Where We Stand: Southern Voices of Dissent Coming from NewSouth Books July 2004

Editor Anthony Dunbar has assembled essays from 12 leading Southern historians, activists, civil rights attorneys, law professors, and theologians to discuss militarism, religion, the environment, voting rights, the Patriot Act, the economy, prisons and crime, and other subjects. A common sentiment running through the essays that make up the volume Where We Stand: Southern Voices of Dissent is dismay at the deepening chasm that now divides America—and specifically the South—into hostile armies whose leaders are fast losing whatever motivation they ever had to pursue compromise and cooperation, and the common good. The essayists are Leslie Dunbar, Paul Gaston, John Egerton, Janisse Ray, Dan Pollitt, Connie Curry, Laughlin McDonald, Sheldon Hackney, Susan Wiltshire, Gene Nichol, Dan Carter, Charles Bussey. Jimmy Carter wrote the foreword.

The book celebrates some valued American principles: promoting the common good, concern for future generations, political compromise, fairness to the minority, everybody pulling the same wagon. In the belief that these treasured ideals still matter, the book also condemns international bullying, unrestrained destruction of our natural environment, extreme—and growing—inequality in the means of living, the creation of a permanent underclass, and mean-spirited politics.

Where We Stand is addressed to readers who see, and wish to reverse, the drift that America has taken, and who have begun to wonder whether this is the country they grew up in. Is this the country they wish to leave to their children? Coincidentally, the writers come from each of the old Confederate states, from the Baptist flatlands of Texas to the persevering Blue Ridge of Virginia. And as a consequence, this book is also addressed to the writers’ fellow Southerners, who bear more than their share of responsibility for the fix we are in. It is right that Where We Stand is written by Southerners because the South has contributed disproportionately to the promise for good in our society but also to its sad misdirection. Out of the suffering of slavery, civil war, and segregation came redemption through the Southern civil rights movement with its message of resistance to injustice, faith in the rule of law, and reverence for human nature.

While not inevitable, some comparisons might be drawn between Where We Stand and the 1930 classic I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. The 12 Southerners who composed that book praised agrarian, religious, and aesthetic values over industrial and material ones. The writers of this collection, in contrast, praise democratic and human values over imperial and military ones. As the Great Depression loomed, the essayists of the celebrated book believed that if America were to be reconstructed, the South would have to lead. In that, the modern writers might concur. But while the Agrarians, as they were known, contested the social goal of “Progress,” realistic people today would have to concede that the battle against progress is long lost. It is not the deterioration of humanist and religious values that is to be feared in our attempts to dominate and industrialize nature; the fear today is the total elimination and destruction of the natural world. Furthermore, the road leads not backwards to the plantation but forward toward a day, soon, when the power of guns and money is harnessed and when the poor of many nations can believe that their advancement and our democratic ideals are compatible.

The topics chosen range from Dan Carter’s confronting the war machine that needlessly led us into Iraq to Daniel H. Pollitt’s review of the consequent loss of our civil liberties. Dean Gene Nichol speaks of the perils of ignoring growing inequality in our economic life, and Susan Ford Wiltshire shows how the Bible itself is a subversive influence in the South—both for good and for evil. The danger of forgetting the Constitutional promise of a more perfect union is presented by Leslie Dunbar, and Janisse Ray, lamenting our assaults on the natural world and our unsustainable lifestyle, urges that we look beyond capitalism. Paul M. Gaston writes of the tattered dream of the utopian Alabama colony of his youth to illuminate the increasingly endangered American dream, and Charles Bussey gives us the view from Europe on America’s war policies and growing intolerance. Threats to our democracy at home, including the imprisonment and disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South, are explored by Connie Curry and Laughlin McDonald. The tragedy of Southern politics, and its rise to national dominion, is traced by Sheldon Hackney and by John Egerton, who declares that all America has now been Southernized. The state of our union portrayed in these essays is a dark one. The authors within Where We Stand strive to keep hope alive.