
          In This Issue
                  By Suitts, SteveSteve Suitts
          Vol. 2, No. 6, 1980, pp. 2
          
          Probably no more persuasive eveidence of the divided and changeing
nature of the South can be found outside the region's historic symbols
of resistance and challenge in race relations. Massive numbers of
people marching down the streets, a cigar-chewing, pugnacious Alabama
Governor, the flapping sheets of the Ku Klux Klan, the closed, White
church door, and the lunch counter at Woolworth's — all once
represented the political changes, social conflicts andhuman urges
that composed muchof Southern life for two decades.
          In this combined issue of Southern
Changes,we leave for a little while the shiny floors of the
South's new airports and not only in passing the reflections of its
glass skyscrapers in order to consider what has become of those once
powerful sylmbols of the South's struggle for something other than
what was. From near and far, by the native and foreign-born, and with
the obvious and hidden totems, we look now at what has become of the
South's symbols of protest and resistance.
          As he moves about the streets of Paris, Southerner Tom Noland sets
the stage by describing the South as the French see it and understand
it today. The piece invokes humor, bewilderment and sobering questions
about the portrayal of this region across the Atlantic. The images we
project, perhaps, are themes we fail to see.
          While Noland writes that the "mention of Fob James..." is met with
shruggled shoulders and blank stares," by the French, the governor of
Alabama has received quite a different reception at home recently as
he faces opposition and outrage among some legislators and
representatives of the state's poor. When James took office in January
1979 he repeated his campaign pledge of "a new beginning" for Alabama
— away from the legacy of the past years. Now, as Wayne
Greenhaw tells us, the beginning looks more like the end to some who
analyze the business of the new governor. Greenhaw's story cannot be
entirely separated from the new generation of Southern governors who
began and have continued to take office
          Charles Young take sus to Greensboro, N.C. in early February where
the celebration of the 1960 Black protest sit-in demonstrations were
juxtaposed with the protest of Klan-related killings in NOvember
1979. With a sympathetic knowledge of the local actors, Young reaches
no conclusions in his article about the strengths of yesterday's
symbols or the importance of today's protests; however, he brings that
city and those events further into focus and lets us think about our
relationship to the paradoxes and the demands which such occasions
represent.
          We have also in this issue and African student who offers us a few
observations about New Orleans and Rev. Wohlgemuth who shares his
experiences as a White minister who faced in himself and others the
fears of race relations.
          Our department pieces review the strength of the "conservative
coalition" in Congress — that group of Southern Democrats and
the nation's Republicans who have found common ground for the last
hundred years — and the status of the women wage-earners over
the past decade.
          On the whole, the image of the South in this issue presents the
same kind of contradictions, surprises, and disappointments that other
generations have perceived in their own time. Still, in that
cicruitous past and its many living symbols, Southerners can find
uniquely the "oneness" which ties together the different people of
this region. It is a oneness that is born of our conflicts and our
loves — a oneness given the most common definition when
individuals see themselves as a community of people living in that
territory and influenced by the past we know as the South.
        