we are obligated to do to fulfill Terry Sanford's promise and to heed his warning.



The recently released State of the South Report 2004. prepared by a remarkable team of thinkers at MDC in Chapel Hill, poses the challenge this way:



In 2004 two interrelated questions confront our regions' leaders:

• Can the South muster the will to develop public schools aligned with the demands of a fast-changing economy? Can the region develop schools that meet the needs of a multi-ethnic, democratic society?
  
   
• How we answer those two daunting questions will determine how bright the future of the South will be. Will it be marked by sunshine or shadow?

It is not an overstatement to say that the task which confronts us now is a more complex and difficult one than we have ever known - more difficult than those of 35 years ago. Here is why it is going to be so hard. In the first place the region still has the country's highest poverty rate. Nearly one out of five children in the South lives below the poverty level, including 2 million black children, 1.1 million Latino children and 1.5 million white children. These children are automatically at risk. They tend to drop out of school, become involved in the juvenile justice system, and become teen-age parents. These factors doom most of them to permanent economic dependency. There are more of these disconnected youth in the South than in the Northeast and West put together.

These discouraging realities face us at the same time that the racial demographics of the South are drastically changing and the public schools are becoming more resegregated. The number of children in the South grew in the decade of the nineties by 3.3 million. One-half of that increase was among Latino children. The South's huge demographic shift means that we are confronted with the necessity of making the schools and workplace arenas where people of different races come together around a commitment to respect and honor their different backgrounds.

This cannot be done, however, if we insist on going backwards in terms of creating truly integrated schools. By the end of the 1980's Southern schools were the most integrated in the country. In 1988 more than four out of ten black students attended majority white schools. Now it is only three out of ten, and continuing to decrease. If that trend continues, we shall miss a critical opportunity to establish the basis for a genuinely united society. The State of the South Report points out where we are:

Today, Southerners must recognize the consequences of economic isolation and a divided society as a threat to their self-interest. Despite the regional progress over the last quarter of a century, its communities will suffer anew if they allow children to grow up and go to school isolated by race and income.

This brings me to what I believe still remains the greatest challenge that we face. I must tell you that the problem of race, despite all the progress that we have made, remains the thorniest, trickiest and most difficult barrier that we confront to achieve a truly successful and united region.

One of the reasons that it is so hard is that most white folks and most black folks do not share the same perspective. Most white folks think that we have come a lot further in race relations than most black people do. There is still too much misunderstanding between the races, too much white flight, too little trust, too many subtle nuances that signal the continuing gap. Closing that gap remains our most important unfinished business, and it is, of course, not just a Southern problem.

I would like to believe that we who live in the South have a special insight into how this can be accomplished. Having been the region whose history has been most shaped by the factors of race over three centuries, we may be best equipped to apply the hard-earned lessons of the past to resolving the problems of today. Not one of us, black or white, who has lived in the South in the last half-century is untouched by the memories if not the actual experiences arising out of the trauma of racial segregation and the struggles over its demise.

The challenge now is for Southerners of both races to work to come together with the same commitment and intensity that a generation ago so many white Southerners sought to maintain segregation and so many black Southerners sought to end it. The new realities require us to understand our mutual interdependence. Member of both races must reach out to each other in ways which transcend race.

All of this is a matter of trying to be honest with ourselves and each other. It is a matter of developing a sense of trust based on everyone - black and white - trying to start from the same place. That is admittedly harder for blacks to do than for whites. For black people have more to forgive even if they cannot and probably should not forget. But there must come a time when we have to recognize that we are all in this together - when we must move past the old divisions of race and understand our common interests and our common humanity.

The other great remaining confrontation with reality goes back to Terry Sanford's admonition about repeating Northern mistakes. I think that we would all agree that we have not heeded his words in a very responsive way. One does not have to travel very far on any of our interstate highways, particularly in the vicinity of a metro area, to realize how we have just about been overwhelmed by the population and economic growth that has taken place in the last thirty years.

The gigantic mega-suburban developments that surround the region's cities have, indeed, brought to much of the South infrastructure problems that threaten livability in what just a few years ago were pristine areas. The age-old economic tradeoffs are obvious, but a failure to enforce a greater measure of regional or state oversight over land use, zoning, water supply and transportation, energy and communication facilities will confirm Sanford's fears and greatly diminish the South's quality of life.

When all is said and done, the kind of region that we pass on to our children will be the measure of our priorities. What the South will look like a generation from now will be decided by where our true values are now. Too often in the past we have been our own worst enemies. It was undoubtedly the South that he was talking about when Greenville, Mississippi's late great writer, David Cohn, said "With heaven in sight, we insist on perversely marching into hell."
Maybe now at long last, after all the mistakes of our conflicted past, we Southerners have learned our lesson. Let us work together, free from the divisiveness of partisan bickering or the selfishness of personal greed, to develop a region-wide cadre of public and community leaders with the vision and the civic courage to cause them to confront and deal with difficult public issues whether on education or race or urban sprawl or housing or health care before they spiral out of control.

We must back up and encourage honest, conscientious public officials to take principled stands that may go against public opinion polls and party loyalty and that may pinch our own toes or even, heaven forbid, cost us a few dollars more in taxes. In this increasingly complex and diverse region in which we live we must find ways to accommodate our differences in a reasonable way. Otherwise we wind up in a kind of political gridlock with nothing getting done, or, what is worse, the wrong thing getting done.

The liberation from our old biases and prejudices will enable us to ensure that our children and grandchildren will inherit a better South than has existed before. That is the kind of responsible citizenship that Terry Sanford was talking about - in doing the things that may not immediately and directly benefit us but will create for those who come after us the opportunity for a more fulfilling and productive life. That is a legacy that all Southerners should be proud to leave.

And now one thing more. In a time of increasing partisanship and political division, there is another huge task facing us, and that is the preservation - some might say the restoration -- of civility and collegiality in our civic and political relationships. Our region has been involved in many bruising battles in the past - on so called values issues from prohibition to Sunday blue laws to lotteries to evolution to smoking, but we somehow never let those differences cause us to lose our sense of camaraderie or respect for each other's ideas. The demonizing of people of a different political viewpoint and the equating of sectarian dogma with political ideology are contrary to our recent Southern experience. God does not wear a political hat.

We must recognize in this socially and economically diverse region and nation there must always be room for honest dissent. We must understand that our future will be diminished if we let bitterness and rancor and anger and greed control the political agenda. Most of us I find want about the same thing - a good education for our children, a job that is sustaining and fulfilling, a decent house and community in which to live, and the enjoyment of a life of dignity and respect. The future of our region and our country must be based on the pursuit of these goals and the recognition of our common humanity. That must be the basis of the new heritage of the South.