A recurrent dream for a minority of Southern whites, a dream remarkable for its staying power in the face of adverse evidence, has been that the South might someday show the world how an equitable biracial society could be achieved. Not a few white Southerners have been tempted to hope that the South could do more than catch up with the Northern pattern of race relations—that it could break through to an accommodation qualitatively different from and superior to that displayed in, say, Philadelphia or Cicero. If this should come to pass, “the South, which has always felt itself reserved for a high destiny,” as Yale law professor Charles Black observed, “would have found it, and would have come to flower at last. And the fragrance of it would spread, beyond calculation, over the world.”
Southern black leaders, from Martin Luther King to Charles Evers and, most recently, James Meredith, have entertained a similar hope for their region. Howard Lee, the black mayor of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, argues, for instance, that white Southerners are at least aware of black people’s existence, which makes them easier for Negroes to deal with than Northerners. Writer Louis Lomax’ assessment of the prospects for his hometown of Valdosta, Georgia, was a little less backhanded: “Valdosta will make it peacefully into tomorrow, partly because the whites themselves are slowly changing, partly because the Negroes are not really pushing. Time nudges them both along.”
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