Tag: new south

‘Not to offend,’ but you are ‘profoundly ignorant’ of South

“Boosters made it clear that the New South could not accept Northern attempts to control, define, legislate, or even narrate activities south of the Mason-Dixon line….

“In July 1884, Robert Bingham, a North Carolina educator, appeared before a Washington, D.C., audience, and proceeded to tell the assembled Yankees precisely how little they knew about Southern race relations. ‘I came here to conciliate, not to offend you, but I tell you that the great mass of your people, however much you think you know about it, are profoundly ignorant of the conditions in the South and of the relations between the races.’

“Even as he pleaded for federal aid to Southern education, Bingham held fast to a central New South mantra: When it came to Southern affairs, particularly racial ones, the North was uninformed, unequipped and unprepared. It should, therefore, be uninvolved: ‘Social relations must be left to take care of themselves in the South.’ ”

— From “Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915″ by K. Stephen Prince (2014)

 

NY Times gives thumbs up to Charlotte museum

This is the first paragraph of the New York Times’ lengthy appreciation of the Levine Museum of the New South:

“CHARLOTTE, N.C. — It is unlikely that anything resembling the impressive Levine Museum of the New South would exist anywhere else. A museum of the New North or the New East would be merely peculiar, but here the term “New South” has a venerable heritage, recalling unrealized hopes and great expectations. There is also much at stake in trying to understand just what the term really means.”

The Greensboro Historical Museum, by contrast, comes across — fairly or not — as an out-of-touch vestige of the Old South, notable mainly for “what may be the world’s largest collection of Confederate firearms.”

I’m having linkage problems, but you can find the story in the Arts section of today’s Times.