In March 2023, this lonely Substack began with a series of late night essays. It is fitting that I conclude the year of 2024 with a nightly essay as well.
What does it mean to be a native Southerner in the modern era? This question occurred to me because of yesterday’s essay. I wrote that Jimmy Carter gave southerners a sense of connection to the larger politic. No one doubted Carter was of the South. But was I missing part of our political past? Why didn’t President Lyndon Johnson come to mind as a trail blazing southerner in the White House? Texans are a unique breed unto themselves. They are the only southern state next to a foreign country. The influence of Mexico and Mexican Americans has been fundamental to Texan identity from the start. When I was growing up, there was no counterpart to Tejanos in Virginia. Johnson was a technical southerner, however, he became an accidental president upon the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Johnson’s southern identity was forgotten as he swept the 1964 presidential election.
President Harry S. Truman was from the Border State of Missouri. Missouri was not unambiguously southern. Missouri was at the confluence of raging northern and southern sentiments. Being a southerner has always been a legacy of the Great Civil War, of being on the losing side of history. Truman may have been a prejudiced man but was he an unabashed southerner? A Missourian state of mind was akin to other border states like Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware. Missourian identity did not align well with the southern defeat, so I don’t think of Truman as a southerner. One can be a non-southerner and prejudiced. One can also be a southerner and liberal on race in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. I am thinking of outliers like faculty at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. of Atlanta, Georgia.
There is an argument that I overlooked President Woodrow Wilson as a southern U.S. president. It is true that Wilson was a native of Staunton, Virginia and grew up in Augusta, Georgia. Wilson was native to the South but his rise to political prominence occurred in New Jersey where he became the president of Princeton and Governor of New Jersey. Had Wilson vaulted to the White House directly from Georgia, I would have thought of Wilson as a southerner in the White House. Instead, I think of Wilson as a New Jersey president. Wilson was an awful president when it came to race. I have trashed Wilson in my essays and duly so. See The Surprising Race Move of President Wilson And the Award Goes to…President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson earned his political stripes up North, so I do not think of him as a southern president.
For these reasons, I think of President Andrew Johnson as the previous southern president before Carter.
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A few months ago in my Book Club, I claimed I grew up in the South. A member replied that Virginia was not the South. Virginia was a blue state. The member, a high school teacher/administrator, is younger than me and has his finger on the pulse of sentiments today. It was the first time in my life my southern identity had been questioned. Does it matter to my sense of self that the Virginia of 1969 is gone forever more? That my home county went 14% for Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election and 85% for Richard Nixon in the 1972 election suggests my southern home is no more. Race time has moved on.
Am I part of a Lost Generation of native southerners? What does it mean to be a Lost Generation? I would argue my southern generation is a lost generation. We came of age during an age of racial instability and transition. We did not flinch as our parents chose suburban integrated schools over racial isolation in city schools and private white academies like Tomahawk Academy in Chesterfield County, Virginia. We populated schools in the fall of 1972 that never knew a day of public school segregation like Salem Church Junior High School. We were young and our hearts were impressed with school identity, not racial identity so much. Maybe, we were the only black students in our classes but what of it? Didn’t prevent us from excelling and winning awards and prizes and honors and being tapped for the gifted and talented programs. Our parents who only knew racial segregation could not understand how free our hearts were in 96% white settings.
We became a lost generation as a suburban, small-town Richard Nixon world morphed into autistic race consciousness in our retirement years. Why the eternal emphasis on race this and race that? It made no sense to us. We became disoriented. The things we prized such as engaging the larger world became suspect. Lost in this context refers to the "disoriented, wandering, directionless" spirit of many of the World War I survivors in the early postwar period.
Racial desegregation was our World War I.
In his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway wrote “You are all a lost generation.” I call upon novelists today who knew the race time of the 1970s in the New South to write a novel for our lost generation. Populate your novel with a love between young black and white southerners, a love ahead of its time. I remember a mixed couple in the hallways of my junior high school. Something inside of me felt warm. Even at a young age, I knew love should be color indifferent. Too many of my middle school classmates were lost in our racial past. They harassed the couple openly as they walked from class to class. Crowds of stunned students would follow the couple in the hallways. It was a primitive, primal vibe. I felt lost at the time, as if a new world was struggling to be born from the womb of prejudice and bigotry. That’s the Way of the World
Someone write our story of aimlessness in our elder years. Tell us why we were touched by racial insight in our southern youth only to age out into racial stupor. Where is our Ernest Hemingway who knew us when we were young?
Conclusion: I want to thank all of my readers who have consumed my essays this past year. My writing springs forth from my intuition and introversion. I perceive more than dogma and slogan words in life. Perhaps, you do too. A special thanks goes out to my subscribers. You get me, I hope. And to my paid subscribers, what can I say? I am so honored and flattered. You will never know.
It is now time on New Year’s Eve to look towards the future. We are moving closer to a Golden Age in Black Culture and Consciousness. I can feel it. The Preference Cascade is in the air. A recent essay by Jake Mackey tells me so. Remain curious about the world. Stay ever wonderful in your own special way. Use artificial intelligence in moderation/smile.
And know we all have one life to live. Let’s live it well.
Happy New Year!
