The Buie Knife

As Vestiges of Segregation Endure, Documentaries Help to Confront Racism, Bring Racial Healing

Shockingly, in some parts of the South, segregated high school proms are still being held. The New York Times spotlights segregated prom nights in Mount Vernon, Ga.

Despite the old reputation of Southerners as more bigoted than the rest of the nation, in my own experience and observation, many Southerners are more liberated from the shackles of racism than people from other regions because they have had to CONSCIOUSLY and deliberately BREAK from what were once Southern social norms. Several white Southerners have told me recently that they felt they were rebelling against the teachings of their parents and grandparents when they voted for Barack Obama for President (Obama won the Southern states of Virginia, North Carolina and Florida.)

It is important for these stories of breaking racial barriers to be told, and increasingly they are being told: 

• A documentary film, "Landscapes of the Heart" is being made of the life of Elizabeth Spencer, a native Mississippian, born in 1921, who rebelled against racial injustice and was disinherited by her father. The film is based on her memoir by the same title. I've had the privilege to meet Elizabeth Spencer, who now resides in Chapel Hill, on several occasions.
• The film will join a strong collection of documentaries about race in North Carolina. Four such films were part of an excellent film festival in Chatham County, sponsored by the Chatham Arts Council. I hope arts councils in other counties in the South will consider similar film festivals, as that is one way to acknowledge the racial injustices of the past that still have an impact on the present. The discussions that surround these films can lead to community healing.
• Another documentary, “The Town Before Brown: Segregation in Chapel Hill, NC, Prior to 1954," explodes the myth that Chapel Hill was always a liberal town on the issue of race. Indeed, for most of the 1960s, it was just as racist and segregated as other Southern towns. Written, produced and directed by UNC Education Professor Gerald Unks, it's an important contribution to understanding the pervasiveness of segregation in the South.
• "An Unlikely Friendship" is a documentary about the remarkable relationship between two Durham, NC residents, an outspoken Black activist, Ann Atwater, and an embittered Klansman, C.P. Ellis.
• A book I wrote, Teacher of Our Town, about the experiences of my mother, Lillian Secrest Buie, were similar to those of Elizabeth Spencer. Born in 1920 in Monroe, NC, a school teacher in Scotland County, NC for most of her career, she also risked the condemnation of her contemporaries to speak out and work against racial injustice. Some examples of her moral courage on race relations are posted here.
• The Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina has a blog for the Bishop's Committee for Racial Justice and Reconciliation. "The mission of the Anti-Racism Committee of the Diocese of North Carolina is, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to transform our congregational and diocesan structures, communities, and personal lives to eliminate racism."

Previously, in response to an evocative newspaper series called "The Ghosts of 1898," about the only violent overthrow of a city government in US history. I wrote "Truth and Reconciliation in North Carolina,". In that piece, I suggested that the only way for true healing to occur is that we must tell the painful stories of the past, in the presence of the descendants of those who have been most hurt. I'm glad to see that is now happening in the South.

Meeting Clyde Edgerton

I spent a delightful morning at McIntyre's Bookstore in Fearrington Village listening to Southern author Clyde Edgerton read from his latest comic novel, The Bible Salesman, and singing songs with his bango. I particularly enjoyed his explanation for North Carolina's history and rural culture of gentle, if not genteel community bartering because the state had small farms in which people depended on each other for survival. This was in contrast to the bustling capitalism of Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia, with their big plantations. NC was less populated in the early centuries because, if you were a ship captain and you asked your crew to choose navigating through the Chesapeake Bay, Charleston Bay, or CAPE FEAR and "the graveyard of the Atlantic," they inevitably chose the Chesapeake or Charleston. I made a similar observation on this blog ("Why Did NC Have Fewer Plantations Than Neighboring States?").

A personal note: My late mother, Lillian Secrest Buie, North Carolina English Teacher of the Year, was a student of Edgerton's in the 1980s when he taught a creative writing class at St. Andrews Presbyterian College. In 2006, when I published a book of her writings, he graciously wrote a blurb praising it. He and I had corresponded, but hadn't met until today. What a warm and charming fellow he is.

How Religion in America Is Changing: 'Church Lady' Is Archetype from a Previous Generation. People Are Less Rigid, More Flexible, More Open-Minded Today

Dana Carvey ~ Church Lady clips | Funny Jokes at JibJab

Dana Carvey said he based the character of "church lady," created in the 1980s, on a woman from the church he grew up up in who kept tabs on his attendance. But that character, and the characters of televangelists like Jimmy Swaggard and Tammy Faye Bakker, are not as resonant cultural archetypes as they used to be, say, in the 1980s. I wonder if people who grew up in the 80s and 90s find those characters nearly as funny as people who grew up in the fifties, sixties and seventies.

In the North, if you answer the phone on Sunday morning, that's natural, but in the South, if you answer the phone on Sunday morning, you're "staying home from church," Georgia-born comic writer Roy Blount observed. As soon as you moved to town in the South, one of the first questions would be, "Have you found a church home yet?"

That's far less true than it used to be:  12 percent of North Carolinians, for example, now claim no religion at all, according to a study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. And religion in the South is far more diverse than it used to be, according to the study, though people in states like North Carolina are still far more religious than in, say, California. 

I remember a time in the small-town South when anybody who wasn't a Protestant was looked upon with suspicion.Thankfully, mostly gone are the days when Jews were asked by bigots or the hopelessly sheltered and naive why their people killed Christ, why they hadn't accepted Him as their Lord and Savior, or if they are "completed Jews." I also remember when Catholics in the small towns of the South were exotic creatures, when they would be asked (even by public school teachers) why they weren't Christians, why they were Papists, why they let a single man -- the Pope -- tell them what to do and control their lives.

I remember as a reporter in the mid-1980s covering the story of a young woman in small-town Oklahoma who sued her church for invasion of privacy and won $150,000 after church leaders told parishioners to shun her because they had seen a man's car parked at her house all Saturday night.   

That kind of hostile religious narrow-mindedness has all but disappeared in America. Another Pew study indicates that openness to new religious traditions is quite commonplace in America, and that many people wind up in different denominations and different religious traditions than their parents.

Of course we still have a serious problem in this country with prejudice, bigotry and inordinate fear of Arabs and Muslims. Most Americans say they know little or nothing about the Muslim faith, according to a Pew Forum survey.

As a reporter who covered religion, I was fortunate enough to be exposed to a wide variety of religious practices, and to attend a wide variety of services -- by fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, black and white Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Russian and Greek Orthodox, even Buddhists and Muslims, and found myself fascinated, identifying something of value in all of them. 

Taking William Peck's course on Introduction to Religion at the University of North Carolina taught me to approach the study of religion phenomenologically.  Reading Harvard psychologist William James' study, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature as well as Huston Smith's The Religions of Man were seminally important to me as well.

I do wonder sometimes, if in all our politically-correct but shallow respect for religious diversity, we have lost something. And maybe we have lost something with the demise of church ladies who took note of when we attended services and when we didn't. At least she cared about our behavior. People don't seem to care or know nearly as much about religion as they used to. Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and Doesn't strikes me as a book that ought to be taught in high schools.

Religion in schools? That debate, too, seems to have become passe compared to the rage the ban against Christian prayers in public schools generated in the 1960s through the 1980s (See this 1988 essay, "Banning Prayer in Public Schools Has Led to America's Demise," by Gary Bergel.) Almost nobody expects public schools to embrace and promote Christianity anymore because it clearly violates the separation of church and state. Indeed, many evangelicals have dropped the quixotic quest to return prayer to public schools. Evangelicals like Os Guinness now make the case for civility and how our future depends on it.

But it is legally permissible -- indeed, I think, necessary -- to teach "about" religion in public schools, and I wish more schools would do it.

'Soothin' Literature Professor Louis Rubin Resides in Fearrington Village, a Special Community for Southern Readers and Writers

At UNC-Chapel Hill back in the seventies, I took an eye-opening course in Southern Literature taught by Louis Rubin. He dubbed the course "Soothin' Literature." I'm proud to learn that Professor Rubin, 83, is now my neighbor in Fearrington Village, residing at Galloway Ridge. Since there's a Fearrington Writers Group (from which I've sadly not had a chance to participate in) and McIntyre's Bookstore in the village, known North Carolina-wide for the national and regional speakers it elicits on a weekly basis, this seems like the perfect neighborhood for such a lover of literature as Professor Rubin.

There was an article in The News and Observer on November 4, 2007 about Dr. Rubin's efforts to set the Fellowship of Southern Writers, which he helped launch in 1989, on a firm foundation for the future. In addition to teaching at UNC, Professor Rubin founded Algonquin Books in Chapel Hill, which helped launch the careers of a number of Southern writers, such as Jill McCorkle.

With an elite membership capped at 50, the Fellowship now has its first executive director, Susan Robinson, who helps coordinate and publicize the group's work. A 10-year plan seeks to ramp up the fellowship's writers-in-schools efforts, launch a program of readings/conferences around the country, publish a newsletter about its activities and organize fund-raising campaigns to pay for it all. The group next meets in 2009.

But Fearrington Village is chock full of Nawtherners, thanks to all those ads for it in the back pages of The New Yorker. It's not quite CARY -- Containment Area for Relocated Yankees -- but it could become so. Since returning to North Carolina after 20+ years in the Washington, DC region, I keep asking myself if "the South" as a state of mind, way of thinking, speaking and talking, still exists. Living in Fearrington Village has not eliminated the question from my mind.

Here's N&O reporter Peter Zane take on the Fellowship of Southern Writers: 

How Do We North Carolinians 'Hold On to the Caring'?

The most striking quote in The News and Observer package on "What Do You Need to Know to Be A TarHeel?" comes from Kathryn Estrada, a homemaker and newcomer, who finds her Raleigh neighborhood personality-less, and old-time customs disappearing. (Her quote.) As a North Carolina native who has been away for 23 years, I understand where she's coming from, but thankfully I know where to find the old-fashioned charm, in places like the Mecca Restaurant in downtown Raleigh.

But it's good to keep in mind the words of Jerry Bledsoe: "As North Carolina's cities have boomed and its economy has gone increasingly high-tech, the state's traditional industries and ways of life have gone by the wayside: tobacco, textiles, furniture-making, country cooking and back-road driving. For so long, we were a small-town state. Maybe the change will be for the better, but I doubt it. There ought to be some sadness for what's been lost. We need to hold on especially to the caring that North Carolinians feel for each other -- the look-after-your-neighbor kind of stuff."

Surprisingly Enlightened Voice From Long Ago

Some 80 or 90 years ago, John Charles McNeill, NC poet laureate and journalist from my home town of Wagram, NC, wrote "Lyrics from Cottonland." Reno of the Stand Tall Blog recently discovered it. He predicted it would include the "usual down-putting (racist) drivel" of the time. But he found "a jolting, pleasant surprise. It was a lament that the black race's demeaning subjugation was ongoing and would continue as long as politicians would deign to use it to their benefit. What is heartening is, even way back then there was at least one voice for justice and fairness, and a Southern one at that, and no doubt many more whose attitudes weren't preserved in some old book. What is disheartening is, racism still abounds, maybe not as blatantly as in 1900, but today it still lurks in the hateful shadows of our hearts, and puts zealous hypocrites in positions of power." Read the whole thing.

• Read more about John Charles McNeill.

Why Did NC Have Fewer Plantations than Neighboring States?

That was the question a couple of history buffs who are considering moving to North Carolina from California asked me at dinner. It's true. North Carolina did not have anything like the James River Plantations in Virginia, the Ashley River Plantations in South Carolina, Georgia's "Plantation Country" or the grand antebellum mansions of the Deep South. I guess the short answer is, no deep-water port (remember, it was the "graveyard of the Atlantic"), no deep, long navigable rivers, soil wasn't as good for big cotton farms. Therefore, planters like the Kenans of Liberty Hall made their money from timber, pitch tar and turpentine instead of from cotton plantations like the aristocracies of other Southern states. (Still, there's a fairly long list of documented slave plantations in North Carolina.) After the civil war, the old plantations were sold to tenant farmers who turned to tobacco. North Carolina's lack of big plantations is one reason natives boasted that the state was "a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit." The state motto could also be considered a dig at its neighboring states of Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia: "Esse Quam Videre," meaning "to be, rather than to seem." 

How Has Small-Town Life Changed?

As I sit here editing my mother's memoir of small town life, I wonder how small towns have changed in the last 30 years? Can one generalize? My mother in one section of her manuscript describes something like Lake Wobegone, a charming place with a strong sense of community where each child has gifts, or like Jan Karon's books on Mitford, where ordinary lives have great beauty.

But in Main Street, published in 1920, Nobel-Prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis satirized small-town life, portraying it as puritanical and bigoted. He describes a dull, ordinary town of complacency, conformity, boosterism, and parochialism. Those negatives, have, I suspect, given way, at least somewhat, as so many refugees from urban areas have moved in, as business has gone global, and as media have become so pervasive. But one of the reviewers says "the small town vs. big city fight (remains) universal."

I was amused and horrified by the latest movie version of Stepford Wives, which I had to admit, looks like nearby Cary, NC. But places like that aren't real small towns, they are artificial, bedroom communities.

De South Still Exists, Thank Gawd

Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena, by Julia Reed, a native Mississippian and sophisticated writer for Newsweek and Vogue.

Underneath the Bland Sameness, Differences in Mindset Remain

It's so easy to lose a sense of place in America today, if you don't know the history and the mindset underneath. It's a myth that "airports and interstates and the celebrated franchised hamburgers have made North Americans all one and the same, as bland and homogenous as tapioca pudding," writes Joel Garreau. As "power and money and influence is dispersed throughout the continent, attitudes shift dramatically, and understanding the differences in our cultures and values become crucial for decisions makers." Hence, his book, The Nine Nations of North America, written in 1989, which includes a brilliant section on "The South." No doubt the sense of regionalism has faded in the last 16 years. More recently, he speculates on why New Orleans will not be rebuilt.