“A Sense of Place”

Twenty-five years ago, astronauts bravely probed the unknown in space, but Southern newspapers were afraid to examine the maneuverings of their towns’ power barons. Most publishers, part of the local establishment, had skeletons to hide, and too many editors embraced a very limited notion of democracy. Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, who won national praise for criticizing integration, was still defending America’s war against Vietnam when the Institute for Southern Studies began.

Southern Exposure and the Institute challenged the silence, the fear, and the status quo with gusto. We helped push “power structure analysis” into the region, helped localize the national debate about “corporate accountability,” and helped wage “corporate campaigns” against such deserving targets as textile giant J.R. Stevens and your local utility company. We insisted on seeing the South as more complicated than white vs. black; we talked about class, we saw all the issues intertwined together, and we nurtured (as best we could) the many movements springing from the energy and space liberated by the Freedom Movement.

It was an exciting time. The modern women’s and environmental movements were only beginning in the South in the early 1970s. Maynard Jackson became the first black mayor of Atlanta, and other black elected officials were pushing political enfranchisement to its full meaning. Southern Exposure and the Institute, through the leadership of Sue Thrasher, Leah Wise and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, used and developed the tool of oral history to raise our consciousness of the legacy given us by everyday freedom fighters — people who learned to use a sense of place as the foundation for expressing their dignity and connectedness, in a song or a labor strike.

Maybe we seemed moralistic and sentimental, but we rightly sensed the evil consequences of capitalism’s march through a region freed of the impediments of legalized racial division and inconvenient customs. Through our sweetly subversive small-paper column, Facing South (“Voices of Tradition in a Changing Region”), and in a dozen other ways, we did our best to promote such community-building values as solidarity and neighborliness against the devilish glitter of money as the medium of all worthwhile human interaction.

Today, we face the stress of that money chase, infusing every aspect of our lives. It is still an external force, but it has worked itself so much more deeply into the fabric of our culture, our imagination, our identity, our sense of place — or lack thereof. The same can be said of racism. It is an external force we hardly know how we internalize and enlarge, like the toxic-laced atmosphere that affects every breath we take, yet it becomes so familiar, so routine, it’s difficult to know how to confront or change it, even though it’s damaging life all around us.

We have better newspapers these days in the South: more investigations, more information about the powers-that-be. And we have more citizen activists, more groups, and more public-interest professionals. As a region, we have made great gains. We are part of a long history of people asserting the best interests of their community, ever-more widely defined, against the narrow interests of the money lords and race splitters.

For this region especially, the challenge remains to build the base for systemic change. The institutional base includes lasting organizations; well-rooted temples of hope and renewal; mass-membership unions serving a variety of positive self-interests; and multi-dimensional networks or parties with the capacity to focus our wonderful energy.

The “idea base” for change includes the values, analysis, ideology, and vision to guide and sustain radical progressive work, along with the consciousness of being in a long line of change-makers who focus not just on self, but on a community, a people, a sense of place.