“Lay Claim on Tomorrow”

At the outset, let me applaud the hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and persons who contributed time, money, ideas, art, poems, jokes, photographs, and visions of a better world that have filled Southern Exposure’s pages since day one. Southern society has been changed, but not nearly as much as we can. Let’s continue to lay claim today on tomorrow.

There are literally hundreds of organizations and thousands of organizers all over the South that are fighting for justice that simply didn’t exist twenty-five years ago. Many of these freedom fighters target poor conditions at a school or school board policies, recreation facilities, dumping families off welfare, job development, tenants’ rights, environmental protection, constitutional protection for the criminally accused, worker rights, voting rights, and campaign finance, just to mention a few.

It was not possible for such a multi-faceted movement to exist in the South that preceded the founding of Southern Exposure and the Institute for Southern Studies. The iron fists that ruled and divided the South prior to Jim Crow’s timely death would not have tolerated progressive collusion on all these fronts.

Let me hasten to add that these different fronts in the progressive movement have made considerable gains in changing the face of capitalism. It is simply not the same world we inherited twenty-five years ago, nor is it the place we envisioned and wanted to be.

While the military-industrial complex is not growing at the alarming rates of the Carter and Reagan years, we certainly have not achieved our vision of the peace-time economy nurtured by the very first edition of Southern Exposure.

Industrialists can’t locate their operations anywhere they damn please and spew poisons on the weakest and the people of color without challenge, but we are a long way from our vision of a sustainable economic future. Southern tenants and workers exercise rights at levels that didn’t exist twenty-five years ago, but workplace democracy and democracy where we live has not been achieved.

Although we have won the access for women and people of color in some of the highest levels of politics, piercing the corporate glass ceiling has been elusive, and the upper reaches of corporate power are still reserved for elite white gentlemen only. The South has become an important battleground for many worker struggles, and unionism is on the rise again. This is the South, yesterday and today.

Through these exciting struggles, freedom fighters envision a more democratic society and struggles for change. These struggles face significant challenges. We must overcome splintering and fragmentation. There is not enough inter-struggle pollination of vision and goals.

We must strategically focus our intellectual power to develop “bridge issues” that intersect with everything else, like housing and the environment. Strategies must be employed to unite progressives at home and abroad.

We must support Southern Exposure and the Institute for Southern Studies and create other working-class institutions that are organized to assist freedom fighters in the lifelong quest to determine who we are, where we are going, and how we will get there.

Bon voyage! And lay claim on tomorrow today, for our children’s children.