Black and White Perspectives on the American South

Who else, the friend wanted to know?

"The white youth of this country, and especially the South," said Gaines, "because unless he knows his neighbor of 300 years, he only knows half his history."

Gaines, author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, delivered the keynote address September 29, 1994, at a conference which had among its goals to determine if there is a Southern history which encompasses the differences between the races.

The conference, "Black and White Perspectives on the American South," held September 29-30, 1994, at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education, examined how the South's black and white residents view themselves and their relations to one another. It was selected for a 1994 Regional Designation Award in the Humanities as part of the Cultural Olympiad, which recognizes excellence and innovation in the humanities throughout the Southeast.

Gaines, who received the 1994 National Book Award for fiction for A Lesson Before Dying, joined 10 other nationally known scholars and writers whose works and experiences qualify them to provide black and white perspectives on a variety of issues related to the South's history and culture. Among them were UGA history professor William S. McFeely, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Ulysses S. Grant, and Melissa Fay Greene, author of Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Non-Fiction, which won the Southern Regional Council's Lillian Smith Award in 1992.

The conference attracted more than 600 people on each of the conference's two days. Four two-hour sessions were held, each featuring a black and a white speaker. The sessions addressed four broad topics: "The Historical Development of Race Relations in the South"; "Class, Race, and Gender"; "Culture"; and "Justice and Power." In afternoon sessions, the audience divided into small groups for discussions with one of the participants who spoke earlier that day.

"I'm not sure any consensus was reached," said Robert Pratt, a UGA history professor and one of the conference organizers. "But if we could get people to act on some of the things that were said, we would be moving in good directions. I was pleased with the number of young people in attendance. If we could reach some of those, I think that is one positive thing to focus on."

"We had very strong attendance; it was outstanding," said Will Holmes, also a UGA history professor and a principal organizer. "You could look at the general session audience and the smaller discussions and see both groups well represented."

Questions raised and addressed by the conference included:

• What is a black Southerner?
• What is a white Southerner?
• Does the issue of Southern identity differ significantly among sub-groups within the black and white community?
• Does gender influence Southern identity?
• Do some aspects of Southern culture divide blacks and whites?
• Do some aspects of Southern culture unite blacks and whites?
• Do blacks and whites living in the South relate to one another differently from blacks and whites in other parts of the country?
• Has regional identification for black and white Southerners changed over time?
• Is there a Southern history that represents the groups' differences?

"One of the strengths of this conference was the quality of presentations, the diversity of the audience, and the way the audience responded to the presentations," said Ronald Benson, director of the Georgia Humanities Council, one of the sponsors. "I see it as a successful effort on the part of the university to provide leadership on an important topic for the wider community."

The conference was the result of discussions which began early in 1993 among Holmes and two of his history department colleagues: John Inscoe, editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly; and Robert Pratt, an authority on the origins of the civil rights movement and race and ethnicity in the United States. R. Baxter Miller, head of the Institute for African-American Studies at UGA, joined the early conversations, according to Holmes.

The University of Georgia Press will publish a proceedings volume of the essays contributed by the speakers, tentatively scheduled for fall, 1995. No decision has been reached on whether a similar conference will be staged again in the future.

For more information, contact Margaret Caufield (caufieldm@gactr.uga.edu), conference coordinator, Georgia Center for Continuing Education, The University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602-3603, 706-542-1585.