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Think tank launched
to reframe issues
Feb.
27, 2005
(Excerpted from a story by Tom Baxter, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
 CHAPEL
HILL, N.C. - Last week, as the ghost of LQC Lamar smiled down on
the proceedings, a think tank was launched.
In 1969, a group of Southern progressive Democrats, impatient for
progress in their region, gathered at a resort near here and founded
the LQC Lamar Society. They borrowed the name of a Georgia-born
legislator and jurist who was the first Southerner to sit on the
U.S. Supreme Court after the Civil War.
The society lasted only a few years, but it helped give birth to
the Southern Growth Policies Board, which has had a significant
impact on the region. And its mailing list gave Jimmy Carter an
important fund-raising boost in the 1976 presidential campaign.
Several of the society's founders, including former Mississippi
Gov. William Winter and journalist Hodding Carter, were on hand
at a two-day conference that ended Saturday and which marked the
beginning of the new Center for a Better South, headed by Andy Brack,
a former congressional candidate and aide to former Sen. Fritz Hollings
(D-S.C.).
Brack's aim is to generate fresh ideas for a debate he believes
has grown stale and shape them in a language that will appeal to
Southern voters.
"When I was running for Congress, the policy stuff that came
from the Democratic Party was essentially written in Yankee,"
said Brack, who lives in Charleston, S.C.
"We need to train a new generation of Terry Sanfords and Jim
Hunts," former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes said at an organizational
meeting for the group Saturday morning.
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