Director's Column

THE FUTURE OF THE SOUTH project is the Center’s newest initiative, and it will be launched with a stellar group of Southern leaders gathering in Oxford for the American South, Then and Now Symposium, November 18-20. This meeting will send the Center in an exciting new direction.

To be sure, we have a long tradition of convening meetings, as Faulkner famously said, to “tell about the South.” Our annual conferences and symposia gather literary critics to analyze the work of authors and to hear writers read from their works. Historians come to talk about such topics as Southern manners and the region’s environment. Music critics and performers meet to “sing the blues”; food critics and others assemble to consider the cultural meanings of Southern food—and to savor eating it.

The November symposium summons journalists, business people, politicians, scholars, religious leaders, and representatives from nonprofit organizations to ponder current public policy issues in light of Southern history and culture. We want to shine the light of humanities values into the arena of public policy discussions.

The Phil Hardin Foundation has awarded the Center a $250,000 grant to establish the Endowment for the Future of the South, which will sponsor annual symposia, workshops,
colloquia, visiting “seers and prophets,” and publications, all designed to focus attention on issues of regional development. We are looking for partners to raise matching funds of $500,000 to enable the endowment to reach its full potential.

The Future of the South project is fundamentally a leadership project, designed each year to engage a diverse group of the South’s leaders in a series of ongoing conversations and
research projects about specific problems and opportunities we face.

In looking for our regional ancestors in such work, we realized that the L. Q. C. Lamar Society had pioneered what we want to do. Formed in 1969, the group sponsored conferences and research to help the region plan for enormous adjustments after the dramatic social, political, and economic transformations of the 1960s. We are pleased to host a reunion of Lamar Society members as part of the November symposium, learning from their experiences and accumulated wisdom. Hattiesburg businessman Stewart Gammill was a
member of the advisory board to the Lamar Society, and he has been a longtime friend of the Center. He helped me think about a Lamar Society reunion, and he put me in touch with
Mike Cody, a Memphis attorney who was another key member of the Society and unusually helpful about the reunion.

Another key player in planning the November event has been Curtis Wilkie, the retired correspondent for the Boston Globe who now holds the Kelly Gene Cook Chair of Journalism at the University. His immediate understanding of the potential of the Future of the South initiative has made for a fruitful collaboration and tied the Center closely to the Department of Journalism on this project.

Former Mississippi Governor William Winter was an active member of the Lamar Society, and he is surely a patron saint of the Future of the South initiative. I have also relied on him
in planning the symposium. He has helped me to see that the Future of the South initiative should extend a positive regional tradition, civility in discussion, as we consider contentious
contemporary issues. We live in an age of polemical ideologies, and our political discussions frequently degenerate into unproductive impasses. Civility itself can be a detriment to engaging issues, of course, if our manners distract us from expressing our views, but civic renewal in not only the South but the nation depends on getting past ideology to find our shared values. The South may have something to offer the nation in this regard.

The late Willie Morris would have enjoyed the reunion and the conversations at the symposium. He was among the earliest participants in discussions that led to the Lamar Society, and he was a University professor in the 1980s, coming to Oxford in 1980, the year before I arrived here. Willie’s passion for the South, his sensitivity to the best of Southern traditions, his righteous condemnations of the region’s old racial ways, and his appreciation for the South’s history and need for constructive social change give us a model of a creative
talent who used his talents to influence the public discussion of issues. He will be missed, but those who gather here in November will be at the foundation of a new effort to draw from the South’s strengths in facing the future.

Charles Reagan Wilson