As the South Goes
A Canary in the Coal Mine

By Khalil Nieves, UFE Education Specialist
February 2, 2007

The Southernization of US Society

If you look for economic inequality, or if you look for racial inequalty, you can find it anywhere in the US. But in the South, you’ll find it in abundance. For example, 19.3% of people in Mississippi fall below the poverty line (that’s 120,039 families). In Louisiana, 19% of its citizens are below the poverty line, or 183,448 families.

What’s going on? What’s up with the South?

The fact is that this is nothing new. Since the beginning of US history, the South has had these characteristics. For example, in 1860, there was a slave population of 3,871,164 people that generated $3,271,218,000 (in 1990 dollars) of wealth. If we look at the disparities that continue today, we see there’s a straight line running from slavery to the present.

But the fact that inequality is greatest in the South is not the main reason to focus time, attention, and resources on that region. It’s because inequality is the South’s chief export. A recent article in The Nation magazine discusses and underscores how the South has set trends that then became part of the entire national fabric. This article points out that “no one should have been surprised that the senator who led the Republican Party of 2002 paid homage to the States Rights Party of 1948….Those Dixiecrats fatally extolled by Trent Lott at the hundredth birthday celebration of their onetime presidential nominee Strom Thurmond were very much a template for today's Republican Party…Segregation (aka "states' rights") was the centerpiece of the Dixiecrats' platform.”

Jean Hardisty, a senior scholar at the Wellesley Centers for Women, says, “The South is a bellwether of conditions increasingly characteristic of the rest of the country: attacks on unions, a “kinder, gentler” racism, right-wing populism that legitimizes institutional power, and the increasing decimation of the middle class as the gap between rich and poor becomes a chasm.“

Racialization of Class Conflict

The article then illustrates the continuing legacy of using race to defuse class struggle: “But the exploitation of race has never been an end in itself. Then and now, it is an emotional means to a pragmatic political and economic goal: The key objective shared by Republicans and Dixiecrats is a government that's a passive referee overseeing a status quo of unfettered free enterprise rather than a dynamic agent of social progress.” Both Republicans and Dixiecrats believed that governments should allow corporations to be free to operate in a free market style, and to have less government protection of citizens.

We agree with the Nation’s analysis that national corporate strategy was based on creating a Southern defection from the Democratic Party, and was “a power play carefully orchestrated by the corporate mandarins of the region (or their lawyers).” This strategy mainly helped northern parent companies. Historically, race has been and continues to be used to hide class conflict, and Southern bosses used racist propaganda and vigilantes to foment strife between black and white workers. This kept unions weak and wages depressed. These powerful business interests wanted to roll back the New Deal and one of their boldest challenges was to Section 7(a) of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (which guaranteed workers the right to organize and bargain collectively). This resulted in weaker unions.

Southern Leadership

Because of this history and its continuing legacy we need to specifically address the growing economic inequality in the South and in our country. It is necessary to challenge the view that race, not class, is paramount.

A final reason to focus on the South is the strength and courage of its organizing tradition. It’s a lot tougher to organize in the repressive conditions that have existed and still exist in the South. Southern community leaders have a significant contribution to make because of their hard-won victories, experience, insights and wisdom that will move our economic justice work forward. Quality leadership comes out of lived experience, reflection, and wisdom gained in struggle. As Jean Hardisty points out, “Progressives often do not understand the importance of African Americans, Native Americans, and other people of color to the movement. People of color have been at the forefront of progressive change… They have lived their lives in a history and culture of resistance to exploitation and racism. “ She also notes that there is “astonishing wisdom that resides in the South.”

Vincent Harding similarly speaks about how the civil rights movement came out of the South. “Now, it is crucial to remember the point of origin of this amazing, transformative black power of our time. For it was out of the South, not the supposedly more politically sophisticated North, that the modern movement first developed. It came from the hardest places of the black situation, the most difficult terrain.”

Vincent Harding then continues discussing how to do this by pointing out that during the 1950s and 1960s “the movement caught the imagination and the conscience of a generation of white young people in America. It offered to them a new sense of hope and of purpose, a new consideration of their possible role in the transformation of America.” This transformation also transformed “older whites, many of whom had lived through the harrowing political persecution of the Cold War period in America [and] now saw hope again. Indeed, beyond individuals, major white-dominated institutions in the society were forced to respond”.

Going South

Going South will enable UFE to do this work. Specifically we will focus on asset-building, community-building and public policy analysis and prescription. UFE has made a commitment to work in the South, and all we need to do is to struggle. Always struggle.