I went to Birmingham, Alabama, during the first week of February to participate in the Southern Cultures Celebration hosted by the Advent Episcopal School. The Center serves as adviser to Craig Battles, who plans and coordinates a wonderful annual program, which includes teacher workshops and programs for students and a gala evening of entertainment and an awards ceremony honoring outstanding Southerners. Craig asked me to make awards to five Southern Achievers, an admirable ceremony that took place in the Episcopal Cathedral in Birmingham.

The program included performances by, among others, the Birmingham Heritage Band playing superb swing music, Alabama Black Belt bluesman Jerry Daniel, Southern gospel singer George Carneal, the spiritual-rap poetry and gospel sounds of Tony Leonard and the Three Gifts, the stories of troubadour Bob Tedrow, and the haunting melodies of Native American musician Mary Youngblood. The Mockingbird Players of Monroeville, Alabama (Harper Lee's hometown) performed excerpts from her novel. Oxford’s own Tom Arriola was master of ceremonies, effortlessly keeping the program on track. The event nicely captured the range of Southern creativity.

The highlight of the evening was the presentation of awards to Frank “Doc” Adams, the beloved Birmingham jazzman and educator; Mary Badham, the child star of To Kill a Mockingbird; Rick Bragg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist; Emory Cunningham, founder of Southern Living magazine; and John Egerton, the award-winning writer and promoter of good Southern causes. Cunningham had died the week before, adding a poignant note to the evening, as his daughters accepted the award. Teacher and student workshops the next day focused on "The Heroic Southerner," looking at the meaning of heroism, from ancient mythology to contemporary concepts, and its relationship to changing patterns of Southern culture.

The Southern Cultures Celebration honors a wide range of Southerners, gives credit to the sometimes astounding creativity of Southern culture, and sponsors the hard, productive work of teacher and student training about the South. It is only one of many events that the Center is pleased to work with, but we are honored that Craig consults with us about his program and possible participants. He also works with the good folks at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who have been actively involved with the program since its beginning.

I thought of the program in terms of the National Endowment for the Humanities announcement of the recipients of planning grants for its Regional Humanities Center initiative. The Center has received one of those planning grants, and we are energetically working to put together a new plan for future Center work that will rest on bringing together the Center’s mission with the work of other cultural institutions in our region. We hope to work with colleges and universities, primary and secondary schools, museums, radio and television stations, historic preservation agencies, libraries, historical societies, environmental groups, arts organizations, and other institutions concerned with regional history and culture.

The Endowment divided the nation into 10 regions, awarding 16 planning grants with others likely to come. The Center’s region is the Deep South--Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. We congratulate the other recipient in our region, Tulane University. This is a competitive program, designed to designate a NEH center in each region, but the University of Mississippi has cooperated often with Tulane on projects, and I am a fan of the work of Lawrence Powell, Sylvia Frey, and the others working on Tulane’s project. We will surely find ways to cooperate as we all think more systematically about the relationship between region and the humanities.

The Endowment program is about collaboration, and the coming year will be an exciting one as we assess the needs for cultural study in the Deep South, meet with representatives of a variety of institutions, and think imaginatively about the common ground that surely exists among institutions in the region. The Center will continue to study the entire South--as is our mission--but we will have a new commitment in the coming year to discerning ways to assist the cultural institutions of the Deep South as we all meet our mutual goals of addressing humanities concerns.