In Search of the New South

Into the Past

On March 2, 1988, six days before the "Super Tuesday" presidential primary, I went to a Jesse Jackson rally at St. Matthew's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Greenville, Mississippi. I started out in Jackson. From there I drove west on Interstate 20 almost to the Vicksburg city limits, then I headed north on Highway 61. At the Highway 61 exit ramp, you quickly leave behind the New South of suburban sprawl and shopping malls and head into a land where, as native son William Faulkner once noted, "the past is not history, it's not even past."

Highway 61 follows the east bank of the Big River through the Mississippi Delta, or, as it is more properly called, the Yazoo Delta in Mississippi. The Delta is a flat and fertile triangle of northwest Mississippi bounded by the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers. It has some of the richest agricultural land on earth and historically has been the home of great cotton plantations.

The Yazoo Delta is also something of an African-American cultural heartland. Until the great migration north during and after World War II, blacks comprised a large majority of the Delta's residents. African slaves cleared this land, drained its swamps, and worked the cotton fields that created fortunes for white plantation owners and Northern and English textile barons.

In this Delta were born Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, and dozens of other great artists who gave the blues to the world. It was also in this Delta that some of the most dramatic scenes of the Freedom Movement were played out. It was here in 1955 that Emmett Till, like so many before him, was murdered by white men. Due to the courage of Till's family, and a national black leadership emboldened by the 1954 Supreme Court integration decision, a trial was held that focused the attention of the world on the violent racism in this Delta.

While Emmett Till lay cold at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River, about 30 miles away a sharecropper named Fannie Lou Hamer was working the fields and raising a brood of adopted children. Seven years later, when the brave, mostly black, young men and women of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to the Delta and put out the call for black voter registration, Fannie Lou Hamer stepped forward and entered history as an inspiration to oppressed people the world over.

In 1962 Medgar Evers, state field director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was murdered in Jackson, Mississippi. A man from the Delta town of Greenwood was tried for the murder. White police officers from his hometown testified that they had seen him there, 90 miles from Jackson, at the time of the murder. But like Emmett Till's killers before him, he was found not guilty by a jury of his white peers. Again the glare of the nation was on the Delta, and the conscience of the nation was disquieted.

For the record, I, a white man, was born and raised in this Delta, too. Many of the great events of the Freedom Movement swirled around in the background of my childhood. Emmett Till was murdered just outside the city limits of my hometown. My grandparents' house wasn't far from Fannie Lou Hamer's. The killer of Medgar Evers, known to one and all, walked the streets of my hometown. As I drove up Highway 61, I was going to see Jesse Jackson, but I was also going home.

EVERY TIME I'M BACK IN THE DELTA, I'M struck mostly at how little it has changed. There are black elected officials now, but the poverty of the region is still overwhelming. Even before the recent farm depression, federal transfer payments -- food stamps, Social Security, disability, AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), and others -- had long been the Delta's biggest single source of income.

On the stretch of Highway 61 from Vicksburg to Greenville, which is relatively unfamiliar to me, I was struck with a sense of familiarity. In spring and summer, the Delta is lush with almost tropical greenery. But in the winter it is a desolate place. Bare fields and bare trees stretch out to the horizon, broken only by metal farm buildings, wooden houses, and rickety, overpopulated shacks fit for a Third World refugee camp.

As Jesse Jackson made his way through a long day of campaign stops, of which Greenville was next to last, he was also coming home. Jackson is, as he tells his Southern audiences, "a true son of the South, born in South Carolina, went to college in North Carolina." And, as he reminded his Mississippi audiences, he has spent a lot of time here too, both in the 1960s, "walking these roads ... for public accommodations ... for voting rights," and more recently.

Jackson's perspective and purview over the years have become national, multiracial, and global. But his political and philosophical roots are firmly planted in the black, Southern, and inclusively Christian tradition and experience of the Freedom Movement.

Aside from his experience with Third World leaders, it is ultimately his history in the civil rights movement that he uses to counter charges, made publicly by Albert Gore, that he lacks a record for the voters to evaluate. In his standard stump speech, he usually addresses the "leadership" issue by saying, "In those days there was no leadership from the Congress. We had to lead the Congress on public accommodations, on voting rights, on fair housing." And, he often adds, "We made America stronger; we made America better."

In the 1980s Jackson's main political accomplishments have been in pushing for stricter enforcement of black voting rights and in helping activate the sleeping giant of the Southern black vote. In the Mississippi Delta, Jackson, and the excitement generated by his regular visits in this decade, have contributed greatly to increased black voter registration and participation. As one result, the Delta's majority, or near-majority, black counties are now represented in Washington by Mississippi's first black member of Congress since Reconstruction, Mike Espy, a Democrat elected in 1986.

Building Bridges

JACKSON'S SCHEDULE FOR THE DAY HE came to Greenville epitomized his 1988 strategy of standing on his historic connection to the civil rights movement and its moral authority, while simultaneously reaching out in an attempt to draw new, non-black constituencies into a renewed and, he hopes, vastly broadened extension of that tradition.

Jackson began the day in Selma, Alabama, at a commemoration of the 23rd anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," the day a march from Birmingham to Montgomery for voting rights was attacked by club-wielding police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Jackson met with Selma's Mayor Joe Smitherman, who had given the orders to attack the marchers 23 years ago. Together they made a walking tour of Selma's depressed black neighborhoods.

In a carefully worded non-endorsement of the kind many white Southern politicians are making this year, an older and wiser Smitherman respectfully praised Jackson for raising the issues of housing and education. However, the mayor declined an invitation to join the anniversary marchers at the famous bridge.

In Texas that same afternoon, Jackson benefited from some new-style racial bridge-building when he was endorsed by Texas State Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower. Hightower was the first and, at this writing, still the only white, statewide elected official to endorse Jackson's candidacy.

Since the mid-1970s Hightower has been known in progressive circles as a sort of guru of the "new populism." In the context of the recent and dubious oil crisis, followed by what was then the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, Hightower perceived the potential for a non-ideological movement against corporate power. He thought such a movement could draw together constituencies as diverse as ghetto blacks and Midwestern farmers in an alliance of self-interest.

In those days Hightower was a public interest lobbyist in Washington, D.C. But he eventually moved back home to Texas and entered politics. As the farm crisis began to take hold, Hightower was elected to the state agriculture post in the early '80s and has since been comfortably re-elected. Events -- including the oil-glut-induced Texas depression -- have confirmed his economic theories. And his good-ole-boy style has caught on.

Hightower is now the Democratic Party's national point man on agriculture policy. He is also one of the most popular politicians in Texas. His base of support is the one he began imagining more than a dozen years ago -- farmers, small business people, white blue-collar workers, blacks, Hispanics, labor unions, white liberals, and progressives.

Meanwhile, on the Midwestern prairie where the old populism was born, the new breed took root and flourished. And in the Old South, white Democrats looking for a way to mobilize the increasingly powerful black vote, without alienating rural and blue-collar whites, began to play a slightly diluted version of the new populist theme. The Democrats' recapture of the Senate in 1986, keyed as it was to turnarounds in Iowa, North Dakota, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, was simultaneously a demonstration of the power of Southern blacks and of the new populism's appeal.

THIS YEAR JESSE JACKSON HAS SOUGHT to become the candidate who embodies both of those new forces under the American political sun. His campaign is aimed at welding the energy and moral force of the black struggle to the universalist appeal of populism, and vice versa.

Since 1984 Jackson has spent much of his time earning his populist credentials the hard way. He has marched with (mostly white) farmers throughout the Midwest and stood with them at dozens of rallies and foreclosure protests, some of them well-publicized, some not. At first Jackson may have seized on the farm issue as an especially vivid way to demonstrate his "rainbow" commitment. But it has gone far beyond a media ploy now.

Jackson has genuinely made the farmers' cause his own, and the family-farm movement is starting to claim him as one of its own. In the last three years, Jackson has also spent cold days on picket lines with (usually white) striking workers across the Industrial North. Workers and farmers have returned the favor by giving him surprising levels of support in Iowa, Minnesota, Maine, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Still, with all Jackson's demonstrated commitment to populist issues and building a new populist constituency, Hightower's endorsement was something of a surprise. Hightower is expected to run for the U.S. Senate from Texas in 1990. And conventional wisdom would tell you that endorsing Jesse Jackson will not help him. The historic populist strategy is to leapfrog over racial prejudices and racial causes, in order to build coalitions around broader, class-based, mutual interests.

In the process of building such coalitions, populist theory holds that oppressed racial minorities will in fact receive their due, both in economic benefits and in positions of power within the coalition. Meanwhile, white racism will be ameliorated not by sentiment or appeals to guilt, but by the concrete reality of shared interests and by the lived experience of interracial association necessary to furthering those interests.

Until very recently, Jesse Jackson has been perceived as a "racial" leader. In 1984 his battle cry was "Our time has come." Try as he occasionally might to broaden the antecedent of "our," there was no escaping the fact that he mainly meant blacks. Much of his campaign was directed at winning a fair share of black power within the Democratic Party.

There was certainly nothing wrong with Jesse Jackson taking it upon himself to become the guardian of black interests and the spokesperson for the black vote within the Democratic Party or in the national media. And there is nothing wrong with him staging a presidential primary campaign to win leverage for blacks in the party.

A populist like Hightower would have to respect such a black leader and collaborate with him as an equal on matters of mutual interest. But he would never endorse him for president. Blacks, after all, will never be much more than 15 percent of the 51 percent needed to take power. And populists are less sentimental than most in recognizing that power is the point of politics. Hightower's endorsement signified a change in Jesse Jackson's identity from "president of black America" to "most prominent national figure of an emerging multiracial movement for economic democracy."

Waiting for Jesse

IN 1984 JESSE JACKSON COULD BE accused of sometimes "talking black" to black audiences and "talking Rainbow" to whites. But this year, everywhere Jackson goes the message is the same, a call to move "from racial battleground to economic common ground." That was the main pitch in Greenville too, but there was also the very special flavor of the black church community welcoming one of its proudest sons back into its bosom.

As I enter St. Matthew's AME Church, the congregation is engaged in that special pastime known as "waiting for Jesse." There's never any dead time when you're waiting for Jesse. Local dignitaries are always on hand ready to speak. They are called upon as needed, depending on how much time there is to fill before the candidate's arrival.

There's also music. Tonight it's the youth choir from a local Missionary Baptist Church and a complement of adult soloists. As I take my seat, a stocky young man is singing "How Great Thou Art." He's good. It soars. It feels like church.

St. Matthew's is a slightly urbanized version of the little brown church in the wildwood. It's small. The crowd of about 250 is standing room only. White-washed plaster walls. A beautiful, high, arching, wooden ceiling with exposed wooden beams. The kind they don't make any more, except for rich people.

After the solo, the pulpit is taken by Rev. E.E. Evans who brings greetings from the Washington County Baptist Association and eloquently sings the praises of his hometown. "Greenville, the Queen City of the Delta ... If an artist could stretch [a] canvas across our river front at sunset and take the picture to the World's Fair, Greenville would win first prize." Another preacher follows, briefly quoting Hebrews on living as brothers and sisters and exhorting us that "the race is not always to the swift, but to those that endure."

In this room, waiting for Jesse takes on biblical connotations. Here, for better or worse, you're not just waiting for a political candidate. You're waiting, not quite for The Promised One, but certainly for what one of the preachers unabashedly calls "a God-sent man." In black Mississippi, on the eve of Super Tuesday, for better or worse, fine distinctions between religion and politics dissolve. It's all "Run, Jesse, Run" and "Win, Jesse, Win!"

Soon another soloist starts an a cappella version of "Wade in the Water," and the circle is unbroken -- from the Red Sea and the River Jordan to the underground railroad and on down to this very night alongside the Big River. "God's gonna trouble the water."

When the singing stops, Jackson enters. Next comes an uproar of cheering while the candidate handshakes his way around the front rows of the crowd, through the choir loft and across the stage.

Finally the master of ceremonies, Johnnie Walls, a black civil rights lawyer and Democratic Party chair of Washington County, brings things around to the secular business at hand by introducing the Mayor of Greenville, the Hon. Henry Burley. Burley is aptly named. He's about 6'2" and rotund, with massive, sloped shoulders. With a voice that sounds like bourbon and cigars, he's a near-perfect caricature of an old-time white, Southern politician. But here he is, in St. Matthew's AME Church, extolling the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

As a well-adapted post-Voting Rights Act Southern politician, Burley is clearly no stranger to the territory. He begins his remarks by noting that he wished Rev. Jackson had arrived earlier. "Since he's going to the White House, I wanted him to hear how good I can sing [the black national anthem] "Lift Every Voice and Sing," says the mayor, to hearty laughter all around. Burley works his way through the usual praise of Jackson for raising the important issues and enlarging the Democratic Party. To conclude, he presents the candidate with the keys to the city of Greenville, "on behalf of all our people."

Finally, Wall does the introduction proper. "He's second in Vermont! [cheers] Second in Maine! [more cheers] Second in Minnesota! [pandemonium] First in Mississippi! [standing pandemonium] This is the front-runner! [the house comes down]."

AT LAST JACKSON SPEAKS. HIS remarks, he tells us, "will be uncharacteristically brief." It's already 8:30 p.m., and he still has another rally that night in West Memphis, Arkansas. He begins by reviewing his history in Mississippi. He reminds us of his intervention in the county elections of 1983 and says, "There are elected officials here tonight who are in office because of that." All these battles have "made Mississippi a better place, and America a stronger nation," he says. Then it's on to "common ground."

"There is a New South with a common agenda. It's not black vs. white, it's barracudas vs. small fish ... The New Mississippi that plays football together can fight for justice together." He recounts his visit to Selma, where "there are new relations between black and white, but the same shotgun houses that we saw in 1965 haven't changed. They're just 23 years older." Then the bottom line, "One difference today over 23 years ago is that we, the people, can win. On Super Tuesday we can win."

Then Jackson pauses and seems to stare into deep space. He extends his arms up and over the pulpit and begins to wiggle his fingers. He breaks into a grin. Out comes the line that capped his Southern speeches in 1984, but is heard less frequently this year. "Hands that picked cotton can now pick presidents on Super Tuesday." The crowd rises with a roar that makes the little church seem at least 10 times its actual size. The job is done. The Second Congressional District of Mississippi is energized.

When the tumult subsides, Jackson does his fundraising pitch. There is little hype to it, and no embarrassment. "We know each other too well to beg off each other," he says. It starts with a call for those who will give $100 and works its way down to, "If you've only got a dollar, you can still have commitment. We didn't win the Voting Rights Act with money. If you could buy it, wouldn't nobody have had to die for it."

Finally a very tired Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson ends the meeting with a benediction that he often uses, but rarely on the presidential stump. It's a call and response recitation: "If my people, who are called by name, will humble themselves and seek my face, I will heal their land."

After things calm down, I go out to take a look at the Queen City of the Delta. Walking behind the church I find a typical black Delta neighborhood with very narrow streets and even narrower one-person sidewalks. There are no curbs and gutters, an ominous sign in this low-lying town by the Big River.

The low, narrow, wooden houses come right up to the sidewalk and are set about two feet apart from each other. Some of them lean precariously. Like the sharecropper shacks of Selma, these dwellings probably haven't changed much in 23 years either.

Southern Strategies

THE NEXT DAY I PICKED UP THE Jackson Daily News. Not too long ago, The Daily News was one of the most viciously racist publications in America. Today its front page features a huge color photograph of Jesse Jackson receiving the keys to the city of Greenville from Mayor Henry Burley. Despite the virtually all-black Greenville crowd, the accompanying headline and article emphasize Jackson's populist appeal to white voters. The reporter quotes the line about "barracudas vs. small fish" and notes the historic appeal of such populist rhetoric in Mississippi politics.

The Daily News also picked up Jackson's complimentary reference to Mississippi's newly elected Gov. Ray Mabus as "a governor who is opening schoolhouse doors." At another appearance, Jackson called Mabus "perhaps the most progressive, cutting-edge governor in America today."

The election of 38-year-old Mabus last fall is widely perceived, here and nationally, as a watershed event in Mississippi politics. He's considered the vanguard of a new generation of white progressive Mississippi Democrats committed to racial equality and economic development. In Mississippi, progress on both of those issues means first and foremost upgrading the state's public school system which is, by most measures, the worst in America. That has become Mabus' winning "non-racial" issue.

Since the Mabus election there is a lot of talk about the New Mississippi, a state finally getting beyond "the past." There does seem to be a new atmosphere in the state's politics. And the key to the change is the black vote. The majority of white Mississippians voted against Ray Mabus. But he still won handily with 90 percent of the black vote.

On Super Tuesday, Mississippi also had a Democratic primary race for a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate. Listening to a black radio station, I heard the rival white candidates' appeals to black voters. One claims to have stood the strongest "against the Reagan tide" and "against apartheid in South Africa." The other heralds his support for renewal of the Voting Rights Act. Each emphasized his allegiance to the cause of the poor and needy. I had to scratch my head. It sounded like an election in Berkeley, California, or some other leftist enclave.

None of this wild rhetoric was coming from the mouths of the candidates themselves. The voices were always those of black supporters. But in the ads for white listeners, the progressive content was distilled to the catch phrase of "The New Mississippi." After all, the primary winner will still have to compete for the white vote against a well-funded and true-blue Reaganaut congressperson. Nonetheless, this is, if not a new Mississippi, at least a different one.

Since 1964, right-wing forces in America have come to count on the Solid South as the heartland of reaction. Nixon called it "The Southern Strategy." Except for native son Jimmy Carter, the South has gone Republican (or Wallace-Independent) in every presidential election since '64. And the more reactionary the Republican, the greater the enthusiasm. The Republican Parties of the South have provided us with some of the most virulently right-wing members of the U.S. Congress -- Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), and the grandfather of them all, Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.).

BUT ALL OF THAT MAY BE CHANGING with a larger and better-organized black vote and the emergence of white progressives who have memorized a few pages from the new populist playbook. In the 1986 U.S. Senate races, the South went solidly Democratic. And, on the whole, the candidates elected were unusually progressive, for the South. Georgia and North Carolina elected senators who would be considered liberal anywhere in America. The margin of victory was the black vote, and the Senate returned to Democratic control.

In 1987 the Robert Bork appointment to the Supreme Court loomed as the ideological crown jewel of the Reagan legacy. It was stopped by the new Democratic Senate. The margin of victory came from the South as every Southern Democratic senator voted against Bork. The reason was pressure from the black Southern voters who sent them to Washington. If white Southern Democrats can keep finding the right recipe of non-racial interests to shore up their white flank, we could see a pattern emerging in which black Southern voting strength not only takes the South away from the Right, but becomes the fulcrum for a political shift in the country as a whole.

Jesse Jackson sees that pattern already and articulates it this way: "The coalition we built in '84 changed the Senate in '86, stopped Bork in '87, and can elect Jackson in '88." That is a self-serving formulation, of the sort presidential candidates make, and it omits some significant qualifiers. But Jackson does deserve a lot of credit for the new mobilization of Southern blacks. His progressive Southern strategy is in tune with the future of American politics. And the smarter white Democratic politicians know it.

That Southern strategy is part of what Jesse Jackson meant as he hammered at the theme of "A New South." But Jackson's idea of a New South cuts deeper than the phenomenon of black votes electing white moderates.

When I asked Mike Alexander, an aide to black congressperson Mike Espy and Jackson's state coordinator, about "The New Mississippi," he said, "You have a lot of younger political leaders who realize that this blatant racism is the thing that has held the state back and who really want to move past that with a new image for the state. But reality is that the wealth is still concentrated in a few hands. There's still a lot of inequality between blacks and whites. The challenge is for the new leadership, and for the people, not only to change the image but to change the reality."

Rims Barber was one of the white Northern students who came to Mississippi for Freedom Summer in 1964. He settled in Jackson and has devoted himself to working for racial and economic justice in his adopted home. He works for the Children's Defense Fund and is supporting Jesse Jackson for president.

When I asked Barber about the New Mississippi, he said, "The problems of race still hit us square in the eyeballs all the time ... It's still there. We're working in the legislature right now on some legislation to help poor people. And poor people become, in the legislative process, synonymous with 'black.' 'Tisn't true. I can pull my census out and say, 'Look guys! It isn't true.' But it's a mythology that's so ingrained in the culture that it's hard to expunge."

Respect for black voting power, high-level black appointments, new waves of black elected officials -- all of this may come to pass. But the bottom line for the New South is going to be economics -- "Fair taxes, fair wages, and fair prices," as Jesse Jackson often says.

In addition to a far-sighted analysis of Southern politics, Jesse Jackson's Super Tuesday campaign also displayed a native Southerner's feel for Southern traditions, many of which know no racial barriers. He talked a lot about fried chicken and college football. At the center of every stump speech he used Southerners' reverence for the gridiron to bring home his populist economic appeal.

One version that I tape-recorded went like this: "The New South ... We see the Cotton Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and Orange Bowl on TV, black and white together, black and white cheerleaders who cheer our teams on to victory -- and that's new and good. But, friends, that's symbolism. Behind the Cotton Bowl, what about the textile workers who, when they work, don't get enough pay to make ends meet? ... Behind the Sugar Bowl, what about the cane cutters? ... Behind the Orange Bowl, what about the citrus workers?"

After that, Jackson would usually pull out his own census data and note, "Most poor people are not black or brown -- they're white, and young, and female. And most poor people are not on welfare. They work ... but they don't get paid enough to make ends meet." He pointed to a New South that has the lowest wages in America, 13 million people without any health insurance, and 57 percent of the nation's toxic waste dumps, and said simply, "It's not fair."

Southern Dreams

"THE NEW SOUTH." WE KEEP COMING back to that magical phrase. For Southerners who know their history, it's a term heavy with irony. There has been a succession of New South's in the past century. And the spiritual, and financial, capital has always been Atlanta. Atlanta is where I spent the last two days before Super Tuesday.

Contrary to what one might assume, the term "New South" did not arise to describe the Reconstruction period of social integration and black empowerment that followed the Civil War. Its genesis was in the post-Reconstruction period, when Northerners, faced with a devastating economic crisis and a burgeoning radical labor movement, decided to turn the South back over to its white elite.

The first "New South" was a public relations creation of that elite. In view of the troubles up North, they hoped that Northern capital would be ready to bring its railroads and factories South, and help itself to the region's natural and human resources.

It worked, to some extent. Agricultural crop prices had plummeted, and Southerners, black and white, were desperate enough to take any job at any wage, children included. So, for instance, the textile sweatshops of New England became the even grimmer sweatshops of Georgia and the Carolinas.

It was in, and against, this New South that Southern populism arose. In those days -- the 1880s and '90s -- blacks were still voting in the South, and the Jim Crow apartheid system had not yet been instituted. The white populist leaders wanted to break the financial tyranny that strangled farmers and drove them to the sweatshops. The only hope for doing this was to forge an alliance of poor whites and blacks. Even then, lower-class whites were the ones most infected with anti-black prejudices. And in much of the South, all the machinery of political power, including the counting of votes, was held by corrupt servants of the economic elite.

But against all odds, a homegrown, radical, interracial movement of farmers and workers called the Populist Party did arise and enjoy a brief period of success in the South. For a thumbnail sketch of interracial Southern populism, one can look to the chapter titled "Forgotten Alternatives" in C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow.

Tom Watson of Georgia was the foremost leader of Southern populism. He served in Congress for the Populist Party and was its vice-presidential candidate in 1896. As Woodward records it, Watson told black and white Southerners, "You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both ... The colored tenant ... is in the same boat with the white tenant, the colored laborer with the white laborer ... If you [blacks] stand up for your rights and for your manhood, if you stand shoulder to shoulder with us in this fight, [the Populist Party] will wipe out the color line and put every man on his citizenship irrespective of color."

Like so many things in the South, the populist story ends with ambiguity and tragedy. The movement was eventually crushed by appeals to racism and, when that failed, rigged elections. The Tom Watson story, told by C. Vann Woodward in Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel, ends tragically, too.

After his party collapsed, Watson took a hiatus from politics for a while and came back as a tub-thumping racist and anti-Semite. The latter Watson thought that the disenfranchisement of blacks was the best thing that ever happened to the common white people of the South. Even with this tragic end, however, Woodward could write, "The wonder is not that the Populists eventually failed, but that they made as much headway as they did against the overwhelming odds they faced."

TODAY ATLANTA IS THE CAPITAL OF another New South, the one that has followed the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s. In the overwhelming '60s they started calling Atlanta "the city too busy to hate." Here the color line has, to all appearances, been wiped out. Atlanta has a black mayor, a black congressperson, and blacks on the city council. Most of them get a fair number of white liberal-to-moderate votes.

But Atlanta's color line wasn't obliterated in a common struggle against "financial despotism." Atlanta integrated to create a stable and favorable business climate for Northern capital and a suitably "progressive" cultural environment for its migrating Northern managers. Atlanta stopped hating, and it has done business. It is now the model of progress for the rest of the post-civil rights New South.

You don't have to knock around Atlanta long to start having some questions about its value as a model. Progress is symbolized by a few blocks downtown around Peachtree Center. After two days I began thinking of this upscale enclave as a real-life theme park called "NewSouthLand." Everyone is prosperous and well-dressed. The races mix easily. There are plenty of overpriced amusements and French-titled concession stands. But at 6 p.m. they close the gate and roll up the sidewalk.

Just outside the gates of NewSouthLand is Old South poverty. Atlanta's homeless population is as visible as New York's, though a great deal blacker. Mike Mears, the white mayor of suburban Decatur, Georgia, and state co-chair for the Jackson campaign, told me, "You go right beyond the World Congress Center, where the Democratic Convention's going to be held, the Omni, and that area there with all this glitter and glitz, and you've got some of the most deprived housing projects and deprived groups of people in the South living right there ... The juxtaposition is staggering."

On the question of New South image vs. reality, symbol vs. substance, Mears told me, "What most of us in the South have not been able to grasp, and have never really been taught, is that racism is institutional. Prejudice is personal. But racism is a system of economic oppression. We've been a racist society, and in many ways we still are. And Jesse Jackson is hitting that head-on. But he's also saying that we fought the battle for voting rights, and now we've got to fight for economic rights. And that's probably at the core of racism more than just personal prejudices or dislikes."

While I was in Atlanta, I went down to the State Capitol. Right outside the front door is a life-size bronze statue of Tom Watson. The memorial, unfortunately, is to the latter Watson, who majored in personal prejudices and dislikes. You'd have to be a cultural archaeologist to see buried beneath that statue, in the netherworld of Southern memory, the early Watson's lost and all-but-forgotten dream of blacks and whites united against a system of economic oppression.

Inside the Capitol is a portrait of Georgia's greatest offspring, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Jimmy Carter put it there when he was governor. It honors the early King who helped create a New South where blacks vote and are elected, where blacks go to the best colleges, get white-collar jobs, and share tables at downtown restaurants with their white counterparts.

Those are great and substantial accomplishments. But moldering in his grave lies the dream of the later King who sought to build, on the foundation of black re-enfranchisement, a multiracial poor people's movement to redistribute America's wealth and power. Perhaps somewhere, maybe in the Southern part of heaven, the early Watson and the later King meet. Maybe their ghosts even convene in the dead of night under this Capitol dome.

HOWEVER IMPERFECTLY AND HALTINGLY, Jesse Jackson's campaign sought to reintroduce those two great Southerners and to reunite the white Southern populist impulse, so long captive to self-defeating bigotry, with the coinciding democratic aspirations of black Southerners. He's tried to bring those he calls "long lost brothers and sisters" back together in a great "family reunion."

In the South, the beginning Jackson made was embryonic. He doubled his white vote over 1984. But it was still only 10 percent or so. And that's 10 percent of Democratic primary voters, not of whites overall. There was considerable white run-off to the Republican Bush-Dole-Robertson affair. Also the white votes Jackson did get in the South were mostly from younger, more educated, left-leaning types, not the sons and daughters of toil.

As we've noted, elsewhere in America, where the barriers of race consciousness are lower, the picture has been different. Different enough that it's safe to say Jackson has introduced a new vocabulary to American politics and identified a potential, new constituency. For the first time since World War I, a major candidate has tromped across America baldly attacking corporate power as the root of our problems, and a substantial cross-section of the public has listened.

Even in the South, the fact, and perception, of Jackson's campaign has opened new doors. Even among whites who didn't vote for him, he won a new respect. His message made sense to the head, the heart, and the pocketbook. They'll be more positively inclined toward him in the future, and perhaps even more so toward a similar economic message from a less controversial messenger.

It's a well-known fact that we Southerners love fine words and lofty rhetoric. Jesse Jackson is one of us in that respect. But Southern flights of rhetoric have consequences. Fine words have often deceived us.

For one thing, we've produced a legion of Jimmy Swaggarts over the years. And in the first half of this century, our white-maned political orators whipped up an eloquent and thoroughly false vision of the glorious Old South and its white "way of life." Their fiction was so compelling that the most poor and unschooled white men in the South could be moved to put on white hoods and kill in its defense.

Dr. King was the South's greatest orator. And his words had consequences, too. In his dream of 1963, he summoned up a Southland that didn't exist and seemed at the time improbable. But those who took his words seriously went forth into nonviolent battle, and today those words have flesh.

Jesse Jackson's call for the South, and America, to move from the wasted years of racial battleground to a new day of economic common ground can be dismissed as catchy and useful election-year rhetoric. It is that. But it is also a rhetoric that falls fresh upon American ears and carries power and hope. His scattering of words into the American wind could yet hold unforeseen consequences.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.