Lamar Society Reunion Highlights Fall Symposium

The Center launches a new initiative with a fall symposium, The American South, Then and Now: From the L. Q. C. Lamar Society to the Endowment for the Future of the South, November 18-21, 2004, on the University of Mississippi campus.
The symposium will examine public policy issues in the South and explore how understanding Southern culture can help illuminate discussions of such issues. The Southern context continues to shape responses to such issues as racial reconciliation, rural poverty, perpetuation of the South’s literary and musical heritage, and advancement of environmental stewardship—all of which participants will discuss at the symposium.

The beginning point for the meeting is a reunion of members of the L. Q. C. Lamar Society, a 1970s-era organization of Southern writers, journalists, politicians, business people, and other opinion makers who sought to lead the South in positive directions as racial segregation ended and the region’s economic development escalated. Its members published You Can’t Eat Magnolias, a realistic look at the South’s challenges in that time, and their work led to the establishment of the Southern Growth Policies Board to advance regional planning on public policy. Mike Cody, of the Burch, Porter, and Johnson law firm in Memphis, worked with Center director Charles Reagan Wilson in planning the Lamar Society reunion and will be a panelist at the symposium as well.

Brandt Ayers, publisher of one of the South’s most respected newspapers, the Annistan, Alabama Star, will give a keynote on the work of the Lamar Society, as will former Governor William F. Winter, another early member of the group. A panel will also discuss the Lamar Society in light of current policy issues, and a dinner will honor Lamar Society members for their work.

Racial reconciliation has gained new prominence at the University of Mississippi with the recent establishment of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, and that topic will be the focus for another symposium panel, to be chaired by Susan M. Glisson, director of the Winter Institute. John Egerton, author of Speak Now against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, and Constance Curry, author of Silver Rights and producer of the recent film Intolerable Burden, will be among the participants in that session.

The symposium will promote bipartisan discussion of the political context for developing social capital in the South, and one panel, “Democrats and Republicans,” will feature Republican Senator Thad Cochran and Mississippi State Legislator Steve Holland, along with Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Southern Politics, Media, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Other panel topics include “Economic Development and Southern Communities,” “The Urban South,” “Southern Culture Today,” and “Religion and Public Policy.”

Among the participants in the American South, Then and Now Symposium will be Hodding Carter, director of the Knight Foundation; former Mississippi Governor Ronnie Musgrove; Charles Overby, chairman and CEO of the Freedom Forum; A. C. Wharton, mayor of Shelby County, Tennessee; and Steve Suitts, of the Southern Education Foundation.

The meeting will be the first project of the Endowment for the Future of the South. The Phil Hardin Foundation has provided a $250,000 grant to establish the Endowment, which will sponsor visiting scholars, on-campus workshops, publications, an annual regionwide symposium, all focused on a compelling topic related to the South’s development. The Endowment will serve as a catalyst for on-campus discussion of public policy and build on the Center’s quarter century of work on the importance of culture in understanding the region’s past and future.

For more information about the symposium schedule, participants, and registration, check the Center’s Web site (www.olemiss.edu/depts/south).