Jackson Free Press

Alternet is featuring a provocative piece by Nina Burleigh, who argues that the "Old South" is "crumbling away." More: "The change has not been sudden, but more of an erosion. Slowly, slowly – as slowly as the hundred long years of Strom Thurmond's life – the reign of white and black men who came of age in an era of separate drinking fountains and burning crosses is ending. Republicans – as they are wont to remind black voters – freed the slaves under Abraham Lincoln. The South was dominated, though, by white male Democrats throughout the first half of the twentieth century, until LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Southern majority turned to the Republican Party, which has been quadrennially tossing racist red meat to poor whites ever since. LBJ predicted that was ahead, remarking, when he signed the law, 'I have signed away the South for a generation.' It turned out to be two. But forty years later, with Thurmond's death, the retirements of North Carolina's Jesse Helms and now, Sen. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, and Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia in 2004, the old conservative bulls in the Senate who have retarded the South's social progress for decades are finally letting go."

"There are to be sure, relics still in power. But with each passing year, their luster dims, their strength wanes. There's the oleaginous disgraced former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. As slick in person as a shiny patch on the Missisippi Delta – and nearly as toxic – he's still befuddled over being betrayed by his fellow Republicans after publicly pining for the good old days of separate but equal, a sentiment with which, he surely thought, any Southern man would concur."

"Turncoat Democrat Zell Miller of Georgia put in a career-zapping performance that marked the end of his political life when spoke before Dick Cheney on the convention podium on Wednesday. The Democrat running for his Senate seat is an African-American woman, United States Rep. Denise Majette. The departure of the old white boys isn't the only needed change. It's possible that the black civil rights leaders themselves, men like John Lewis, must move on too before the Old South can finally rest in peace. The rhetoric and imagery of black men who cut their political teeth marching in the 1960s, while genuinely heroic, will have to give way to make room for younger black men and women speaking for a generation of Southern blacks whose problems are more complicated than separate drinking fountains."

"The change-over couldn't come soon enough. In spite of conventional thinking that says the Voting Rights Act changed the South, poor Southern whites and blacks are still paying the ultimate price for the continuing lock-hold of Old South values on the region's – and the nation's — politics. Those quaint-sounding values – chivalry and honor through military heroism – have justified centuries of anti-feminism and countless unnecessary young dead men."