The Center formally began its work in November 1977, with a Eudora Welty Symposium, and we will be hosting another meeting, A Symposium on Southern Studies, November 8-9, to mark the Center’s 25th anniversary. Please read about the early days of the Center in Geralds Walton’s story elsewhere in this issue of the Southern Register.

A key consultant in formulating the Center’s early approach was Dick Brown, of the Newberry Library in Chicago. He visited the campus and reinforced the idea that an academic curriculum should be the foundation for Center work, leading to our Southern Studies Program. Dick returned to the Center last summer, for an Advisory Committee meeting, and he noted that the Center’s greatest contribution has been to document a key quarter century in the South’s history.

Think back to 25 years ago, when voters elected a Deep South president, Jimmy Carter, and Time magazine did a famous issue praising the South’s many virtues–all of this after a decade of civil rights turmoil had brought an end to a long phase of Southern history. By 1977, the South had become the Sunbelt, a place to set the pace for the nation’s economic development. The title of Peter Applebome’s recent book about the region, Dixie Rising, captures the South’s prominence in the national life.

Those same 25 years since 1977 were also ones in which the South saw diminishing ties with its past, and yet the Center has been there to document the vanishing, and transforming, traditional cultures that long gave distinctive character to the region. The Southern Media Archive and the Blues Archive, now both housed in the John Davis Williams Library, have photographs, home movies, commercial recordings, field recordings, oral histories, and other materials that provide a unique resource to understanding the recent Southern past and earlier times as well. Center-collected folk art rests in the University Museums, providing access to another form of creative culture that has become increasingly prominent in the contemporary period.

Southern Studies faculty have researched and published books on economic development, religion, on writers, musicians, and artists. They have made important contributions to the study of the Civil War and the civil rights movement. Our graduate students have researched and written theses, which have often been initial research efforts on popular and folk topics and have especially given first-hand documentary accounts of intriguing places like Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint and Graceland Too.

Center-sponsored conferences and symposia have been forums for the best scholars of the South to present their work, and the published volumes from them are a record of contemporary research on key topics in Southern cultural studies.

Those of us who have been long associated with the Center probably are too close to its work to appreciate its collective contributions in focusing research on the South, which will wait for future scholars to understand fully and to utilize the resources it has produced.

The November symposium will bring together scholars and writers who have been associated with such Center projects as the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, documentary studies, and the blues. Our founding director, Bill Ferris, will return for a featured presentation looking back on the Center’s development. We are inviting former students back for a panel on the Southern Studies Program, and we will even have a prom with music from our Southern Studies family, our students and faculty who have often been performers of Southern music as well as students of it.

One of the enduring Center approaches has been to provide a bridge from the academic community to a broader public. We try to involve the public in our activities, making the latest scholarship accessible to broader audiences, and we want to involve many people in the activities of this 25th anniversary year. So we invite everyone to come to our November symposium and hear our common reflections on the state of the South and the study of the South. While we look backwards, we also will be looking ahead to the Center’s, and the region’s, next quarter century as well.

Charles Reagan Wilson