The South Second Reconstruction

MY MOTHER was uncomfortable; she found it difficult to explain what she was asking. We live in Nashville, but she had grown up in Alabama, and her family still live there. It was an impending visit to her family which had occasioned the awkward discussion. "Could you just cut your hair a little? Most people won't do anything, but... there is a class of people ... 'white trash'..." She couldn't say much; the Southern redneck has been used so many times as a stereotype to describe all Southerners that discussion of the subject has become painful for many, particularly for those who, like my mother, grew up in rural areas and still have family ties there.

The visit, though not as exciting as envisioned by my mother, was a chance to mix with rural Southern whites, a group whose social order has been severely shaken in the past decade, and who are struggling to maintain their identity in the face of an influx of change from outside.

High school students in particular embodied the conflicts between the older order and the new. Along with college students, they have fewer emotional ties with the old South and are thus more receptive to ideas from outside; but unlike college students, they are still under the control of their parents. A cousin in Birmingham listens to the Jefferson Airplane's songs of revolution, and decorates his room with posters and peace symbols. He also hangs Confederate and American flags in his room. He sometimes talks derisively about "nighgers," but his parents worry that he will become involved in the Free Bobby Seale rallies organized by blacks at his integrated school. In short, he is caught between the traditional order of the South and the new order of his generation, accepting one without rejecting the other and seemingly unaware of the incongruity of his position.

Further South, another cousin told me about his friend, the "hippie of Beauregard High School," who always carries around a little done in his wallet. My aunt and uncle would be horrified if they knew that one of their son's friends smokes pot: my cousin himself is a Wallace man, but he isn't upset about his friend's proclivities.

The white view of blacks seems to have changed, too. Integration is becoming accepted, except when attempts are made to eliminate de facto segregation by busing. This is about the same reception integration has received in the rest of the country. This doesn't mean, however, that the race question is quiet. George Wallace did win a close runoff in 1970 by waging perhaps the most blatantly racist campaign of the past decade. And during gossip over a meal-one afternoon a Baptist minister grinned and told us how "Down our way there was this nigger that killed a woman. The sheriff went down and got him, but on the way back to town, the sheriff's gun accidentally went off and killed the nigger," Old habits die hard; but the generation which has never known respect for the rights of a black man is dying out, and their successors are growing up in the awareness that the old order will not be allowed to survive much longer.

THE 1960's have not been easy for the South; in some ways, they have almost amounted to a second Reconstruction. Conquered by the judicial and political might of the North, the South has seen its institutions revised, its voting rolls altered, its very existence as a culture threatened by an influx of carpetbaggers. The lawyers who brought civil rights cases to trial, the college students who came down to participate in sit-ins, the inexorable stream of Supreme Court decisions, all seem to have been parts of an occupation by outsiders sent down from Washington. (It is amazing that so many Northerners consider Washington to be in the South. To an Alabamian or a Tennessean, Washington is as much a part of the North as New York, both geographically and intellectually.) This has all resulted in a sort of regional persecution complex. Most Southerners feel, with some justification, that they have taken more than their share of blame. Thus many who disagree with the racial views of George Wallace admire him for his refusal to back down before the federal government and for his defiance of "northern liberals" in general.

Defiance, while it has affected the young, has apparently not been able to isolate them. They live in their double world of racism and revolution, of Woodstock and George Wallace, unsure whether to follow the leaders of their generation or of their parents. As my Birmingham cousin's mother said, "At his age, it's easy for him to get involved in these movements and things." The youth of the deep South are for the first time facing a significant alternative to the traditional values of their parents. The strength with which that alternative reaches them will be the crucial factor in determining whether the next generation will represent a significant change in Southern values.