Focal point for a better South
By Andy Brack
(Published Feb. 24, 2005, in The (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer

CHARLESTON, S.C. - - The American South, our friendly, contradictory and warm region haunted by ghosts of racism, the Confederacy and poverty, is being called to service again.

As national political bickering reaches new levels and public apathy grows, leaders throughout the South have an opportunity to pull the nation up by its bootstraps. In spite of the McDonald's, Starbucks and television babble that threaten to homogenize the land of magnolias and dew, the South's diverse peoples continue to hold similar values, eat grits and say "y'all."

It's the South's shared values among a hardworking, God-fearing people that offer a chance for it to help to move the nation forward, much like it was more than 30 years ago when former U.S. Sen. Terry Sanford of North Carolina wrote, "The South's time has come, after a century of being the whipping boy and the backward child. The time has come, finally come. The South can lead the nation, must lead the nation - - and all the better, because the nation has never been in greater need of leadership."

As members of the future-oriented L.Q.C. Lamar Society, Sanford and other leaders inspired progressive changes that made things happen, from better jobs to improved Southern schools. But as former Anniston (Ala.) Star publisher H. Brandt Ayers recalled at a reunion in November, the Society's mission seeking real change became an "extinct volcano" following the successful presidential election of one of the Society's own, Jimmy Carter.

Ten years ago, long after the end of the Lamar Society, Sanford planted another seed to try to transform the South. He and a Greatest Generation cadre of Southerners brought together a handful of emerging young leaders from several Old South states. They sought to instill zeal in a new generation so they would adopt the task to move the South forward.

This week, some seven years after Sanford's death, that dormant seed of progress sprouts with the advent of the Center for a Better South.

This pragmatic, non-partisan Center, which will be launched during this week's "New Strategies for Southern Progress" conference at UNC-Chapel Hill, will focus on generating progressive policies, ideas and information for thinking leaders who want to make a difference across the South. By working across the region, the center will help Southern progressive visionaries to lead the nation toward a more effective government that serves people, spurs business growth and opens opportunities for all.

For the center, "progressive" means working with leading thinkers who will help develop new ideas to expand stale debates that run rampant throughout Southern legislatures. It means rethinking tax policies, land use, education and health care beyond tired mantras such as, "Less government, lower taxes." It means finding new ways to encourage blacks, whites and Hispanics to engage in the political process to effect change.

The task ahead for the center and the next generation of progressive leaders is daunting. As related by former Mississippi Gov. William Winter, the South continues to have the nation's highest poverty rate:

"Nearly one out of five children in the South lives below the poverty level, including 2 million black children, 1.1 million Latino children and 1.5 million white children. These children are automatically at risk. They tend to drop out of school, become involved in the juvenile justice system, and become teen-age parents. These factors doom most of them to permanent economic dependency."

With the loss of tens of thousands of jobs to foreign markets, the growing divide between rich and poor, stresses on use of land and more, doing things the same old way in the South won't make a real difference in people's lives.

It's time for a Center for a Better South. Like the Sanfords and Carters, the Winters and the Ayers, our generation must act now with new, reasonable, responsible ideas to craft a vision that can lift all boats in a rising tide of change. Otherwise all that's good about the South may become history.

Andy Brack, a graduate of Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is president of the new Center for a Better South (www.bettersouth.org). It is based in Charleston, S.C.

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