Today marks the remembrance of a very important Southern man who fought an important, and largely Southern battle: the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  While certainly everyone knows the struggle for civil rights that King spearheaded, probably few know the controversial history of this holiday.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ronald Reagan officially signed the bill making MLK Day a holiday in 1983, even though he was vocally against the creation of a holiday honoring King.  In fact, even when announcing he would sign the bill, his resignation at doing so is clearly evident:

Since they seem bent on making it a national holiday, I believe the symbolism of that day is important enough that I would—I’ll sign that legislation when it reaches my desk.

And Reagan wasn’t the only one to fight the passage of this historic national holiday.  Sen. Jesse Helms of South Carolina mounted a filibuster against the bill, and also impugned King’s character by calling him a “Marxist.”  And don’t forget another notable Senator who fought the passage of a national King holiday: a certain Arizonan Senator by the name of John McCain.  McCain even defended the rescinding of the holiday by then Arizona governor Evan Mecham.

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Most US regions have historic racial divides; but few have been as staunch as the political and economic system that began in the 17th-century South (at least if Lawrence’s excellent installment on early Southern history is to be believed). This division between black and white southerners constitutes a central axis in the history of the South, and has defined most the region’s important historical events.

Mmmmmm.... cultural influence....

But after surviving abolition, emancipation, and Civil Rights, a new development might finally undermine this old Southern dichotomy for good: immigration. While most Americans think immigration is isolated to places like New York, California, Texas, or South Florida; few recognize that a new wave of immigration is shifting away from these traditional gateways into more unlikely places.

Now it’s important to not overstate the issue – Mississippi is not a “majority-minority state,” like California – yet, even on a smaller scale, immigration is having a noticeable impact on some places in the South. Consider North Carolina. Between 1990 and 2000 the state experienced 274% growth in the percent of the population that was foreign-born. Below, you can see the growth in all state’s whose foreign-born pop.’s doubled between 1990 and 2000.

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I came across an article recently, in Journal of Forestry , that presented an interesting puzzle: in some places in the South, African Americans can be up to 50% of the population living near a national park (e.g. Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest); however, their usage rates for these parks is just ~1%.

White People Enjoying Sequoia National Park

Making this story more complicated is that another minority group, Hispanic Americans, use the national park system far more frequently.  In many respects, Hispanic Americans share commonalities with African Americans (both have roughly similar income and education levels, both are minorities, both have apparently been shown to use public park lands in similar ways, etc.) — yet the two groups have markedly different usage rates for national parks.

In areas where Hispanic Americans live close to parks, they show up at these parks in percentages that reflect their share of the local population.  However, as discussed above, this is not true of African Americans.

So why don’t black Southerners use the parks they live near?

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Being both a crazy and a dorky guy, one year during college I decided to spend a Spring Break exploring the South, with another crazy and dorky guy. Specifically, our plan was to see as much of the Mississippi River as would fit into our week-long Spring Break.

After a bit of research, it turned out that this was pretty easy to do. The Great River Road follows Ol’ Man River for most of his length (by the way, I highly recommend driving the Great River Road; it’s a cool historical route). Anyway, by making a giant box to get there (see below), the two of us eventually made our way from Memphis, TN to New Orleans, LA, sleeping in a conversion van parked in various state and local parks.

Our Route

Now, the stories I could tell from this experience could fill a number of posts. We ate at diners in Tennessee, saw Civil War sites in Vicksburg, and surprised Lawrence’s family with a delivery of crawfish from Biloxi, MS. Frankly though, some of these stories are too inappropriate to tell publicly – for instance, let me just say that after a night in New Orleans, I woke up inexplicably at a truck stop in Mississippi – with no wallet – after laying all night on top of two umbrellas on the floor of my van. However, certainly the craziest highlight of this trip took place in Greenville, MS.

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In my first post on the subject of racism in the south, I argued that the South is more racist than the rest of the country – but perhaps less so than many would imagine.  In particular, I presented some cross-tabs showing the regional breakdown of the number of people harboring negative feelings toward African Americans in various contexts.  Throughout the cases I looked at, the Deep South consistently displayed higher percentages of people expressing negative feelings.  However, I also showed that the differences between the South and the rest of the country were often not huge (the differences were frequently just 10%, in terms of the number of people expressing negative feelings toward their fellow black citizens).

For those even mildly familiar with descriptive statistics though, there is something you might fault me for: there are higher concentrations of black Americans living in the South than in rest of the country.  “So,” this argument goes, “its not shocking that we don’t see as much negativity to African Americans as one might expect; because a lot of African Americans live in the South (and we’ll assume they aren’t as likely as white Americans to dislike black Americans).”

This is a very good point.  This is certainly an issue I would have to deal with if these posts were about doing “journal-grade” social science.  Yet, for my present purposes, I think this argument about population goes beyond a simple methodological “problem;” it brings out a point that underlies our understanding of the South.

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Now I know the issue of racism is a bit heavy for one of our first posts.  Still, this topic is clearly something that a blog about the South must deal with.  So, in this first of two upcoming posts on the topic, I will address the issue of racism in the South.  (These are going to be longer posts unfortunately; as this is a knotty subject).

Let me start off by saying that there is no doubt in my mind that the South, including the Panhandle, is more racist than any other part of the country, and that it has a long history of racism.  Also, I cannot speak for the other contributors, but personally, I don’t buy arguments trying to limit the egregiousness of Southern slavery and racism by “putting it in a historical context.”  In my mind, the South was a driving force in the evil practice of slavery – and far more so than any other region of the country.  I also do not buy arguments about how “the civil war was really about economics” or other such nonsense – most of the confederacy supported slavery, was fighting to keep slavery, and one cannot separate this out from their other motives.

In short, neither I, nor this blog, are apologists for the South’s racism.  None of the authors here want any part of racism.  That being said, racism (like the history of racial struggles in the US) is complicated, and so I think it deserves attention beyond just the simple platitude that “the south is racist.”

Why is it more complicated than that?  Well, let’s turn to some numbers.

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Almost a year ago, I broke one of those simple yet insightful maxims of daily life I learned growing up in the South: don’t discuss religion or politics over dinner. I was eating with my parents back in Live Oak, and the issue of the upcoming election came up. We discussed the nominees for both the Republicans and the Democrats, and my father ventured a guess that I was to hear over and over the following year, all across the country: “People around here just aren’t going to vote for a black man.” He pointed towards the forested land we lived on, and said “People in Live Oak aren’t going to feel comfortable, and I’m not saying it’s right, but if Obama gets the nomination there’s no way he can win.”

While the immediate conversation devolved into a series of half-cocked assertions on both sides, more cool-headed reflections surface in the following months. Would people really not vote for a black man in this day and age? If so, by how much? And would this be especially strong in the South? How much does race predict voting patterns in a bi-racial election?

It turns out this is a well-known question, coined alternately the “Bradley Effect” or the “Wilder Effect.” These terms refer to the situation where voters do not voice racial bias to pollsters and so election-day results are significantly lower for black, or other minority, candidates. A recent paper out of Harvard University analyzes 133 races for state governor, and finds that there was a “Wilder Effect” but that it disappeared. The author argues that racially-charged issues in a specific period created the effect, and once this context changed, the effect went away: “the prominence of racialized issues such as crime and welfare declined markedly at the national level in the late 1990s and early 2000s” (7). The author uses data from the Clinton-Obama primary match-up, and finds that Obama actually did better than polls indicated, not worse.

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