Former president Jimmy Carter, who will be 99 this Sunday, October 1, was only 46 when he first popped up on the national political radar. After declaring in his 1971 inaugural address as governor of Georgia that “the time for racial discrimination is over,” Carter followed through by increasing the number of Black people on state boards and commissions from three to 53, boosting Black employment in state jobs by 25%, and hanging a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in the state capitol.

Media-wise, such moves secured Carter’s place within an emerging cohort of racially enlightened “New South” governors, including South Carolina’s John C. West and Florida’s Reubin Askew, who were also elected in 1970. Liberal optimists hailed their victories as the undoing of the Republican “Southern strategy” of relying on racially coded appeals to win over once-reliably Democratic white voters angered by their old party’s pro-civil rights stance. By the time Carter won the presidency in 1976, he personified a vision of a risen, racially redeemed South that captured the American imagination in the final decades of the 20th century.

Yet this sunny perception of Carter’s journey to the presidency obscured the reality of how he had managed to take the all-important first step.

Regardless of his actions after becoming Georgia’s governor, Jimmy Carter had captured that office in 1970 not by thwarting the Southern strategy but by following it very nearly to the letter in repeated campaign appeals to racial and class prejudice. Once they got him where he wanted to be, he quickly disavowed such tactics, which, in his mind, amounted to nothing more than purely pragmatic nods to political reality necessary to achieving his more idealistic aims.

The apparent incongruity between the method Carter employed to become governor and the measures he implemented in office can be traced in part to the way he reacted to the contrasting racial attitudes of his parents. Despite having myriad interactions with Black people as a landlord, grocer, and financier, Carter’s father Earl was no less adamant about their inferiority to whites than any but a tiny handful of his white contemporaries. Ironically, one of these rare exceptions was his wife Lillian, whose sympathy for Black neighbors and readiness to invite them into her home might have prompted more than quiet disapproval, had her husband been a less prominent figure in the community.

Young Jimmy’s awareness of the peculiarity of his mother’s racial views—and the near-ubiquity of his father’s—shaped the distinct blend of realism and idealism that defined his early political career. When his father died in 1953, he resigned his post as a naval engineer, to assume control of the family’s agribusiness enterprises. His budding political aspirations surfaced when he assumed his father’s old seat on the county school board in 1955, only a year after the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in the public schools in Brown v. Board of Education. With thousands of white Southerners scurrying to join the defiantly segregationist White Citizens’ Councils, Carter stood out as the only white man in Plains to decline membership in the Sumter County chapter. Later, when the congregation of the Plains Baptist Church, where Carter was a deacon, overwhelmingly rejected the idea of allowing Black people to worship there, his family cast three of only six dissenting votes.

Still, despite his efforts to improve Sumter County schools, Carter made no overt effort to encourage compliance with Brown. In his 1992 book, Turning Point, the best he could say for himself as a candidate for state senate 30 years earlier was that he had been “at least moderate” on segregation.

Carter’s first run for statewide office began with his belated entry into the 1966 Democratic gubernatorial primary against former governor Ellis Arnall, a racial moderate of longer standing, and the unrepentant segregationist Lester Maddox. Maddox won, courtesy of his strong appeal with blue collar whites, and with Arnall capturing the bulk of the Black and more affluent white vote, Carter came in a disappointing third. Still, the stinging defeat educated him to a stark reality: Racial moderation was not yet a winning strategy in Georgia politics. Nor would it be in the 1968 presidential race, when race-baiting virtuoso George Wallace easily outdistanced both Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon in Georgia.

Carter took the lessons of both these campaigns to heart when he again sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 1970. This time, his chief opponent was former governor Carl Sanders, who had once declared himself “a segregationist but not a damn fool” and generally lived up to his own billing by presiding over Georgia’s grudging but relatively orderly retreat from segregation between 1963 and 1966. Sanders was a senior partner in a high-powered Atlanta law firm, with a smooth, urbane persona. Dubbing him “Cufflinks Carl,” and playing to both racial and class resentments, Carter’s ads portrayed Sanders hobnobbing in air-conditioned comfort with his closet liberal country club pals while the good working folk of Georgia, including a certain peanut farmer from Plains, sweated and strived to make ends meet.

In a naked appeal to Wallace supporters, Carter opposed bussing and defended the rights of white Georgians to preserve racial homogeneity in their neighborhoods. His campaign circulated photos of Black members of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team showering Sanders with champagne, and spread word that he had furtively attended the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. While Carter’s racial machinations won him the endorsement of outspoken segregationist politico Roy V. Harris, more than eight in 10 Black voters opted for Sanders, who barely made it into a runoff election, where Carter bested him by 20% before trouncing his Republican opponent in the general election.

As governor, Carter melded his idealism with a more practical-minded engineer’s approach to problem-solving in an ambitious plan to rid state government of corruption, mismanagement, and waste, although when he announced his presidential candidacy near the end of 1974, he was still better known and appreciated for his efforts to do right by Black Georgians.

His carefully cultivated personal ties to influential ministers and civil rights leaders only bolstered Carter’s standing among Black voters. Yet he knew that his success depended on winning substantial support from Southern whites as well.  To this end, he revamped his old Southern strategy, playing this time to regional rather than racial antagonisms. One of his campaign ads noted that after suffering years of ostracism and indiscriminate stereotyping as rednecks and hillbillies, “only a Southerner can understand what Jimmy Carter as President can mean.” Boasting an improbable duo of advocates in George Wallace and Martin Luther King Sr., Carter picked up more than half the electoral votes he needed to defeat Gerald Ford by carrying all of the old Confederate and border states except Virginia.

Still, despite his earnest courtship, Carter failed to win over a majority of white voters in the South, leaving him all the more indebted to the close to 90% support he enjoyed among Black voters in the region. As the ultimate political realists, they seemed to accept Carter’s pandering to Wallace voters in 1970 as merely a situational concession to political reality necessary to achieving the racially equitable and humane ends he secured upon taking office. Ironically enough, historically high Black participation in a presidential election had been critical to putting a white Southerner in the White House. Meanwhile, reeling from the military failure in Vietnam and the moral failures of the Watergate affair, white voters above the Mason-Dixon line also proved surprisingly receptive to the drawling Carter’s disarming smile, downhome folksiness, and earnest assurances that he would bring honesty and humility back to the White House.

Though he had not been above a bit of political charade along the way, once in office Carter appeared to revert to the somber, moralizing Southern Baptist he had always been at heart. With the economy faltering in the face of soaring inflation, he sermonized from his bully pulpit about Americans’ addictive consumerism and their habit of defining themselves not “by what one does, but what one has.” To hardly anyone’s surprise, his gospel of restraint seemed downright heretical to a generation who saw instant gratification and unbridled acquisitiveness as their birthright. Carter’s habit of foregrounding “pain” over “gain” in laying out the ramifications of his decisions led his vice president, Walter Mondale, to observe that “the worst thing you could say to Carter if you wanted him to do something was that it was politically the best thing to do.” Somewhat akin to Henry Clay, once in office Carter seemed to signal that he would “rather be right than [continue to] be president.”

Beyond the substantial economic challenges he faced, the crowning blow to his prospects of retaining that office was his failed—and now, reportedly, sabotaged—effort to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis; the abortive desert rescue mission with its abandoned, sand-clogged helicopters became for many a metaphor for his failed and inept presidency. He was easily out- distanced in 1980 by Republican Ronald Reagan, whose vows of a military buildup and gospel of permanent plenty played far better than Carter’s calls for sacrifice and self-denial. So much for securing the Camp David Accords, bailing out Social Security, deregulating the airlines, preserving the Alaskan wilds, and a number of other stellar accomplishments.

Yet, despite his overwhelming rejection at the hands of American voters, Carter left Washington in 1981 at age 56 with his idealism not only intact but less encumbered by political constraints. His boundless energy also demanded an outlet. By 2002, he had already gained such a reputation as a global peacemaker, humanitarian, and champion of human rights, that awarding him the Nobel Prize for Peace was less a question of “if” than “when.”  With his moral certitude now reaffirmed, he seemed even less concerned with the political consequences of his forthright manner, as he indicated in 2007 by likening Israeli practices in the West Bank to a form of apartheid. Unmoved by the ensuing outcry, Carter soldiered on in his one-man war on human suffering and injustice, even inquiring about his ongoing Guinea worm eradication project after entering hospice care in February 2023.

As the longest-lived of all U.S. presidents, Jimmy Carter hardly stands out as the only one of them who ever sacrificed principle to political expediency. He has no rival among them, however, in dedicating himself upon leaving that office to a higher, more transcendent ideal of human service and remaining faithful to it even as the end of his days draws nigh.

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Since 2011, the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize has honored the author of the U.S. nonfiction book published in the previous year that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. Though there have been many moments in the past decade that have reinforced for us the importance of this work, the announcement of the 10th annual book prize occurs as the novel coronavirus creates myriad new challenges to community cohesion, not least the need for social distancing.

This year we honor historian William Sturkey, for his extraordinary portrait of a community in his latest book, Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White.

Sturkey has produced a meticulously detailed study of the historical, cultural, and economic roots of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction “New South.” Through personal profiles of black and white citizens of Hattiesburg over multiple generations, Sturkey weaves a moving narrative that exemplifies the purpose of the Zócalo Book Prize.

Our judges found in Hattiesburg “a finely woven microcosm of American society as a whole [that] points to the immense work still ahead to make it into a more perfect and just union.” The judges particularly recognized Sturkey’s achievement of “a rich and deeply nuanced account of the development of the white and black communities of Hattiesburg, Missisippi, under the apartheid system of Jim Crow.”

One aspect of the book that struck many of them was its seamless melding of cultural and economic history. Another was the nostalgia of many of Hattiesburg’s African American residents for the community that disappeared with the victories of the civil rights movement.

Why would people miss a time when they had fewer rights? Sturkey’s book describes the ways in which the African American community of Hattiesburg found strength in one another and the institutions they built. This is the subject of Sturkey’s Zócalo Book Prize Lecture: “How Do Oppressed People Build Community?” He will deliver the lecture and accept the prize, which includes a $5,000 award, during a live event streaming on Zócalo’s YouTube channel on May 20 at 5 PM PDT. Jai Hamid Bashir, winner of the ninth annual Zócalo Poetry Prize, will deliver a public reading of her poem “Little Bones” prior to the lecture.

Previous book prize winners include Michael Ignatieff, Danielle Allen, and Jonathan Haidt.

We had a chance to speak with Sturkey, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill historian, about the research, themes, and structure of Hattiesburg.

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But those times were not really simple: Americans were then gripped by Cold War fears and the Red Scare, and buffeted by new economic pressures. The entertainers who most successfully created sunny visions for anxious Americans of that era—our “good old days”—responded to tough times with cheerful portrayals of their own, earlier “good old days.” In other words, the mid-century period many Americans pine nostalgically for now was itself defined by a profound cultural nostalgia. Rural television comedies of the time, set in a not-so-real version of the American South, are a perfect example.

When producer Sheldon Leonard created The Andy Griffith Show in 1960, he hit upon a new way to offer succor to the stressed-out masses. With a syrupy drawl and toothy grin, Sheriff Andy Taylor offered up the law-and-order masculinity so popular in Westerns while also oozing down-home, folksy charm. Add to the mix a freckled urchin of a son, Opie; motherly Aunt Bee; and the bumbling deputy Barney Fife, and CBS had a wholesome hit with a refreshing lack of controversy. Misunderstandings abounded, but there was a never a problem that couldn’t be solved with a little common sense, a heart-to-heart conversation, or maybe an impromptu sing-along on the front porch.

The Andy Griffith Show earned high ratings, so CBS kept it on the air, and ordered other comedies like it throughout the 1960s. The worlds depicted in these shows did not resemble the reality that most Americans lived in at the time. Many popular shows in this genre, including Petticoat Junction and The Beverly Hillbillies, featured multigenerational families living under one roof. Most Americans lived in suburban and urban areas, almost all of the denizens of rural comedy lived in places that were, well, rural.

Critics complained that the programs were too simplistic. Still, they performed well throughout the country, from the South to the Northwest, in the city and in the country. When most of CBS’s rural comedies finally left the airwaves in 1971, they were still consistent members of Nielsen’s top 10 performers.

How did these shows about rural rubes become such a beloved part of imagined American life in the 1960s and beyond? For one, fantasies the programs served up were wholesome and steeped in nostalgia—and many fans professed that they loved these shows exactly because they portrayed a (purportedly) simpler time. The disconnect was the whole point.

While the worlds of these rural comedies were contemporary, the major issues of the time never surfaced. There was no violence and no sexuality; only family and community. Such a time never existed—rural America has always been plagued by social and economic strife—but the programs portrayed the relationships between family, friends, and neighbors so authentically that the setting around them seemed real as well. Viewers, then and now, believed the highly curated world of rural comedy was an accurate representation of a world that they knew in their youth. Considering that this was a past viewed through the lens of childhood, perhaps it was.

These programs offered an escape from the fears and anxieties that were common in the 1960s. Women, having taken a robust role in public life during World War II, were now expected to leave the workplace entirely and devote themselves to house and home for their ever-growing families. Many bristled in their newly circumscribed roles, and turned to anxiety medications like meprobamate, marketed as Miltown, to alleviate their frustration. Concerns about Soviet infiltration and espionage led to widespread fears of enemies lurking among friends and neighbors. Families stockpiled canned goods and purchased bomb shelters for the backyard. Children ducked for bomb drills.

Beyond the escapism they provided, these shows had multiple levels of appeal for different demographic populations. White Southerners looked at rural comedy and saw a positive version of themselves, without the criticism of racism that had come to permeate news coverage of the South as civil rights became a national issue.

People in other areas of the nation saw something less flattering but equally comforting. For many city dwellers, rural comedy was their only connection to the South. It confirmed stereotypes—so many of the characters were slow-drawled, slow-witted rubes—and yet it presented a South that was funny, warm, and likable.

That likability came at a cost; TV producers gave short shrift to crucial aspects of real life that might have been healthy for viewers to see. One omission, often pointed out by media historians, was accurate and intimate portrayals of family life. Green Acres was the only show among them to feature a married couple, and single characters were involved in chaste, casual romances. In The Andy Griffith Show, the only married person is Otis, who (perhaps significantly) is the town drunk. Some have pointed out that marriage—and to a lesser extent, romance in general—might have been downplayed on these shows in order to limit both sensuality and familial conflict.

An even more significant omission is that of race. The rural areas of North Carolina and Missouri where many of these comedies took place had significant nonwhite populations in real life, but one would never know it from watching the programs. And although most rural comedies ran until 1970 or 1971, none of them featured a significant character of color, except the occasional guest star, even as integration became fashionable for other popular programs.

Aaron Ruben, who produced both The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., explained, “black people meant conflict and our shows are supposed to represent utopia.” He was, of course, talking about the tastes of white viewers, looking for charm and old-fashioned values, signs that the times hadn’t changed quite as much as the nightly news might indicate.

Ruben would have had no reason to go beyond that—at the time, Nielsen was not putting its viewership-tracking boxes in African-American homes, so their opinions didn’t count. The only viewers considered worth courting at that time sought out racial homogeneity. Rural comedies, in this historical and cultural context, shouldn’t seem quite so innocent to our modern eyes.

Still, one aspect of these programs seems to stand the test of time. Ask virtually any American about The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, or any other 1960s rural comedy, and they will almost invariably respond to the show’s powerful nostalgia—even today. It reminds them of being a kid, of watching the show with grandparents, and of the good old days that have long-lived in American minds and on their screens, if nowhere else.

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We were at the K&W reflecting on a year-long mission to understand how Southern food shaped Southern identity. Both of us are academics at Southern universities, and we had come to our project with an interest in how rhetoric plays a role in shaping Southern identity—that is, how words and symbols send messages about how we see ourselves and others, our opinions, and our actions. We also both grew up in the South. Ashli is a Virginian; Wendy, a Texan. As adults, we chose to stay here to work and raise our families, knowing that the South would always feel like our only true home.

Exploring how Southern food communicates, playing a vital role in shaping and creating the identities of Southerners today, was a dream assignment—a rare chance to combine our work with pleasure. Food is a vital cultural component. It acts rhetorically by articulating identities and inviting individuals to embrace those identities. Analyzing food in the South, we believed, would help us better understand this culture we loved, in a broad-sweeping and universal kind of way. After all, everyone eats. Southerners, in particular, take a great deal of pride in family recipes, and have strong opinions about the regional cuisine. It is easy to get people to talk “Southern food-ese,” whether they are originally from the region or not.

Our travels took us from Charlotte, North Carolina to Birmingham, Alabama, and from Memphis, Tennessee to New Orleans, Louisiana. We prepared maps and agendas, wrote interview questions and brought note-taking tools, scheduled meetings, and made reservations. Before we took off, friends and family asked us which spots made the list for the “authentic Southern food experience.” Would our itinerary include Athens, Georgia’s Weaver D’s, Charleston’s Husk, or Austin’s Franklin’s Barbecue? Or were we going to stop by a Cracker Barrel in every town?

A shrimp po’ boy, and patrons, at local favorite Domilise’s, New Orleans, Louisiana. Photo by Wendy Atkins-Sayre.

This second question was generally a joke, a knowing nod to the roadside restaurant chain’s often-derided faux-Southern decor and mediocre food. There would be no Cracker Barrels on our eating tour, we assured them. We knew “real Southern” fare when we saw it. Indeed, we would be frequenting places like Domilise’s, the legendary dive in uptown New Orleans known for its po’ boy sandwiches. The current explosion of writings on Southern food might not yield a uniform definition, but it almost always emphasizes locally grown produce, ingredients that were readily available and inexpensive, and a strong connection to the land. We would follow the lead of those in the know.

We did go to Domilise’s, and it did not disappoint. We waited 20 minutes, in wilting humidity, for the famous crusty French bread sandwiches, stuffed with fried shrimp, oysters, or roast beef. Photos, autographs, and beer bottles from long-shuttered breweries adorned the walls. The bar was weathered by the touch of thousands of visitors. Diners chatted away, happily greeting familiar faces behind the counters. It was obvious why folks in a town full of great food were so devoted to this spot. The food not only brought them to the same location, but also connected them through shared sensual experiences—the sights and sounds of the neighborhood joint, the smells and tastes of the simple meal so closely tied to the region.

Domilise’s was the real deal. But the scene at K&W, and many other eateries like it, seemed to be, too. Whether Grandma cooked the hog jowls or not, eating that particular dish, in that particular place, was necessary for the Charlotte crowd to start the year successfully. Being there, we were participating in an important community ritual. This gave us pause. Like Cracker Barrel, K&W is a chain, with dozens of locations, in several states. There is little, if anything, artisanal about it. But it was apparent that its patrons on New Year’s Day were having a “real Southern” food experience. Were chain restaurants necessarily inauthentic expressions of Southern identity, as some food critics—not to mention so many of our friends—seemed to think?

The more we traveled, the more we began to wonder. We also began to question our attempts at scholarly remove. Getting mired in details was distracting us. This epiphany dawned at a chicken shack place in Middle Georgia that sat next to an old gas station. We fumbled with greasy fingers to record our experiences, getting odd looks from fellow customers and the women behind the counter—the very people we wanted to connect with. In Atlanta our food tour schedule was packed with too many restaurants, and the places we had chosen to visit seemed too controlled. So we stopped relying on critics’ lists of places we needed to visit, chefs we needed to watch, foodie experiences we needed to have. We decided just to eat, to listen, and to let the whole weird experience wash over us. There were more spontaneous stops along the roadside, and fewer reservation-heavy New South restaurants.

Fundamental questions started to emerge. What the heck was Southern food? And what, for that matter, was being Southern? We had started with a sense of what made a dish “real,” and had set out to find eating experiences that fit our definition. When our approach changed, our definition of authenticity began to shift, too. We saw many Souths, many kinds of Southerners, and many foods and experiences that could count as “real.” Was a Southern meal defined by particular foods, like BBQ, fried chicken, and grits? We had imagined our research would focus on discovering the boundaries circumscribing Southern cuisine, but instead we found a food culture in flux. Southern food doesn’t belong to a certain region; its reach extends beyond the traditional South and can be hard to determine. Ashli’s definition of real Southern barbecue is the vinegar-y (with a touch of tomato) pulled pork you find in Piedmont North Carolina. Wendy’s is beef brisket and sausages. Appalachian soup beans are very different than shrimp and grits. All of these foods are Southern.

Collard greens, macaroni and cheese, and carrots served up at Homestyle, housed in a trailer outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Photo by Wendy Atkins-Sayre.

So, we learned, is chorizo. In Charlotte, North Carolina, a Sav-Way grocery in one formerly industrial neighborhood now serves an immensely popular torta made with the sausage, at a lunch counter in the back. An expanding immigrant community in the South has brought countless additions to old recipes. Hummus, a traditionally Middle Eastern dish, has found its way to highbrow Southern tables in the form of mashed boiled peanuts, field peas, or Lima beans. Sandra Gutierrez, food writer and cookbook author, draws on Latin American traditions and adds a Southern twist. Chiles rellenos can be stuffed with pimiento cheese for a Southern flair.

There’s a long tradition of Southerners incorporating ingredients that are abundantly available but not necessarily “authentic” to the region in their food, such as casserole staples like Velveeta cheese and cream of mushroom soup. The Stokes family’s holiday shrimp mold, combining crustaceans with canned tomato soup, gelatin, celery, onion, and cream cheese is one such example of old-school Southern food with alien origins. As Ashli’s mother-in-law explained, it has to be served with Ritz crackers and it has to be served at Christmas. It does not matter that combining shrimp with gelatin might seem weird. Chorizo in Charlotte may one day be the same kind of thing. Oddball dishes become Southern food when they make their way into family traditions and stories. They send messages about family, about togetherness, about defining who you are in your corner of the world.

We found ourselves moving away from concentrating on the boundaries of Southern food and instead let the food speak for itself, experiencing everything from the Homestyle Restaurant, housed in a trailer home in the piney woods outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to a Popeye’s franchise in Jennings, Louisiana. We learned to let the people we met define the food for us. It became less important to define Southern cuisine and more important to embrace all that is—and wants to be—Southern. Southern food more broadly defined gives us all something to discuss, and even celebrate.

Some have opined that Southern food is in danger of extinction because of changes in the region, including increases in the numbers of chain restaurants, and the general suburbanization of so many Southern towns. But our travels revealed that a vibrant and evolving regional food culture brings people together and unites them, whether through a shared love of certain dishes or even heated arguments inspired by food loyalties. That Southern cuisine is moving forward by blending its own traditional ingredients and methods with those of other cultures, regions and times—and, even, taking root in chain restaurants—is a nod to its roots and a sign of breaking ground, a demonstration of how the South itself can become stronger while also changing.

Southern food may, in fact, both reflect current regional changes and also lead the way in crafting a new South, one where its culture echoes its changing people—more inclusive, more diverse, and more hopeful, influenced by influxes of immigrants, and newly fast-paced Southern cities. Optimistic, yes, but possible. The South is still here, but maybe not the one you, or we, were expecting.

The post Our Revelatory Culinary Road Trip Through the New South appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The white South began to erect soldiers’ monuments soon after the Confederacy’s defeat. In the first two decades after the war, communities most often chose a simple obelisk or other monument of funeral design and placed it in a cemetery. Former Confederates thereby mourned their dead and memorialized their cause. Even in the early years after the war, though, some monuments featured a sculpture of a soldier and occupied a more public place—a practice that increased over the next two decades.

The vast majority of Confederate monuments were erected between 1890 and 1912, and most of these consisted of a single soldier, with his hands folded over the top of his rifle’s barrel and with its stock resting on the ground. Typically, the soldier stood atop a column on the courthouse lawn or some other central public space. These statues hardly seemed martial, much less ready to attack. Indeed, they looked surprisingly calm and at ease. They did not always face north, as folklore has it but, rather, whichever way the courthouse faced.

An advertisement for soldier monuments in the magazine, Confederate Veteran. Image courtesy of Gaines Foster.

The origins and purposes of these monuments to the common Confederate soldier is complex. They resulted, in part, from a commercial campaign. Monument companies advertised in veterans’ magazines and hired agents to travel the South. They offered credit terms (lest the veterans die before a town could raise the money for a memorial) and, in one ad, even offered a free marble breadboard to the secretary of any United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter that ordered a monument.

The companies, though, were exploiting an important cultural movement. Putting up soldiers’ monuments was a central ritual of the Lost Cause, a shorthand term for an organized attempt by the Daughters, Confederate veterans, and many other white Southerners to shape the memory of the Civil War. Southern whites erected Confederate soldier monuments for at least three interrelated reasons.

The leaders of the Lost Cause first sought to honor the veterans of the war. The monuments expressed white society’s appreciation and respect for the soldiers’ wartime sacrifice, constituting a more profound and permanent version of today’s off-hand “thank you for your service.” The monuments also reassured the veterans that, despite losing on the battlefield, they had fought honorably and well—and for the noblest of reasons.

The Lost Cause and the monuments that emerged from it also sought to vindicate the Confederacy itself. The white South’s memory of the war claimed that soldiers fought for states’ rights and the defense of their homes and families. The Lost Cause also proclaimed secession to be legal, denied the centrality of slavery to the war, ignored the evil inherent in the South’s peculiar institution, and over time romanticized it. The monuments thereby celebrate not just the veterans but the Confederacy and, despite the attempt to deny it, its cause—slavery.

Finally, although they celebrated the Confederacy, the monuments and the Lost Cause were as much about the present as the past. In honoring the faithful soldier, the Lost Cause’s leaders made him a model for the lower classes in a turbulent period of change in the South and the nation.

The erection of the monuments followed the populist revolt and widespread labor unrest. The soldier statues were a reminder that, as during the war—when Confederate soldiers loyally followed aristocratic leaders like Lee into battle—the middle and lower classes should be loyal to a hierarchical society. The Lost Cause thereby offered a vision of the “proper” social order, one in which the lower classes deferred to leaders, women proved loyal to men, and African Americans remained subservient to whites. In the same decades in which most of the soldiers’ monuments went up, the white South created a repressive racial order based on segregation, disfranchisement, lynching, and other forms of white racial violence.

The story of the Lost Cause’s monuments to the Confederate soldier reveals the difficulty of knowing how to honor soldiers’ sacrifices without embracing or even justifying their cause—a problem also faced by later generations of Americans struggling over some subsequent wars. It shows that monuments emerge more from memory—an attempt to shape the past—than from the history that actually happened. And, in the midst of a public debate over Confederate monuments, it reminds us that memory and its symbols have less to say about history and more to proclaim about the shape of society in the present and the future.

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Given that history, it’s hard to argue with Gregg Allman, who once asserted that the phrase “Southern Rock” was redundant. He would have known. Along with brother Duane and the rest of the Allman Brothers Band, the Nashville-born and Florida-raised performer conjured up the peculiarly regional beast two decades after Turner and his band visited Memphis. Formed in Jacksonville, Florida and based in Macon, Georgia, birthplace of Little Richard and Otis Redding, the Allman Brothers Band crosswired blues and country sources with longform guitar improvisations that waxed ecstatic and sublime, sharing the quests of jazz visionaries like John Coltrane and Bay Area jug-band-gone-psychonauts the Grateful Dead. (Duane Allman wasn’t called “Sky Dog” for nothing.)

Gregg Allman’s death in May, at age 69, which followed by a few months the suicide of founding drummer Butch Trucks, marked the definitive end of a band that had officially called it quits in 2014. Its career had been troubled from early on, shadowed by the separate motorcycle-accident deaths of Duane and bassist Berry Oakley just a year apart in 1971 and ’72. Yet the Allman Brothers Band enjoyed a stunning resurgence in its latter years and went out on top with a climactic string of shows in 2014 at New York’s Beacon Theatre.

At once the alpha and the omega of what people thought of as “Southern Rock,” the Allmans seeded generations of bands from their essential DNA. They also shared status as Jacksonville’s greatest rock band with some scruffy fellow travelers: Lynyrd Skynyrd. The group was named in reference to a disliked high school gym teacher, and quickly established itself as something much more than a soulful boogie outfit, led by frontman Ronnie Van Zant.

Lynyrd Skynyrd passed into legend when a 1977 plane crash claimed the lives of the singer and two other musicians, among others. The band’s most pointed song on Southern identity, not to mention its most quoted, was “Sweet Home Alabama,” which amid verses that long for the state’s blue skies and celebrate its musical heritage, punched back at folk-singer diatribes—such as Neil Young’s sardonic “Southern Man”—and patronizing Northern hypocrites. “Well, I hope Neil Young will remember,” Van Zant sang, “A southern man don’t need him around anyhow.”

Gregg Allman, who passed away earlier this year, and his brother Duane were namesakes of the band that seeded generations Southern rockers from their essential DNA. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In another verse that took a swipe at what we’d now call coastal elites, the song criticized those passing judgment on the South when they had problems of their own. But Van Zant also acknowledges the troubling popularity of Alabama governor George Wallace, a white supremacist who swore during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, “segregation today … segregation tomorrow … segregation forever.”

Although the song’s greasy guitar licks and strutting rhythm can make it sound ready for a bumper sticker, its perspective is nuanced. It doesn’t endorse Wallace, but it also doesn’t brook unsolicited blue-state judgement:

In Birmingham they love the Gov’nor, boo-boo-boo
Now we all did what we could do
Now Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you, tell the truth

Like the Allman camp, Van Zant supported former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential race. He also sang songs that endorsed gun control (“Saturday Night Special”) and reached across the Deep South’s racial divide (“The Ballad of Curtis Loew’). The performer happened to be a huge Neil Young fan, and vice-versa—it’s said that the Canadian penned the smoldering ballad “Powderfinger” for the band—although Skynyrd nonetheless unfurled the Confederate flag as a concert prop.

Van Zant’s defiant, prideful stance was readily adopted—without the political complexities—by a new wave of country acts that took over Nashville in the 1980s. At the same time, Southern college bands, liberated by punk and post-punk, championed a choppier, anti-virtuosic, and art-infected aesthetic that spread like kudzu in places like Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Athens, Georgia, led by groups like the dBs and R.E.M—and even, heck, the palliative, tailgate-party pop of Hootie and the Blowfish.

R.E.M.’s liberal activism is well-known, but its songs were usually too slippery for political interpretation, its regional perspective more abstract and allusive, evidenced by album covers that pictured old railway trestles or the Biblical hallucinations of folk-art savant Rev. Howard Finster, or a nod to history in titles like “Fables of the Reconstruction,” the band’s third studio album, released in 1985.

Contemporary country music, heralded by strapping suburban cowboys like Garth Brooks and Travis Tritt, more than compensated for the abdication of six-string pyrotechnics and Dixie-fried attitude, pumping up the volume as they stormed the arena circuit, where so-called “Bro Country” continues to rule today.

Those separate strains weren’t as polarized as they seemed, though. When I lived in Atlanta, from the late 1980s through the ’90s, something new was incubating in the music bars around Little Five Points and in the low-rent shotgun shacks of Cabbagetown (a raw-edged neighborhood cast into decline by the closing of the mammoth Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill in 1977). A loosely connected music scene emerged that had generous elbow room for honky-tonkers, punk-rockers, drag performers, and avant-garde noisemakers.

My friend and fellow Atlanta journalist Bob Townsend coined a name for it: The Redneck Underground. The label stuck best to brash performance artist Deacon Lunchbox, a burly poet who somehow crossed Charles Bukowski’s scabrous candor with New South progressive politics as he verbally assaulted icons of the old order—all while sporting a bra, brandishing a chainsaw and, for self-accompaniment, whacking a hammer on a torpedo shell.

In his song “Lewis Grizzard I’m Calling You Out,” Deacon (AKA Timothy Tyson Ruttenber), took on Grizzard, the popular Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist and author of such unreconstructed Southern humor collections as Elvis Is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself. “You’re a knee-jerk, myopic, supercilious, half-baked, neo-closet-white-supremist [sic], mixed-drink-swilling, country club Reaganite, petit-bourgeois, woman-bashing, beach-music-listening, pork-barrel, good ol’ boy, homophobic [expletive].”

That Deacon hollered such epithets in any number of venues only a few minutes’ drive from The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, is a detail that underscores the significance of a message delivered as over-the-top humor.

Deacon died tragically young, at age 41, in a 1992 car accident. But his subversive, cantankerous spirit abided. His way of being a working class white man in the contemporary South embraced a history and sense of place while also acknowledging its social ills and racist past (and present). As an artist, he was scarcely alone in this. It was an important evolutionary moment in the music, one that would take up the legacy of bands like the Allmans and Skynyrd as a mythic wellspring.

Elvis Presley, son of Tupelo, Mississippi, “whose hip-shaking synthesis of blues, gospel, hillbilly, and country music changed American popular culture forever.” Photo courtesy of Ian Burt/Flickr.

The Drive-By Truckers were right there with Deacon. Part of an Athens scene that included jam bands (Widespread Panic) and idiosyncratic songwriters (Vic Chesnutt), the group would have been distinctive for the juxtaposition in its name alone—but it also had three guitarists and as many songwriters.

The band was co-founded by Alabama college pals Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood, whose father David Hood is the bassist in the fabled Muscle Shoals studio band The Swampers—celebrated by name by none other than Ronnie Van Zant in “Sweet Home Alabama.” Hood and his bandmates brought it all back home in their 2001 album “Southern Rock Opera,” whose 20 songs explored the legend of Lynyrd Skynyrd, while also tangling with the contradictions of Southern history.

Amid swaggering guitars, his voice hoarse and impassioned, Hood identifies a fundamental principle on “The Southern Thing.”

You think I’m dumb, maybe not too bright
You wonder how I sleep at night
Proud of the glory, stare down the shame
Duality of the southern thing.

Eight albums later, the Truckers continue to roll, avatars of a recombinant, critically aware kind of Southern Rock whose leading artists include the former Trucker Jason Isbell and Lee Bains III & the Glory Fires, as well as gritty, bluesy, powerhouse African-American artists like guitarist-vocalist Brittany Howard of the Alabama Shakes and guitarist Benjamin Booker.

Bains and his group, based in Atlanta and Birmingham, foreground their concerns in their 2014 sophomore release, a punning, landmark album called “Dereconstructed.” Its music combines the protest-anthem fury of The Clash with an unflinching narrative focus, as Bains struggles to reclaim Southern identity on his own terms, facing down old ghosts still holding fast to daylight. “Down here, we still hoist that old flag, watch it twist and flap in the wind,” he sings; “the way it did over the smacking lips and cracking whips of white men selling black men.” The song “Flags,” as does much of Bains’s music, reckons with the nightmare of Southern history in ways at once intimate and sweeping. He’s bound by blood to a place, but he doesn’t have to sit pretty:

Senior year, you could go deaf from all the talk of terrorists and Muslim fundamentalists
And I thought it strange in a town where so-called believers blew up women’s clinics we had the gall to act so offended.

When Bains played at the Word of South festival in my hometown of Tallahassee, Florida, last year, he used the occasion to partner with the writer and Southern culture scholar John T. Edge. Together, they presented a blazing historical work called “Lester and Donald,” with Edge reading and Bains singing-speaking-shouting about Lester Maddox, Georgia governor from 1967 to 1971, and pickaxe-wielding segregationist, and parallels with the rhetoric and agenda of then-GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump. The performance was at once spellbinding and so crackling with garage-rock energy you could mosh to it.

Far from becoming a cliché, or a pop culture footnote, Southern Rock has right now found its surest voice—and it isn’t about to shut up.

The post How Southern Rock Reclaims Regional Identity While Facing Down Old Ghosts appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the United States, slave masters were intent on keeping their slaves illiterate. Two events drove Southerners to discourage literacy. In the Stono Rebellion of 1739, more than 20 whites were killed by slaves attempting to escape to Florida. In 1842, the revolt led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, cost the lives of 55 to 65 whites and more than 100 slaves. Each event led to new restrictions, in the form of anti-literacy laws and punishments for slaves who tried to learn to read and write.

The objections to slave literacy were threefold: 1) Slaves did not have the mental capacity for education and would only become confused; 2) Slaves might learn to forge passes to non-slave states; and, 3) Insurrection and rebellion might result from slaves reading abolitionist writings.

But some slaves found ways around prejudice and law to satisfy their hunger for knowledge. Their main antebellum sourcebook for literacy was the Bible.

Some masters permitted it, because they saw the Bible as teaching slaves their “divine” role as servants. Beverly Jones, a former slave in Virginia, would write: “Always took his text from Ephesians, the white preacher did, the part what said, ‘Obey your masters, be [a] good servant’ … They always tell the slaves dat ef he be good, an’ worked hard fo’ his master, dat he would go to heaven, an’ der he gonna live a life of ease. They ain’ never tell he gonna be free in Heaven. You see, they didn’ want slaves to start thinkin’ ‘bout freedom, even in Heaven.”

The Second Great Awakening (1790-1840) changed the educational calculus, by putting at the forefront the belief that all men and women from every race were in need of salvation, and that all redeemed individuals were to be “useful” in God’s kingdom. The efforts to reach African American slaves for Jesus resulted in the “planation missions” movement of the 1830s and 1840s. African Americans who embraced Christianity became not only church members but also preachers and ministers.

Plantation missions were part of a greater reform movement to bring about holiness to the whole nation, including to the Negro slave. To accomplish this, leaders of this movement had to demonstrate to the plantation owners that its religious efforts were not antithetical to slavery. Additionally, there was resistance from Southerners because they believed that African Americans didn’t have the capacity for religious experience.

Despite Southern resistance, the efforts of plantation missions were fruitful and many slaves became Christians. A multi-part process of religious instruction unfolded. First came regular sermons geared toward the perceived level of the slaves’ mental capacity. That might lead to a weekly lecture which the master and his family were encouraged to attend in order to provide a good example for his slaves. After that, Sabbath schools were established, and instruction at these school was expressly oral (and not written) “religion without letters” utilizing a question-and-answer method from printed catechisms, homilies and visual aids to achieve learning. Once schooled in Christianity, slave converts participated in regular gatherings at times and places approved by the plantation owner.

That was often as far as things went—until the Emancipation Proclamation and the subsequent end of the Civil War. In post-bellum Southern states, initiatives were carried out to educate freed slaves in subjects beyond religion. The foundation for these efforts came from the freed slaves themselves.

According to James Anderson, author of The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935, “Former slaves were the first among native southerners to depart from the planters’ ideology of education and society, and campaign for universal, state-sponsored public education. In their movement for universal schooling the ex-slaves welcomed and actively pursued the aid of Republican politicians, the Freedman’s Bureau, northern missionary societies, and the Union Army.” Not only did African Americans improve their own educational opportunities, but they also helped improve education for whites by challenging the plantation owners’ educational paradigm that schooling happened in the home, and not in public schools.

Religion retained a powerful, if different, role in education after the war. As African Americans emerged from slavery to freedom, churches became central to their communal life and a foundation for many of self-improvement initiatives in education. The church’s ability to sustain the infrastructure of an informed society—including numerous newspapers, schools, social welfare services, jobs, and recreational facilities—mitigated the dominant society’s denial of these resources to the black communities.

As Northern missionary societies and the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freeman and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Board) entered the South in the post-bellum era to educate African Americans, they found that they would be building on educational efforts already established by slaves and free blacks. White teachers, mainly from the Northeast, joined a cadre of African Americans teachers.

One of the important educational innovations in the immediate post-bellum era was the academy—primarily parochial day or boarding schools where the curricular focus was on reading, writing, and mathematics (although courses in cooking, sewing, and domestic arts were also offered.) When these schools were first started, the hope was that students would gain basic literacy so they could read the Bible, complete basic math computations, and understand labor contracts. Instead, a classical liberal arts curriculum was brought to the school by white teachers, many of whom had gained experience in New England boarding schools, and then taught by African-American teachers as they took over instruction. Practical courses in industrial arts were added to the curriculum, although the emphasis was on Latin, algebra, English literature, and foreign languages such as Greek, French, and German.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown, a self-proclaimed disciple of Booker T. Washington, founded Palmer Memorial Institute, but steadfastly resisted efforts to make industrial education an emphasis at her school. Instead, she utilized a college preparatory approach in which her students studied Latin, French, English, algebra, geometry, and science. To balance out the students’ educational experience, students took courses in agriculture, home economics and industrial education, and helped raise food for the school by working on a 120-acre farm. Brown’s school was representative of the pedagogical tension experienced by many academies.

Henry Lyman Morehouse coined the term “Talented Tenth” (popularized by W.E.B. Du Bois) to make the case that developing an African American elite was essential for the advancement of all Blacks. This concept had appeal for both African Americans and Northern missionary groups, especially the American Baptist Home Missions Society (ABHMS). For African Americans the concept of the “Talented Tenth” represented the hope of gaining respectability in American society. For many Whites, the “Talented Tenth” represented a buffer group to negotiate with the “field Negroes” revolt in the post-bellum era.

For all the devotion to education in this era, the schools developed by and for African Americans did not produce a level of property ownership and economic self-sufficiency among its graduates that were among the primary goals of these schools. Education accomplished much, but it was no match for the racist structures of the society, particularly after the end of Reconstruction.

However, this continual thirst for education among African Americans and their continued efforts to achieve it resulted in many institutions of higher education that continue to make significant contributions in the world of academia and the broader American society. Among these were Spelman University—which began as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary in the basement of the church.

The post How African Americans Emerged from Slavery with a Hunger for Education appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What makes some artwork timeless?

History shows that neither high prices at auction nor gallery attendance figures are good predictors of how artists, artworks, and art movements will be viewed in decades to come. The Guggenheim’s landmark exhibition 1900: Art at the Crossroads was noteworthy for revealing that the artists we lionize today were far from acclaimed in their time.  The Guggenheim’s 2000 show reprised the Paris ‘Exposition Universelle’ of 1900, which featured works by the likes of artists now forgotten—Leon Lhemitte, Fritz von Uhde, Alfred Guillou, Ferdinand Khnopff, and Franz von Stuck—but lacked works by the Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and modern masters we now love like Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse.

Today, major museums still follow the whims of the art market. The trustees who foot the bills often collect market favorites, and are not disgruntled when the museums they govern reflect their taste. Exceptions abound, but so do reputation-enhancing monographic shows of artists represented by the most powerful galleries on both coasts. And so the carousel built by talent-affirming players in the art world—dealers, curators, critics, and collectors—spins and spins with minimal friction. But is this really the art that our era will be remembered for?

The Atlanta-based Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which I serve as its president, seeks to get art that matters into major museums, while enhancing audiences’ ability to appreciate it. We want to enlarge the canon of American art history to include dozens of artists whose contributions have not heretofore been noticed, let alone embraced, by the market, critics, or museums.

What unites these artists is that they are all African Americans from the Southeastern United States. But their individual contributions are just that: individual. The objects themselves are undeniably ciphers of our time that come from this particular stream of the American experience. The quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama; assemblages by Thornton Dial; and sculptures by Lonnie Holley are today recognized as fundamental examples of American art.

The Foundation’s goals are not to entreat art world leaders to acknowledge that these artists merit inclusion by virtue of race or class. Our aim is instead to place important objects in permanent collections of leading art museums, so as to allow curators, scholars, and critics to situate them in the greater narrative of art history for public benefit.

Jessie T. Pettway, Bars and string-pieced column; 1950s; Cotton; 95 x 76 in.; Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Photo by Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio. Courtesy of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection.

The project has its roots in the prescient life’s work of William S. Arnett, an Atlanta collector who devoted decades to assembling thousands of objects by almost 200 artists from the Southeastern United States. He identified artists whose achievements had never made it out of their home states to arbiters of art world success in major cities in the Northeast, Midwest and West. And he sought, through books and exhibitions, to tell their stories.

These stories are related by means of powerful and insightful artworks, drawing on the artists’ faith and from their awareness of major events on the world stage. As African Americans in that part of the United States still coping with stubborn traces of the Confederacy, they bear first-hand witness to racial injustice and overt discrimination. But their contributions are universal, not parochial. And while the formal attributes of their works are varied, from assemblage to painting to sculpture to textiles to site-specific projects, there is nothing in their art not found in mainstream art practices from the combines of Robert Rauschenberg to the mise-en-scène installations of Edward Kienholz to the heroic testaments of Anselm Kiefer.

That said, the acceptance of these artists and their artworks over the generation since Arnett set his sights on them has been episodic and conditional. Consider the works of Thornton Dial, shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1993. Dial’s assemblages at this time invoked representations of tigers—avatars for African Americans making their way through the South’s jungle of racial strife and exclusion.

But acclaim for the exhibitions was cut short by a slanted segment on the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes, which cast doubt on Arnett’s efforts by suggesting that his motives were born not of advocacy but of greed. Many gatekeepers of the museum and art market establishments were loath to countenance the unconventional Arnett or his championing of previously unknown artists, and the producers fed the storyline of exploitation of African Americans by an eccentric white collector. While there are grounds to question the fairness of the patronage system he implemented in assembling a comprehensive collection of thousands of objects, no one who knows him can question his intentions.

A better chapter began nearly a decade later with the pioneering exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend in 2002, that earned accolades from the chief art critic of The New York Times as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.” The repurposing, by black rural women, of scraps of worn work clothes and other textile remnants into functional bedcovers became expressive, formally sophisticated testaments of the African American struggle. Once considered outside the mainstream, the quilts are now timeless since the US Postal service issued stamps. With that imprimatur in place, other exhibitions followed with appreciative evaluation of the oeuvres of Thornton Dial and Ronald Lockett.

A second obstacle to acceptance of these artists has been the assertion that a lack of credentialed training should by definition exclude them from the mainstream. The fact is that a majority of top-tier artists who figure prominently in the art market lack an M.F.A. (Master’s of Fine Arts degree). But as for the Southern artists represented within the Souls Grown Deep collection, their limited formal education has yielded the epithets self-taught, vernacular, or outsider. The ensuing marginalization has excluded them from entering the white-walled enclaves of the art world outside of the South except as curiosities or folk art.

Arnett decided, in 2010, to donate the highlights of his collection to the then newly established Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which takes its name from a 1920 Langston Hughes poem, “The Negro Speaks of River,” the last line of which is “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

This allowed for a fresh start in achieving Arnett’s lifelong ambition. And in fall
2014, the foundation made an initial donation of 57 objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was the start of a planned transfer of hundreds of artworks to dozens of museums. in 2016, the Foundation entered into discussions with U.S. museums, modeling its approach on the methodology of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation by which art purchases are met with donations.

We believe that the willingness of a museum board and staff to commit resources, expertise, and space when making an acquisition offers a greater likelihood that artworks so acquired will become integral to the Museum’s holdings. The recent acquisition of 62 artworks from the Foundation by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco was the first such major commitment.

Audiences living in or visiting the Bay Area now find an open door to the achievements of American artists previously excluded from the art world’s prevailing narrative. The stories told by these powerful artworks should attract new viewers seeing their heritage represented for the first time, and will open the eyes of traditional museum-goers previously unaware of long-neglected artistic achievements.

It is our hope that a century hence, in survey exhibitions of art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the artworks of Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, the quilters of Gee’s Bend, and dozens of others will be shown alongside works by artists who are today household names—together with other artists whose names have yet to surface.

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