In Love with Defeat. H. Brandt Ayers
better angels of our nature.” Mississippi’s Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar was one. His nationally acclaimed eulogy at the funeral of the South’s bitter enemy Charles Summer of Massachusetts implored his fellow Americans: “Know one another and you will love one another.”
But bitterness ran too deep in the South and in the North. After all, three-quarters of a million human beings had died in that tragic struggle, and four million slaves, almost all illiterate and penniless, had been released from their bondage to fend for themselves. There was no safety net—no Marshall Plan. Cynical political deal-making took over.
With the country still torn apart and the old battle wounds, physical and psychological, slow to heal, it was left to the Supreme Court to kick the can down the road with its well-meaning but unfortunate “separate but equal” mandate in 1896. Most Southern whites heard the first word but ignored the second.
And so for another sixty years the South lived for the most part in a self-imposed political and pastoral isolation defending a past that it would not let die. That attitude was reflected in a story out of the old plantation town of Holly Springs, Mississippi, not far from where I grew up. It was there on a lovely June evening many years after the war that a visitor from New York City remarked to his hostess on the veranda of her antebellum home, “What a beautiful moon.” “Ah, yes,” she replied, “but you should have seen it before the war.”
It took World War II to begin to break the South out of its fantasies. Millions of us Southern white segregationists and black GIs came home with a much-enlarged perspective of the world but nonetheless to the same totally segregated society that we had left four years before.
It was obvious to many that things were going to change. The unanswered questions were how and how long would it take. Again the Supreme Court stepped in, as it had sixty years before, to provide an answer. Only this time the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education had the moral support of the country outside the South and the fervent interest of every black American.
Too many Southern whites did not understand the strength of that force, just as their forebears had underestimated northern resolve to save the Union in 1861. So in the 1950s we embarked on another lost cause, just as my Confederate grandfather’s generation had done a hundred years before.
The latest effort was an even more hopeless crusade, but the arguments were the same. The issue of race cloaked in the garb of states’ rights was the driving force. The South ensnared itself again in a myth of its own making. We wasted another twenty years fighting dead-end battles in the courts and often in the streets that were lost before they had begun.
Now thankfully at long last, we are seeing the repudiation of some of those myths—both by Southerners about themselves and also by those outside the South about the South. But old stereotypes die hard. What is most frustrating to us who live here is the lack of awareness on the part of so many who do not live here, or have never been here, as to how much the South has changed in so many positive ways since the 1960s.
For several decades the region has attracted an ever-increasing number of people from all races and from other states and countries. Many black Southern expatriates have discovered a more hospitable environment here than in the mean streets of Northern cities and now are moving back to their ancestral homes to add their talent and leadership to the communities they once rejected.
There are those who fear that all of these changes will make us less Southern. I submit that—without causing us to lose our Southernness —they will be making all of us more American by transferring to those outside the South an appreciation and acceptance of the distinctive cultural qualities about which Brandt Ayers writes so passionately in this book.
Impulsiveness may once have been one of those qualities, but hopelessness never was. We offer without apology a heritage of civility and courage and compassion. Even in the bad old days of segregation there were countless examples of kindness and generosity by blacks and whites toward each other. It is in the framework of our fascinating cultural diversity that we can embrace our common humanity. By sharing an understanding of its heritage and mystique, the South can contribute much to the richness of our national existence.
This is the process that, accompanied by a universal commitment to respect the dignity of all of our neighbors and to provide the opportunity for a competitive education for everyone, can lead us into an era when the South will be able to revel in its victories. Hopefully, it will not still be in love with defeat.
There will continue to be cynics and fear-mongers who would turn us back. My old friend, the late David Cohn, the great writer from the Mississippi Delta, warned us years ago of these charlatans: “With heaven in sight,” he wrote, “they would lead us perversely into hell.”
But how can a people so richly endowed with those human qualities that make for personal satisfaction and fulfillment, and with a natural bounty of almost all of the resources that contribute to good living, ever again be guiled into cutting our own throats as we did twice in our tragic history?
The South of the future must not be the South of romantic illusion nor of racial bigotry. I believe that it can be and still will be a distinctive South that we can enjoy and celebrate—yet a South that is committed to fairness and justice for all of its people and to the building of a more united country.
This is the kind of region that Brandt Ayers has devoted his extraordinary career to achieve. Thanks to his kind of vision and persistence, that newest New South is now within sight if succeeding generations of young Southerners do not let it slip away. I do not think they will.
Former Mississippi Governor [1980–84] William F. Winter was honored in 2008 with the Profiles in Courage Award of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. He practices law in Jackson.
I write of a place that was but is no more, the Deep South, which had a sudden violent rebirth as a New South but whose newness has long since worn off, and which contemplates in wonder and doubt the fact of a black man as President of the United States.
Born into a small-town publishing family in the Old South, I was a witness to the death throes of that civilization, which occurred between 1965 and 1970, and I was one of the leaders in what came to be called the “New South.” Nothing can be “new” forever, and so the patina of newness began to disappear in the 1980s, soon after Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
This is the story of that time.
To begin at the beginning, my parents’ house at 818 Glenwood Terrace was filled with books, Asian treasures, an expectation of achievement, and an air of adventure beyond the confining limits of Anniston. The publisher of the Anniston Star and his wife, Harry M. and Edel Y. Ayers, had a curiosity about world events and foreign travel that made them an unusual small-town couple and demanding models for my sister Elise and me, but their primary commitment was to one place, Anniston, Alabama, and to the people who lived there.
Next in order of lifelong influences was marriage in December 1961 to Josephine Peoples Ehringhaus, daughter of a distinguished North Carolina family. Josie, I called her as a bride, and now, Josephine, as I call her as editor of the high-style Longleaf Style magazine, which features fine writing by Pulitzer-winners and other authors. She is unique. She has an internal homing device that draws children, the wounded, seekers of companionship and at least one president of the United States to the warming beam of her personality. She has been a harbor in the tough times, a joyous companion in the good times, and a wonderful co-pilot of our captain’s paradise, which keeps us rooted in a forest on the edge of our hometown but an airport away from the human and natural wonders of the world. I am also grateful to my daughter, Margaret Ayers, for her love and support.
A rough draft of an okay human being and an above-average career was crafted by a wonderful man and dear friend, the late John Verdery, headmaster of the Wooster School in Connecticut, where Masters Donald Schwartz and Joe Grover also put their stamp on and widened the world view of a Southern boy. At the University of