The American South Today

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish-Tribune

Escaping a particularly cold Prince Edward Island  spring, we flew to Tampa, rented a car, and spent two weeks driving along the Gulf of Mexico coast, through the Florida panhandle, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, until we reached New Orleans.

This whole region is part of the American deep South, where 50 years ago, segregation was still the norm, the racist Ku Klux Klan was a power to be reckoned with, and civil rights workers were beaten and even murdered.

On the surface, little of this horrid period of history remains visible. On the highways and in the towns, one sees the same fast food chains, Walmarts and supermarkets as elsewhere in the United States. Blacks and whites now eat and work together.

In Biloxi, Miss., we visited Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America.

In 1861, 11 of the states where African-Americans were enslaved seceded from the Union. Most American Jews abhorred slavery, though some did serve in the Confederate ranks.

Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana was appointed Secretary of State of the Confederacy by Davis in 1862.

The southern states were only defeated following one of the most terrible civil wars in history, one that cost 625,000 lives. Finally, in 1865, the Confederacy ceased to exist and slavery was abolished.

But for the next century, the so-called Jim Crow laws kept Blacks segregated in schools, workplaces and neighbourhoods. Few could even vote, much less run for political office.

All that changed after the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King in the 1960s.

A significant number of those trying to bring the South into the 20th century were idealistic young Jews. About 50 per cent of the civil rights attorneys in the South during the 1960s were Jews, as were more than half of the whites who went to Mississippi in 1964 to challenge the Jim Crow Laws.

Two Jewish activists, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, along with one African American, James Chaney, were murdered there by the Ku Klux Klan as a result of their participation.

In the South today, Blacks serve as sheriffs, mayors, state legislators and congressional representatives.

In Biloxi, more people are interested in the casinos that have turned the city into a southern Las Vegas than in the so-called ‘Lost Cause,’ the Confederacy of Jefferson Davis.  

The South does retain a distinctive culture, however. Most of the stations we found on the car radio were devoted either to country music or evangelical religion. 

Last year, Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi, had to apologize when he suggested during an interview that the White Citizens’ Councils active in his state during the era of desegregation weren’t “that bad.” 

And in 2002 Trent Lott, a US Senator from the state, was forced to step down as the leader of the Republican Party in that body when he remarked that Strom Thurmond, the arch-segregationist senator from South Carolina, should have won the 1948 presidential election. Thurmond ran as a ‘Dixiecrat’ opposing integration.

“When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him,” said Lott. “We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years either.”

Despite such backsliding, the American South, more than at any time since the Civil War, has itself been integrated into the wider political culture of the country.