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Excerpts from the essay collection You Can’t
Eat Magnolias (1972), edited by H. Brandt Ayers
and
Thomas H. Naylor.
“
Southerners–Jefferson, Madison, John Marshall–conceived
the design of our democracy and found the words
to describe it, words we still quote. Up to the
time of Lincoln’s inauguration the South had
dominated the White House, the Congress, the Supreme
Court, the cabinet, even American diplomacy. The
Jeffersonian tradition encouraged a vigorous and
respectable school of antislavery in the South
which exposed and attacked the evils of slavery
on every level. The slave states contained many
more antislavery societies than the free states,
furnishing leadership for the Abolitionist movement.
But even while a Tennessean, Andrew Jackson, was
spreading the participatory power of democracy
to average citizens everywhere, the South was beginning
to be locked into the paradox from which it is
just now showing signs of escaping.”
H. Brandt Ayers
“You Can’t Eat Magnolias”
“Increasingly, a large number of Southerners have a strong desire to
seek realistic solutions to the South’s problems. Among these Southerners
are the moderate governors recently elected in half a dozen Southern states,
and
the members of the L.Q.C. Lamar Society, whose goals are constructive change
through practical solutions to the South’s major problems. These individuals
(and many others like them) recognize the South’s great potential in terms
of both human and natural resources. That the South still has a chance to avoid
some of the urban and environmental problems of the North is well understood
by this new breed. . . .
People like these are committed to the premise that Southerners can find practical
solutions to such problems as poverty, low per capita income, inadequate schools
and housing, inferior health and sanitary conditions, and an excessive rate
of populations growth. If there is to be a ‘Southern Strategy,’ it
should be and will be designed by Southerners for the benefit of all the people
of the
South and not merely feed the old retarding mythology which has sustained visions
of the past by starving the imagination of government and people alike.”
Thomas H. Naylor
“ A Southern Strategy”
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