The South Will Rise Again

By Nina Burleigh, AlterNet. Posted September 3, 2004.

On a recent trip through South Carolina, I visited the Museum of the Daughters of the Confederacy in Charleston. The charming curator there, June Murray Wells, is a trim 70-something raconteur who remembers being asked to pull tight the corset stays for bird-like nonagenarians in the 1940s whose daddies really had worn the grey in the Civil War.

With Hurricane Charley bearing down on us, Mrs. Wells reminisced about the last big hurricane to slam Charleston — Hugo in 1989 — and walked me over to a display case which, she said, held the single most precious object in the Museum’s entire collection, one that provoked thousands of concerned letters from across the South after the big storm, inquiring about its safety.

On a bed of red velvet, I saw what pearl of great price had survived. A single coiled yellow-gray strand of Robert E. Lee’s hair, purportedly trimmed from the actual corpse’s head.

Medieval relic worship cannot surprise anyone who has spent any time at all in the Palmetto State, where state legislators famously refused to take the Confederate flag down from the Statehouse dome in this new millennium. Charleston is, after all, home to the Citadel, whose towering pink faux-feudal crenellated walls still cloister fresh generations of Southern men who sport spit-shined swords and memorize the fine and not so fine arts of war.

That Old South, though, is crumbling away, notwithstanding the integrity of those walls. The change has not been sudden, but more of an erosion. Slowly, slowly – as slowly as the hundred long years of Strom Thurmond’s life – the reign of white and black men who came of age in an era of separate drinking fountains and burning crosses is ending.

Republicans – as they are wont to remind black voters – freed the slaves under Abraham Lincoln. The South was dominated, though, by white male Democrats throughout the first half of the twentieth century, until LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Southern majority turned to the Republican Party, which has been quadrennially tossing racist red meat to poor whites ever since. LBJ predicted that was ahead, remarking, when he signed the law, “I have signed away the South for a generation.” It turned out to be two.

But forty years later, with Thurmond’s death, the retirements of North Carolina’s Jesse Helms and now, Sen. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, and Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia in 2004, the old conservative bulls in the Senate who have retarded the South’s social progress for decades are finally letting go.

There are to be sure, relics still in power. But with each passing year, their luster dims, their strength wanes. There’s the oleaginous disgraced former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. As slick in person as a shiny patch on the Missisippi Delta – and nearly as toxic – he’s still befuddled over being betrayed by his fellow Republicans after publicly pining for the good old days of separate but equal, a sentiment with which, he surely thought, any Southern man would concur.

Turncoat Democrat Zell Miller of Georgia put in a career-zapping performance that marked the end of his political life when spoke before Dick Cheney on the convention podium on Wednesday. The Democrat running for his Senate seat is an African-American woman, United States Rep. Denise Majette.

The departure of the old white boys isn’t the only needed change. It’s possible that the black civil rights leaders themselves, men like John Lewis, must move on too before the Old South can finally rest in peace. The rhetoric and imagery of black men who cut their political teeth marching in the 1960s, while genuinely heroic, will have to give way to make room for younger black men and women speaking for a generation of Southern blacks whose problems are more complicated than separate drinking fountains.

Nina Burleigh has written for The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune and New York magazine. As a reporter for Time magazine, she was among the first American journalists to enter Iraq after the Gulf War.

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