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A changing, more urbanized South (In Your Dreams!)
You know the images that say "Southern." Kudzu on a red clay bank. A sharecropper's shack abandoned in a field of cotton (or tobacco). Moonshiners vrooming down country roads.
That iconography that has embedded itself in our Southern souls is rural. Even Southern food is the food of rural poverty - the pig parts, greens, sweet potatoes, and corn in multiple manifestations (including distilled into a jug).
Yet a group of Southern leaders and thinkers who gathered last weekend at Davidson College outside Charlotte heard experts describe a region that has become more urban than rural.
Mindsets, though, change more slowly than demographics.
The group was pulled together by a nonpartisan nonprofit group, the Center for a Better South, based in Charleston, for the purpose of devising an Agenda for a Better South - major areas on which Southern leaders should concentrate their efforts. The agenda, still in drafting stages, is to be released in the coming week.
Of course, we talked about education, poverty, race relations, taxes and crime, among other issues. No self-respecting group of "progressives" would otherwise. The agenda's goals are ambitious and admirable. One example, from the draft: To improve health, "each Southern state should increase life expectancy to levels on par with Canada."
Achieving the goals would make this region safer, smarter and healthier. So this isn't a critique of the goal-setting (a process I had to miss). However, I found some of the other topics more thought-provoking.
The South is urbanizing, its demographics changing.
Ferrel Guillory, director of UNC Chapel Hill's Program on Public Life, discussed how in-migration to the South is enriching education and income levels, and for blacks as well as whites.
People are flowing into major metro areas: "The South has shifted from an agrarian to a metropolitan society."
I think much of the Southern leadership infrastructure still puts rural problems ahead of urban ones. Guillory illustrated this: He's been studying South Carolina's poverty-ridden Interstate 95 corridor. Yet, he pointed out, in South Carolina more distressed people live in the city of Columbia than in the I-95 region.
"We're looking at place-based solutions," Guillory said. Instead, maybe we should just focus on people in need, urban or rural.
Should the South forget "Leading"?
Jay Barth of Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., dared ask this. He thinks Southern progress is hindered by several qualities, such as an inability to embrace diversity, including race, ethnicity and sexual orientation.
Another hindrance, he said, is the South's increasing suburbanization. Much of its 20th-century growth has been suburban, unlike the 19th- and early 20th-century growth in the cities of the North.
Suburbanization allows class and race separation to continue, Barth said, and lets suburban residents disconnect from the larger metro region.
In a similar vein, former U.S. Rep. Glen Browder from Alabama was blunt about how the rest of the world views the South. If you think it's a problem that people see an invisible D(emocrat) or R(epublican) behind your name, he said, realize that Southerners have "an invisible S."
"Our brand is broken," he said. "It's tainted."
"Quit dreaming about leading the nation," he advised. Instead, concentrate on improving your state.
Yet from all this emerged no visions that directly confront an urbanizing region. Had I been in the goal-setting, I'd have pushed for one to reduce vehicle travel, for environmental and wellness reasons, or to openly advocate more money for transit.
Old images die hard. Those sepia-tinted memories of mules and music remain powerful for many Southerners. Somehow, the newer image of a minivan in the Target parking lot hasn't embedded itself in anyone's soul - and isn't likely to.
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Sources: McClatchy Newspapers, Charlotte Observer, MSNBC, Wikipedia, Google Maps
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