Who Speaks for the South?

Dewey Grantham, Jr., is a good historian and a great gentleman, so I trust he'll indulge my use of his words of nearly 20 years ago to summarize a now discredited point of view which we need to listen to in order to learn about who speaks for the South. In 1967 Grantham explained that the anthology he had edited, The South and the Sectional Image, focused on the white South exclusively because whites had "determined the 'place' of the Negro in Southern life and regarded him as only a shadowy object and not [as] an actor or doer." 

Although he was writing as an historian, presumably as a critic of a body of thought, Grantham chose to accept the assumptions of his subjects, as though still, in 1967, blacks had nothing worth hearing to say about the South. Women's views did not penetrate into the Grantham anthology of 1967, but their absence did not provoke an explanation even as cursory as that about blacks. Happily, the writing of history about Southerners is much broader now. 

When Grantham wrote, the civil rights revolution had not made itself felt in the academy, where most histories are written, and feminism was barely beginning to be a force again in American life. Almost 20 years later, after two revolutions, we have abundant research and writing not only on blacks and white women, but also on working-class Southerners of both races and sexes. While writing about Southern history in the period before 1967 focused mainly (with some brilliant exceptions, of course) bn elite white men, we now have easily accessible books on many sorts of Southerners. By my count, nearly 30 books on the history of Southern blacks have appeared since 1981. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall counts about seven books on Southern women's history since 1979. There are monographs on Southern poor whites, agricultural and industrial workers, Indians, and Appalachian people. Clearly, new voices in Southern history are speaking and being heard. 

While the writing of the history of Southerners has broadened considerably, I'm not sure that the question of who speaks for the South in history can be answered any differently. We now have white women speaking for themselves and black people speaking for themselves. But have their voices influenced the central issue of who speaks for the South? To answer that, we need to return to the black studies movement of the 1960s and the women's studies movement of the 1970s. 

When black students began demanding courses on black history and culture, they often insisted on the creation of black studies departments as well. Understandably, the students did not trust the traditional departments which had ignored blacks for so long to bring the black experience into the curriculum in good faith; the traditional departments in predominantly white universities (where the demands were voiced most saliently) had faculties that were still lily-white and seemingly uninterested in blackness. The decision to back separate departments was based on an understanding of academic politics, but it also let many traditional departments off the hook. Faculty in many history departments felt no need to offer courses on the black experience or to integrate black materials into existing courses because, they could explain, the black studies departments would take care of all that. A new structure, black studies, was erected alongside, but not touching, older departments like history. Black history may exist in the Afro-American studies department but may not change the way American history is taught in the history department. 

The story repeated itself in the 1970s with women's history and departments of women's studies. The divorce of the new fields and the traditional teaching extends to Southern history. Instead of there being one entity — the South — there are now three. Black Southerners are part of black history, Southern women are part of women's history. Southern history still belongs to white men. 

Four recent books on Southerners' ideas of the South illustrate this point: Michael O'Brien, The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941 (1979); Richard H. King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955 (1980); Daniel Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (1982); and Fred Hobson, Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (1983). Lillian Smith figures in the Hobson and King books; Ellen Glasgow appears in Singal. But none of these books examines the thought of other female Southerners, like Jessie Daniel Ames or Mary McLeod Bethune, or of any black Southerners. It is as though women and blacks who lived in the South had no views on their region. This, of course, was not the case. 

Let me give two random pronouncements I stumbled across while pursuing other trains of thought. First, in 1923 Walter White, a Negro Atlantan who worked for the NAACP at the time and became executive secretary of that organization in the 1930s, said that the white South had thoroughly "dehumanized and brutalized itself by its policy of oppression of the Negro." He called white Southern leaders "ineffectual," "depraved," and "rotten." In 1932, Charles S. Johnson, the Fisk sociologist who later became the first Negro president of that university, reacted to Allen Tate's cancellation of an interracial party in Nashville for NAACP official James Weldon Johnson and prominent poet Langston Hughes because Tate objected to interracial marriage. Johnson said, "The South as an institution can sink through the bottom of the pit of hell." 

Are not these men speaking of the South as they knew it? If the four white male authors mentioned above are any indication, the views of White and Johnson could only tell us about black Southerners, not about the South. Howard Odum, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson, according to those authors, speak for the whole South. 

Obviously those of us who are black or female and who write about Southerners who were black or female do not mean for Southern voices to be limited to the likes of Odum, Tate, and Donaldson. We like to think that we are shaping a new way of listening to Southerners in the past that is more plural. We are convinced that our subjects are saying something about the South as a whole. So far, we have not been heard. Blacks may speak for blacks now, and women speak for women, but to judge from the books I have read, in 1984 as in 1967, elite white men still speak for the South.