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Group attempts to forge 21st Century agenda for region

November 10, 2009 —

What kind of place do you want the South to be in 2020? That thought-provoking question was the subject which brought together more than 30 planners, politicians, academics and journalists – your humble scribe included – for a conference at Davidson College this past weekend by the Center for a Better South. 

The Center for a Better South is the grandchild of the LQC Lamar Society, which was founded in 1969 by a group of young Southern leaders, including former Mississippi Gov. William Winter, former North Carolina Sen. Terry Sanford, Alabama publisher H. Brandt Ayers and Mississippi writer Willie Morris, to forge a vision for a post-segregation South that would, as Sanford once put it, “avoid making Northern mistakes in a Southern setting.”

Proposing an agenda for the region took more courage 40 years ago took more courage than it does today, but arguably it has never been harder, in what the center’s president, Andy Brack, described as “increasingly partisan and media-saturated world of small soundbites for big problems.”

Take education, which has been at the top of every progressive list of improvements for decades. These days there are both liberal and conservative strategies for improving education, and sometimes they are even in agreement. Witness the praise for the Obama administration’s efforts by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue at a recent one-day session in Atlanta. But many of the fundamental problems the South faces remain, even as the standard for improvement rises steadily higher.

The conferees at last weekend’s session didn’t break the mold on this subject, but reshaped it somewhat by setting a goal which addresses economic development and education simultaneously.  It was an attempt to look at an old problem in a 21^st Century way.

Similarly, the need for adequate energy to power a viable economy has been an agenda item since the 1930s, but in setting reasonable goals for the next decade, this group had to confront the reality that greater energy efficiency is a prerequisite, no matter what kinds of power plants are built in the region. Hospitals have been on the improvement list a long time, but the group which met last weekend used a term of fairly recent coinage, “wellness,” to describe its aspirations for the future.

The region’s deeply engrained tradition of violence has been a factor in many of the South’s problems, from race relations to incarceration. But the Davidson group chose to look at the subject more broadly and set specific benchmarks for personal security and community safety.

Like all good agenda-setting enterprises, this one is an ongoing process. What the group hopes to do is further refine its goals and present them as a starting point for debate and problem-solving to those who make policy and laws across the region. Ayers, in a luncheon speech Saturday, spoke wistfully of how the history of progressive movements in the South has been in many ways a series of burned-out volcanoes, with each successive effort falling short of the ambitions that sparked it. But it’s good in any case to initiate a discussion.

Sometimes during the weekend, old ideas about progress bumped uneasily into newer ones. During one session, former US Rep. Glen Browder, who has used his practical experience to forge a new career as a professor of political science at Jacksonville State University -- his latest book is "The South's New Racial Politics: Inside the Race Game of Southern History" -- expressed mild irritation because the screen behind him was scrolling Twitter message about what was being said, as he spoke. The future, even for those who have thought long and hard about it, can often be disorienting when it arrives.

As part of the agenda-setting exercise, we were asked to list what we liked and disliked about the South. It was striking, I thought, how similar the answers were – I’d listed “narrative ability,” a quality I thought would take a lot of explaining, but someone else named “story-telling” as something they liked about the South.

Within this group, it wasn’t necessary to explain too much why this quality was positive and vital. Southerners like to tell a story. We just have to work harder at figuring out what the story is going to be.