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William F. Winter

There have been countless efforts by Southern and non-Southern writers—some highly regarded and many less so—attempting to interpret the uniquely complex region that is the American South. That remains an endlessly challenging task. It may be an impossible one. As an eighty-nine-year-old fifth-generation Mississippian, I have spent half of my life trying to figure it out.

In this insightful memoir, Brandt Ayers has come as close as anybody ever has to explaining who we Southerners are and why we act as we do. In addition, he has provided us a personally experienced commentary on many of the fascinating personalities and events that have shaped the region for better or worse over the last half-century.

As a newspaper reporter, editor, and publisher, he has been where the action was, but he has been much more than simply an astute observer and chronicler of the Southern scene. As a founder of the influential LQC Lamar Society to be a voice of reason in the 1960s, and as confidant and counselor to progressive Southern leaders including two presidents, he has helped make the South more prudent and responsible than it otherwise might have been.

I can testify out of my own bittersweet involvement in the often brutal electoral politics of my state of Mississippi how difficult it was to provide moderating influence in the closed society of which we were a part.

It was on a September evening in 1962 in my hometown of Jackson when I saw the frightening power of politically incited fear and prejudice overwhelm an entire state. I was there when then-Governor Ross Barnett walked on the field at halftime of a University of Mississippi football game and harangued thousands of well-meaning, Bible-reading, white Mississippians into believing that the sky would fall if one black man was admitted to Ole Miss. I finally understood how the calamitous Civil War had started a hundred years before.

How did this happen again a century later, we ask ourselves. It happened partly because not enough wise leaders and thoughtful people after the Civil War understood the immensity of the reconciliation that had to take place between the North and the South and between the races. With Lincoln gone, there were not enough like him to appeal to “the better angels of our nature.” Mississippi’s Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar was one. His nationally acclaimed eulogy at the funeral of the South’s bitter enemy Charles Summer of Massachusetts implored his fellow Americans: “Know one another and you will love one another.”

But bitterness ran too deep in the South and in the North. After all, three-quarters of a million human beings had died in that tragic struggle, and four million slaves, almost all illiterate and penniless, had been released from their bondage to fend for themselves. There was no safety net—no Marshall Plan. Cynical political deal-making took over.

With the country still torn apart and the old battle wounds, physical and psychological, slow to heal, it was left to the Supreme Court to kick the can down the road with its well-meaning but unfortunate “separate but equal” mandate in 1896. Most Southern whites heard the first word but ignored the second.

And so for another sixty years the South lived for the most part in a self-imposed political and pastoral isolation defending a past that it would not let die. That attitude was reflected in a story out of the old plantation town of Holly Springs, Mississippi, not far from where I grew up. It was there on a lovely June evening many years after the war that a visitor from New York City remarked to his hostess on the veranda of her antebellum home, “What a beautiful moon.” “Ah, yes,” she replied, “but you should have seen it before the war.”

It took World War II to begin to break the South out of its fantasies. Millions of us Southern white segregationists and black GIs came home with a much-enlarged perspective of the world but nonetheless to the same totally segregated society that we had left four years before.

It was obvious to many that things were going to change. The unanswered questions were how and how long would it take. Again the Supreme Court stepped in, as it had sixty years before, to provide an answer. Only this time the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education had the moral support of the country outside the South and the fervent interest of every black American.

Too many Southern whites did not understand the strength of that force, just as their forebears had underestimated northern resolve to save the Union in 1861. So in the 1950s we embarked on another lost cause, just as my Confederate grandfather’s generation had done a hundred years before.

The latest effort was an even more hopeless crusade, but the arguments were the same. The issue of race cloaked in the garb of states’ rights was the driving force. The South ensnared itself again in a myth of its own making. We wasted another twenty years fighting dead-end battles in the courts and often in the streets that were lost before they had begun.

Now thankfully at long last, we are seeing the repudiation of some of those myths—both by Southerners about themselves and also by those outside the South about the South. But old stereotypes die hard. What is most frustrating to us who live here is the lack of awareness on the part of so many who do not live here, or have never been here, as to how much the South has changed in so many positive ways since the 1960s.

For several decades the region has attracted an ever-increasing number of people from all races and from other states and countries. Many black Southern expatriates have discovered a more hospitable environment here than in the mean streets of Northern cities and now are moving back to their ancestral homes to add their talent and leadership to the communities they once rejected.

There are those who fear that all of these changes will make us less Southern. I submit that—without causing us to lose our Southernness —they will be making all of us more American by transferring to those outside the South an appreciation and acceptance of the distinctive cultural qualities about which Brandt Ayers writes so passionately in this book.

Impulsiveness may once have been one of those qualities, but hopelessness never was. We offer without apology a heritage of civility and courage and compassion. Even in the bad old days of segregation there were countless examples of kindness and generosity by blacks and whites toward each other. It is in the framework of our fascinating cultural diversity that we can embrace our common humanity. By sharing an understanding of its heritage and mystique, the South can contribute much to the richness of our national existence.

This is the process that, accompanied by a universal commitment to respect the dignity of all of our neighbors and to provide the opportunity for a competitive education for everyone, can lead us into an era when the South will be able to revel in its victories. Hopefully, it will not still be in love with defeat.

There will continue to be cynics and fear-mongers who would turn us back. My old friend, the late David Cohn, the great writer from the Mississippi Delta, warned us years ago of these charlatans: “With heaven in sight,” he wrote, “they would lead us perversely into hell.”

But how can a people so richly endowed with those human qualities that make for personal satisfaction and fulfillment, and with a natural bounty of almost all of the resources that contribute to good living, ever again be guiled into cutting our own throats as we did twice in our tragic history?

The South of the future must not be the South of romantic illusion nor of racial bigotry. I believe that it can be and still will be a distinctive South that we can enjoy and celebrate—yet a South that is committed to fairness and justice for all of its people and to the building of a more united country.

This is the kind of region that Brandt Ayers has devoted his extraordinary career to achieve. Thanks to his kind of vision and persistence, that newest New South is now within sight if succeeding generations of young Southerners do not let it slip away. I do not think they will.

Former Mississippi Governor [1980–84] William F. Winter was honored in 2008 with the Profiles in Courage Award of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. He practices law in Jackson.