This article is adapted from the first of three Lamar Lectures given at Georgia Wesleyan College April 3—4,1984. It was written while the author was a Fellow of the National Humanities Center.

Around 1970, a number of Southerners began to say something rather odd. Independently, they had concluded that the South might be coming out of a tense and turbulent era in black-white relations in better condition than the rest of the country. Some even ventured to hope that the South could show other Americans, and the world, what an equitable biracial society looks like. The then-governor of Virginia, Linwood Holton, for instance, told a Rotary convention in St. Augustine that "we in the South have a better opportunity than any area of America to resolve the American dilemma, to become a model for race relations." Other observers—journalists and scholars as well as politicians— were starting to express similar opinions. It was about that time that I wrote an article with the self-explanatory title, "Can the South Show the Way?"

As the seventies began, black Southerners were worse off than non-Southern blacks by nearly every measure one might