One in a series, appearing occasionally, examining social and political changes in states or regions holding major primaries.
RALEIGH, N.C. - They were just simple political primaries, a Democratic race and then a runoff, much like hundreds of unremarkable contests that have been held in the South in the last several generations.
But the struggle between Frank Porter Graham, the liberal former president of the University of North Carolina appointed to fill an unexpired Senate term, and Willis Smith, a prominent Raleigh lawyer and a former speaker of the state House, was anything but unremarkable. The contest, conducted right at the fulcrum of the last century, in 1950, scarred the region, shaped its character and unleashed forces that would, in time, remake the South. The runoff sent shock waves into Texas, Florida, Louisiana and the other Southern states that hold presidential primaries tomorrow, contests transformed by the winnowing of the candidate field last week into a first test in a region the two presumptive party nominees, both men of the South, will hotly contest next fall.
Indeed, all the pressure points, all the tensions, all the dreams and all the burdens of modern Southern life converged here in primaries that would reject Graham's impulses toward integration and modernization, embolden segregationists, enrage black bystanders - and, in one of the great unintended consequences of American history, set the terms for all of Southern politics to this day.
Embedded in those two primaries, among the most bitter fought anywhere at any time, were the forces that already were reshaping the South, creating upheaval in the region most resistant to change, leading to the forced desegregation of Southern life, continuing the remarkable migration of blacks to the North, foreshadowing the rebirth of the South and setting the groundwork for the flowering of a new industrial and suburban culture for the region that, Franklin Roosevelt, in 1938, called ''the nation's number one economic problem.''
For the story of the contemporary South is the movement from its rejection of integration to its embrace of it - not only the integration of the races within the region, but also the integration of the region into the economy, culture, politics and life of the nation.
The process has been fast, thorough - and revolutionary. The National Emergency Council's landmark 1938 report on the economic conditions of the South found that the region's people ''want and need houses, radios, butter, beef, vegetables, milk, eggs, dresses, shirts and shoes,'' adding: ''They want and could use the many thousands of things, little and big, that men and machines make to bring health and good living to people.'' Today the rate of job growth in urban areas of the South outpaces the rate in urban areas nationwide, the percentage of high school students preparing for college is higher in the South than in the nation overall and the biggest gap of all - between per capita income in the South and in the country as a whole - has all but withered away.
''The theme of the South now is change, after years of no change,'' says Ned McWherter, a former governor of Tennessee, a state whose culture now is marked as deeply by Saturn, Nissan and FedEx as by the Grand Ole Opry. ''We were basically an agricultural economy. We went to nonskilled needlework and shirt and shoe factories. Then we went to assembly and service and eventually technology. Our region has totally changed, and the politics have changed along with the economy.''
Today the South - with Jim Crow laws and one-party rule things of the past - is more like the nation than ever before and, in some areas, has begun to lead the nation. The 21st century began with a Southerner in the White House, a Southerner as vice president, a Southerner as Senate majority leader and two Southerners as presumptive nominees of both major parties. The city of Selma, Ala., which resisted integration with a force that stunned the rest of the nation, has a city council with 15 blacks and four whites and black police and fire chiefs.
''We took our old rural values - a closeness to the land, relationship to family, the appreciation of a tree and a garden - and even as we moved to metropolitan areas we kept our patches of green and our own pieces of land,'' says Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life at the University of North Carolina. ''We created these big, sprawling suburban entities that reflect our style of life - but we're also paying a price for this sprawl with traffic and environmental problems.''
As the last century began, the South's problems were of an entirely different scale and character. Segregation - the great stain on American life and the legacy of slavery and Reconstruction - set the tone and timbre of every strain of Southern life.
''Segregation showed the creativity of white people in continuing the sort of distinctions between the races that prevailed until the Civil War,'' said John Hope Franklin, the Duke University historian. ''But you cannot talk about the South without talking about race. There's no South without talking about the two races - and, soon, about three races.''
Segregation's great sin was the division of black and white and the tyrannies rooted in the false creeds of the past, tyrannies that permeated the farthest corners of the Southern landscape and the Southern mind. At the opening of the last century, all the Southern states were drafting new constitutions that blocked black citizens from voting and limited the participation of poor whites. ''The fundamentalist religions of the poor of both races focused on acceptance of their condition and the promise of a better life in the hereafter,'' Jack Bass and Walter de Vries wrote in ''The Transformation of Southern Politics.''
As a result, the main American domestic achievement of the age - the dispersal of hope, opportunity and new rights throughout the nation - was denied to a major region of the country for two-thirds of a century. As late as 1944, Gunnar Mydral was able to observe that ''Southerners still think of Negroes as their former slaves,'' explaining that ''in the South, the master-model of economic discrimination - slavery - is still a living force as a memory and a tradition.''
Segregation would end, just as the Democrats' one-party rule that was itself a legacy of slavery would end, but not before intervention from the Supreme Court, in its 1954 school-desegregation decision; from federal authorities, who at gunpoint in Little Rock and Selma, enforced the court's rulings and congressional voting-rights measures and defied the high priests of segregation like Governors George C. Wallace of Alabama and Lester Maddox of Georgia; from black protesters unwilling to tread the path set out by Jim Crow laws and willing to boycott buses in Montgomery, Ala., and strike elsewhere across the region; and from the moral outrage of imaginative civil-rights leaders, from both inside and outside the South, who produced the highest hour of civil disobedience during sit-ins and freedom rides and in response to the murders of Medgar Evers, the civil-rights workers in Nashoba County, Miss., and the four girls who died in the 1963 bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. (The epitaph for one of them, 11-year-old Denise McNair read, ''She loved all, but a mad bomber hated her kind.'')
All this helped end the segregation of another sort that the region itself suffered from - the effective separation from the rest of the nation.
With few major cities - Richmond, Charleston, New Orleans - the South at the beginning of the 20th century was dominantly rural, and not only rural but isolated, with the region's residents, whether in the mountains or the coastal plains or the bayous, living far from each other and the rest of the nation. Not until Huey Long was elected governor of Louisiana in 1928 was the notion of a bridge across the Mississippi River even seriously contemplated.
The region, now so robustly industrial and technological, was agrarian in economics, culture and spirit. Cotton and tobacco and, to a lesser extent, rice ruled. The only organized industrial operations were in textiles, tobacco and water power, two of the three of them dominated by the Duke family of North Carolina. With few elites (the big planters, a handful of bankers and merchants) and with most of the population (black as well as white) working as tenant farmers and low-skill wage earners, the South was a third-world nation.
But time and the tides of history changed the region. Though he feuded with the Southern barons of Capitol Hill, Roosevelt consciously used the war mobilization to help improve the economy of the South, planting military bases in the region, building roads to the bases, providing jobs and the start of a modern economic foundation that spread beyond farming and textiles.
Indeed, the Southerners who stepped up first to volunteer for military service also stepped up to go to college and then took the big step in American life, becoming white-collar workers: insurance salesmen, middle managers, merchants. Around the wreck of the mill economy began to grow a family-oriented, urban middle class.
From its earliest origins, before World War II, the rush toward industrialization troubled many Southerners, especially the conservatives known as Agrarians - thinkers and writers who feared that the price of progress would be too high, would shatter the character of the South and plunder its fields, farms and foothills, would alter its ancient rhythms. In one of history's ironies, that concern, expressed in the pathfinding volume called ''I'll Take My Stand'' in 1930, would be adopted by liberals in the end of the century.
One little-remembered Southern visionary was Hugh White, who took office in 1936 as governor of Mississippi having campaigned to ''Balance Agriculture With Industry.'' With an aggressive approach and an innovative bond-subsidy program - imitated by eight other Southern states by 1962 - he was the forerunner of generations of Southern governors who decided to court business. ''No longer did sons and daughters or their mothers and fathers have to accept the fact that there were few promising careers for young people in Mississippi. Young adults might now be able to stay near home, earn a better salary, and enjoy an improved standard,'' wrote the historian James C. Cobb in ''Selling the South: The Southern Crusade of Industrial Development, 1936-1980.''
The South's resistance to organized labor attracted new industry, but it also brought new tensions to the region and new resentments from the North, especially in New England, where Governor Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut and Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts decried what the Bay State lawmaker called Southern ''raiding.'' Kennedy grew angry when the American Bosch Co., responding to a free factory and tax preferences in Mississippi, moved its high-volume automotive production operation for voltage regulators, electric windshield wipers and small motors from Springfield in 1954.
Suddenly the Southern landscape was sprouting industrial parks and suburbs, and because northern industrialists belatedly took note of what Henry Grady described in the 1880s as the South's surplus of (cheap) labor, suddenly the Southern conversation was disrupted by new disputes over union organizing and wages.
Much of the cure for the Southern syndrome came from outside, in the form of manufacturers' money, which transformed the economy of the South, and federal law-enforcement authorities, who transformed the social architecture of the region. But the prospect of the outside money and the threat of the outside force sometimes prompted the South to cure itself. That impulse was personified in Ernest F. Hollings, who sided with segregationists and fought what he called the ''power-happy federal government'' to win election as governor of South Carolina in 1958 but who swiftly helped desegregate Clemson University and was the first governor to endorse Kennedy, the northern candidate for president, in 1960.
Still, primitive infrastructure, corrupt (or virtually nonexistent) local government and the stigma of segregation, which lingered long after the South's integration effort surpassed that of many places in the North, provided a drag on Southern economic growth. So did poor schools; in 1940, per-pupil expenditures in the public schools of the South were only half of the national average. As late as 1968, Southerners were investing only 78 cents in education for every dollar invested in the rest of the nation.
''The first thing that changed the South was the elimination of Jim Crow and the second was the new emphasis on education,'' says William Winter, who served as governor of Mississippi between 1980 and 1984 and made the state the first in the nation to pass a comprehensive education-reform program. ''In some ways they are equally important. The change in race relations in the South emphasized how much we had neglected education for almost all black Southerners and many white Southerners.''
Then came a series of other revolutionary developments: the beginning of the space program, seeding Texas, Alabama and Florida with the benefits of a highly educated workforce and the trappings of technology; the development of a tourist industry in the region, especially Florida, which brought visitors, jobs and tax revenues; the growth of a new political class, which put on display an attractive group of southern governors and appealing national figures such as Senator Howard H. Baker Jr., who won plaudits for his performance on the Senate Watergate Committee, and Jimmy Carter, the first president elected from the Deep South.
These new aggressive Southern politicians, at first mostly Democrats and later often Republicans, broke the hold of rusticated conservative Democrats on the political culture of the region - and, owing to the seniority system that gave the South so much power in Washington, of the nation.
By 1971, George H. Brown, the census director, was able to report that ''for the first time since the 1870s, the past decade has shown that more people moved into the South than out of it.'' By 1975, seven of the top eight spots in a national ranking of business climates were occupied by Southern states, with Texas ranking first and, most astonishing of all, Alabama ranking second. In the five years between 1970 and 1975, the number of black elected officials in the region tripled.
But the growth of black political participation is only half the story of modern Southern politics. The other is the growth of two-party politics after the Democrats' domination faded.
Lyndon Johnson worried when he signed the Voting Rights Act that might have handed the South to the Republican Party, which for a century had been vilified in the region. Johnson helped transform the Democratic Party into a biracial coalition, with blacks eventually becoming perhaps the preeminent voting group in the party in the South. But he also accelerated the white flight to the Republican Party that was symbolized by the movement of Strom Thurmond, who had run for president in 1948 on the Dixiecrat line and who had switched to the GOP in 1964 to support Barry Goldwater.
With his Southern Strategy, Richard Nixon was the first Republican presidential nominee to court the region with brio. And though Nixon is a formidable figure in Southern political history, the pivotal role may in fact belong to Wallace, who ran an independent campaign against Nixon and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968. Wallace, in so many ways an agent of change in Southern politics, provided a bridge to Republican rule, allowing voters who once considered themselves yellow-dog Democrats a temporary resting place before they moved fully into the GOP tent.
Now the South is new, or at least different. Its resources of water, land and forests, which once held the region back, are valuable assets. Its politics, once inbred and narrow, has become visionary, and to historians the phrase ''Southern politician'' now is just as likely to include figures such as Terry Sanford of North Carolina, Albert Gore Sr. and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Lister Hill of Alabama and the Arkansas triumvirate of Dale Bumpers, David Pryor and Bill Clinton - and Republicans like Winthrop Rockefeller of Arkansas and Linwood Holton of Virginia - as Orval Faubus of Arkansas and Ross Barnett of Mississippi. And perhaps the preeminent Southern moral and political leader of the 20th century was not an elected official at all, but the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
There remain shadows in the Sun Belt, of course. Governor James Hunt of North Carolina has created a rural prosperity task force. Remnants of the old economic structure, especially in poultry and catfish processing plants, textile mills and low-wage service industries, persist and vast pockets of poverty remain.
But the South has risen, and is rising still. Blacks, at a rate of about 100,000 a year the past two decades, are pouring back into the region, with Atlanta alone gaining 160,000 blacks between 1990 and 1996. Interstate 85, the primary transportation route in the Southeast, is now regarded as the Autobahn of America, and some of the charms dangling from its industrial necklace are BMW, Bank of America, Saab and United Parcel Service. And the region is remarkably competitive politically, with Republicans and Democrats now routinely alternating control of major offices in places like Alabama, South Carolina and Georgia. The South is new again.
