History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie: Scholarship, Activism, and Wayne Flynt in the Modern South

Index

Editors’ Introduction

"You don’t love because, William Faulkner once wrote. You love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults. For Wayne Flynt, an abiding love for his state and region has not prevented his recognizing the inequities and despair that define southern life for so many. As a scholar, he traced the contours of southern political history, documented the lives of poor whites, and helped to bring southern religious history to center stage. But, unlike so many historians, Flynt has not been content to confine his attentions to matters historical. For this scholar, teacher, and preacher—roles that were rarely mutually exclusive—history is a way to inform, to, in his words, hold up a mirror" to southerners asking them to consider the past and its contemporary implications. Beyond academe, he has emerged as one of Alabama’s most articulate social critics and voices of reform, a respected and often controversial leader in causes ranging from childhood poverty to public health to equitable taxation. Although once rumored to be a Cuban agent smuggled into the country to integrate the First Baptist Church of Tallahassee, Flynt spent his life in the South and most of it in his beloved Alabama.

In his 1992 presidential address to the American Historical Association, William E. Leuchtenberg explored the relationship of the historian and public engagement. He noted the tensions between scholars who become involved in public policy matters and those who choose to remain more isolated from contemporary concerns. Leuchtenberg found merit in both positions and concluded by encouraging historians to blend their scholarship and activism while at the same time cautioning them to maintain their analytical detachment.¹ Historians have long used their research as a means of trying to improve their present. From Charles Beard, Herbert Baxter Adams, John Hope Franklin, and C. Vann Woodward to Morgan Kousser, Allan Lichtman, and Michael Kelly, historians throughout the twentieth century have served the dual role of historian and public advocate, whether on issues ranging from women’s suffrage to economic reforms to voting rights and disfranchisement.

Wayne Flynt is a vocal advocate of such interaction between historians and the world in which they live. From his ivory pulpit, he spoke loud and often of the need for education reform and a revised state constitution, and for a state to care enough about itself to make hard choices that might result in temporary discomfort in order to establish fundamental change. To be sure, critics of Flynt’s public advocacy abound, from colleagues in the profession to the Alabama Farm Bureau Federation to members of his university’s Board of Trustees to those who believe that increased funding cannot cure all ills. He remains eloquent and prophetic to some, wrongheaded and naive to others, but he casts a long shadow as both a scholar and a reformer.

As a scholar, Flynt’s research opened new ways of looking at the South’s past. His biographies of Florida politicians Duncan Upshaw Fletcher and Sydney Catts, both of which were praised by reviewers for what they revealed about southern Progressives, linked politics, religion, and a southern reform ethos. His next book explored a topic closer to heart and home—the South’s poor whites. Published in 1979, Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites garnered praise for filling what had become a great chasm in southern historiography. Unlike anyone since Frank L. Owsley, Wayne Flynt moved poor whites to the center of the region’s historical narrative, giving scholars a rare insight into their meager yet complicated lives. Although criticized by Bill C. Malone for vague terminology and hazy conceptualization, Flynt’s work nonetheless received praise for its sympathetic, but not uncritical, treatment of this overlooked segment of society.² Flynt may have been criticized for a not quite complete definition and portrayal of just who was a southern poor white, but no one criticized him for his fairness. Although sympathetic to his fellow poor white, Flynt nonetheless did not hesitate to provide a cold-eyed view of their racism and their violence.³

In 1989, Flynt published his most important work. When a young undergraduate student with an interest in the historical profession asked Flynt how long it took him to produce it, Flynt responded dryly, twenty-five years. But, in reality he had worked on Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites since his childhood, steeped in the reality of growing up poor in Alabama. In exploring the occupations, religious beliefs, and culture of Alabama’s poor whites, Flynt asserted that poverty was the most consistent theme in Alabama’s history. The state’s poor whites were resilient, sectarian, and bitterly racist, but they maintained their dignity through decades of poverty by close familial ties and a distinct, vibrant culture. The book earned Flynt a number of awards and the praise of fellow historians for producing a sympathetic but not uncritical examination of a forgotten people.⁴

Following the success of Poor but Proud, Flynt continued his exploration of Alabama history, and with Leah Atkins, William Warren Rogers, and Robert David Ward, coauthored Alabama: The History of a Deep South State. The first comprehensive history of the state in sixty years, this book filled a large historical chasm in that it finally addressed equitably the story of Alabama Indians, African Americans, and women.⁵

If Poor but Proud was Flynt’s examination of his people, Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie was an inquiry into his faith. From the denomination’s establishment to its rise as a dominant group in the state, Flynt’s study reveals that as the Baptists of all races and creeds tried to shape the world in which they lived, for in the name of Christ they too were recast by such outside events as secession, Civil War, and emancipation to redemption, Progressivism, segregation, integration, and the culture wars of the modern era. Aimed at Baptists and non-Baptists alike, the book offered Flynt’s fellow Baptists a fair but critical look at themselves, while providing for non-Baptists and fellow scholars a detailed study of the South’s largest denomination. As he had with poor whites, Flynt tried to move southern historians toward the region’s religious history as a way of better understanding the South and its people.⁶

As the last book published before his retirement, Alabama in the Twentieth Century might be considered his farewell address to the state. Alabama, he wrote in the preface, is like a disease. Once it infects a person, it is hard to cure the ailment. Every time I thought I had obtained a cure, I experienced a relapse. In an unconventional format, the book traces the state’s modern era topically rather than chronologically within three large sections: political economy, society, and culture. Beginning with the infamous and much-lamented 1901 constitution and including sports as a window into Alabamians’ best and worst characteristics, Alabama in the Twentieth Century does not seek so much to mark new historiographical ground as it does to delineate what may be the most tumultuous century in the state’s history and to provide Alabamians some insight as to why their state seems to struggle with itself so much. It is history, political commentary, social critique, and prophecy, blended together in accessible style.

These essays further with original scholarship the themes and subjects Flynt explored in his own work: religious history, southern political history, and the experience of the region’s downtrodden and powerless. The authors use ideas and topics central to Wayne’s work as points of departure in their essays, providing new views on important aspects of the southern historical experience. Brooks Blevins and Susan Youngblood Ashmore open the volume with considerations of the region’s poor. Blevins examines race relations between Arkansas hill country whites and blacks and finds the existence of a peaceful relationship primarily because local African Americans did not challenge the area’s racial mores. Ashmore provides a legislative history of one of Lyndon Johnson’s main weapons in the War on Poverty, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and the political tension that developed over its passage as southern politicians saw the act as a civil rights bill in disguise. Richard D. Starnes builds on Flynt’s controversial ideas concerning the link between southern Protestantism and Progressive-era social reform. Examining Baptists in North Carolina, he finds that not only did these believers develop a powerful brand of social Christianity, but as a group they played an essential role in shaping North Carolina’s reform ethos and reputation as the South’s most progressive state. Andrew M. Manis explores the origins of interracialism in Macon, Georgia, in the 1930s and asserts its roots in religious motivations. Glenn Feldman, Gordon Harvey, and Jeff Frederick explore the dynamic nature of twentieth-century Alabama politics by drawing on themes such as interest group politics and the failure of reform. Feldman chronicles the collapse of an unsteady New Deal coalition in the South in the face of attacks from conservatives, specifically Alabama’s Big Mule/Planter alliance, who argued that the New Deal was radical, even communist, in nature. Harvey analyzes the 1970 Democratic gubernatorial primary contest between Albert Brewer and George Wallace as a failure of voters to move beyond race in order to embrace progressive reforms in education, economic development, and government. Jeff Frederick traces the role of interest groups such as the Farm Bureau in stifling efforts aimed at improving the lives of those at the bottom of society.

Any attempt to assess Wayne’s influence must consider his work as a social reformer. Two essays by fellow reformers trace his roles in social causes close to his heart—equity in school funding and constitutional reform—allowing an interesting, informative glimpse into both his reform efforts and, more generally, the scholar as activist. These essays depart from the standard scholarly essay and serve as reform memoirs from those Flynt worked closest with in exacting change in Alabama. In conclusion, two seasoned observers of southern history and culture—John Shelton Reed and Dan T. Carter—provide the volume’s foreword and afterword and, along the way, offer their assessments of Wayne’s influence on the historical profession and the region he loves.

The irony of a work like this is that it cannot do justice to the central role in Wayne’s professional career, that of professor. It is easy for scholars, particularly those at research universities, to give teaching only cursory attention as they pursue their research agendas. Wayne chose a different path. Since 1990, he has served as a Distinguished University Professor at Auburn University. Even with perquisites such as a personal travel budget and a low teaching load, Wayne chose to teach courses above and beyond those required by his rank. It was in those classes that most of his students had their first formative Flynt experience. Known for his tough professorial love, his free-flowing editorial pens, his rapier-like use of the Socratic method, and his heartfelt loyalty and support, Wayne shaped and molded large numbers of graduate students who went on to appreciate his passion for the real-life implications of the history that they wrote. It is because he was a teacher of the highest order, in his classroom and by his example, that we honor his life and work.

Notes

1. William E. Leuchtenberg, The Historian and the Public Realm, American Historical Review 97, 1 (February 1992):1–18.

2. Malone criticized Flynt for myopia in defining the southern poor white. Flynt, he wrote, seemed to gravitate more toward the Appalachian poor white and away from the poor white Cajuns or Texans. And of Flynt’s assertion that the South was the most ethnically homogenous region of America, Malone responded by asking if Flynt had forgotten blacks, Indians, Chicanos, continental Europeans, Cajuns, and assorted mixed breeds? Bill Malone, review of Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites, by Wayne Flynt, Journal of American History 67, 2 (September 1980):382–83.

3. James A. Hodges, in his review of Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites, by Wayne Flynt, Journal of Southern History 46 (November 1980):587–88, viewed it not only as a tool to aid southern African Americans but as a means of placating white southerners.

4. Durwood Dunn, review of Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites, by Wayne Flynt, American Historical Review 96 (February 1991):267–68; Paul Mertz, review of Poor but Proud, Journal of Southern History 57 (May 1991):366–67; Thomas Terrill, review of Poor but Proud, Journal of American History 77 (December 1990):1021.

5. J. Barton Starr, review of Alabama: The History of a Deep South State, by Wayne Flynt, Journal of American History 82 (September 1995):713–14; Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, review of Alabama, Journal of Southern History 62 (February 1996):189–90; Michael Fitzgerald, review of Alabama, American Historical Review 101 (February 1996):236–37.

6. Randy Sparks, review of Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie, by Wayne Flynt, Journal of American History 86 (September 1999):747–48.

1

Can Any Good Thing Come from Auburn?

John Shelton Reed

A few years ago Russell Jacoby lamented what he saw as the disappearance of the sort of old-fashioned intellectual who write[s] with vigor and clarity . . . for the general reader. In his book The Last Intellectuals, he argued that such folks have become as scarce as low rents in New York or San Francisco, replaced by high-tech intellectuals, consultants and professors—anonymous souls, who may be competent, and more than competent, but who do not enrich public life. One certainly sees his point, but one also sees (at least I do) that he wasn’t looking very hard.

Jacoby should get out more. To places like Auburn, Alabama, home of a distinguished public intellectual who has certainly enriched public life in his home state. Jacoby’s argument, important and provocative as it is, suffers from what might be called Manhattan myopia. For him and for many other New Yorkers, intellectuals write for little magazines, not the Mobile Register and Alabama Heritage; they hold forth in Greenwich Village coffee houses or at the 92nd Street Y, not before the Dothan Rotary Club. These Yankees might well adapt Nathanael’s question about Nazareth (John 1:46): Can any good thing come from Auburn? To which the answer, of course, is Sure—and one of them is Wayne Flynt.

Not that Flynt’s influence and reputation have been restricted to Alabama. He has spoken at innumerable American colleges and universities, addressed learned symposia in places like Cambridge and Prague and Vienna, and even taken his tales of the American South to audiences in India and the Far East. He has been honored by his peers (most recently with the presidency of the Southern Historical Association), and his achievements as a historian have been well assessed in the preceding introduction.

But few academics of his distinction have been as willing, or able, to engage the citizens of their home place on important issues of the day. Not just in his scholarship but in his public life, Flynt has followed the advice of another great Alabamian and cast down his bucket where he is—with remarkable results. He has been tirelessly active, addressing the meetings and sitting on the boards of groups with names like the Campaign for Alabama, the Alabama Poverty Project, Voices for Alabama’s Children, the American Cancer Society’s Committee for the Socioeconomically Disadvantaged, and Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform.

No doubt he is greatly in demand as a speaker partly because he has that command of the vernacular that Jacoby believes most American intellectuals have lost. Listen to him tell an interviewer about the pleasures of creek fishing: The formula is simple: Find a small Appalachian river or creek. Seine your own bait. Walk in the creek if possible. If not, use a canoe. Never fish a lake. Never ride in a boat with a motor. Even someone who prefers high-tech bass fishing with electronic fish-finders, or who doesn’t fish at all, can savor those words.

The same gift accounts for the fact that apparently every American newspaper you’ve ever heard of, and a good many you haven’t, have called him for comment on various issues. He usually obliges with something pithy and true. (As one newspaperman I know would put it, he gives good quote.) When Alabama repealed its antimiscegenation law, for instance, he told USA Today simply, A lot of white folks want to turn the page.

But Flynt has a well-deserved reputation not just for plain speech but for hard truths. As an Auburn alumni newsletter put it, If you want an after-dinner speaker who’ll lull you into sweet dreams of the Old South, don’t invite Auburn University Historian Wayne Flynt. Flynt plainly loves his state and its citizens but often with the wry realism of Zora Neale Hurston, who was known for saying with exasperation, My people, my people. It speaks well for Alabama that the invitations to address civic clubs, public libraries, and community forums keep pouring in.

More than invitations, in fact. Flynt’s career seems to contradict what Jesus had to say (Mark 6:4) about prophets’ being without honor in their own country: His c.v. is littered with prizes and awards from his fellow Alabamians—from the Alabama Library Association, the Alabama Historical Association, the University of Alabama Press, the Children’s Hospital of Alabama, the Alabama Arthritis Foundation—the list goes on. The Mobile Register named him Alabamian of the Year in 1992, and (perhaps the best indicator of the respect he commands) he was chosen by the governor and the presiding judge for the thankless job of official facilitator in an interminable lawsuit over equity in the funding of public schools.

Finally, Flynt must be nearly unique among academic advocates of reform in his willingness to put his money where his mouth is. He endowed the Mae Ellis Moore Flynt Teaching Excellence Award of the Alabama Association of Historians, for instance, to reward outstanding K-12 history teachers like his mother. He has also come up with at least one radical, commonsense proposal of the sort that I identify with another maverick Baptist, Will Campbell. When Alabama Baptist churches helped to defeat a state lottery in support of education, Flynt called on them to give up their tax exemptions to support local schools—and his own church, Auburn First Baptist, did just that. I got tired of all the pious talking and no acting, he said. Ours is a traditional, mainline Baptist church with money problems like most Baptist churches. I figured if we can do it, anybody can do it.

In 2000, Samford University, his alma mater, gave Flynt an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree (along with Wendell Berry, another prophetic voice from the South). The citation described him as a teacher, scholar and writer whose high-wattage light has beamed into the darkness surrounding issues of poverty, race, education and state government. Certainly he has brightened the corner where he is.

Which raises some interesting questions. How can someone, these days, be such a successful public intellectual in Alabama (I won’t say of all places)? Why does an accomplished historian and professor devote so much time and energy to the unrewarding grind of trying to reform his home state? And—perhaps even more of a puzzle—why do so many Alabamians not just listen to him but apparently want to listen to him?

In part, this may be a regional thing. Jacoby is right that this sort of engagement is rare these days, but it may be less rare in the South than in other parts of the United States. In his classic study of American race relations, An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal wrote that the southern social scientists of his time compared favorably to their northern colleagues precisely in that statesmanship enters more naturally into [their] writings and the significance for human happiness of the problems under study is always a present thought in the South. Just so, listen to Flynt sixty-odd years later, on what Auburn University should be: I don’t want Auburn to be the Berkeley of the South; I want Auburn to be the Auburn of the South. I want it to find out what it can do to make a difference in the lives of the people of this state; stop worrying about being something we can’t be and that most Alabamians don’t want us to be; begin to define who we are and what our mission ought to be from the perspective of serving the population of this state. Even at Auburn, I’m sure, this is not a popular view among college faculty members these days, but it may get more respect in the South than elsewhere.

There is another reason, though, and a more important one, for Flynt’s speaking out and for his receiving a hearing. John Andrew Rice, founder and first rector of North Carolina’s Black Mountain College (also, I should note, nephew of both a South Carolina Methodist bishop and Senator Ellison D. Cotton Ed Smith, an evangelist of a different stripe), once observed that If you scratch a Southern teacher, a preacher will wince. In Flynt’s case, of course, this is quite literally true. And I think an important component of his visibility and influence is that his social thought comes not from Karl Marx or The Nation magazine but straight from the Sermon on the Mount.

When he rebuked Alabama politicians for not addressing the state’s high child poverty rate, for example, he reminded them of what Jesus said about the least of these (Matthew 25:45). When an interviewer asked him about Alabama’s problems, his immediate response was that Christian love and a sense of justice demand that we remember where we come from and not forget the people we leave behind. (Characteristically, he preached to the unconverted as well, adding, If we have no sense of Christian charity and no sense of justice, then we sure better do something out of a sense of our own self-interest.)

This sort of rhetoric is not uncommon in Alabama. When Governor Bob Riley—a Republican but also a longtime Sunday school teacher in Ashland’s First Baptist Church—claimed that it is immoral to charge somebody making $5,000 an income tax and argued for tax reform by saying We’re supposed to love God, love each other and help take care of the poor, the Associated Press, mystified, called Flynt for comment. He explained patiently that Governor Riley was locating the debate in the Bible and biblical justice to the poor, and he stopped just short of saying It’s a southern thing; you wouldn’t understand.

But Flynt understands, and so do most of his fellow Alabamians. He gets a hearing in Alabama because Alabamians are used to being exhorted by preachers, and usually listen politely. Unfortunately, a cynic would say, they’re also used to ignoring those exhortations. But at some level maybe they feel a little guilty about that and recognize that they are the better for it.

2

Revisiting Race Relations in an Upland South Community

LaCrosse, Arkansas

Brooks Blevins

Wayne Flynt loves a good story. Anyone who has known him for very long can testify to that. Maybe it’s the Baptist preacher in him. Maybe it’s the southerner in him. And maybe all southerners have a little bit of Baptist preacher in them. Having read too many lifeless histories, I’m convinced it’s not the historian in him. Whatever the reason, Wayne appreciates a good tale, be it fable, anecdote, parable, or just plain yarn. His appreciation for the story has served him well over a long career, whether in the classroom, on the social crusader’s trail, or holding a busy pen. In a scholarly path that has been recognized most often for its social history, Wayne’s dedication to telling stories—to keeping it personal, to keeping the humanity in history—has consistently infused his narratives with life and vitality.

I feel honored to have played a role in one of Wayne’s stories for several years now. It’s the story of how he and I came to meet, of how a boy from the Ozarks found his way to Auburn, a place the boy only knew as Bo Jackson’s university and a place that he had always thought was in Georgia, not Alabama—a popular misconception, I believe, outside the Southeast. Wayne loves this story. He’s told it each time he’s had the opportunity to introduce me as a speaker or to slide me into a conversation with old friends. And in that true southern storytelling tradition—in which doctoring a few of the particulars is not so much changing the story as it is making it better—Wayne tells a slightly different version each time. Here’s one version of the story.

As a college junior in the spring of 1991, I had the good fortune to take a course on the civil rights movement from Elizabeth Betsy Jacoway, who was teaching on a one-year sabbatical replacement at Arkansas (now Lyon) College, a little Presbyterian, liberal arts school in the foothills of the Ozarks. As a requirement for the course, I completed a research paper, a project in which Betsy had required her students to use both secondary and primary sources and one in which I had taken the interpretations of a few southern historians to task. One of these historians was J. Wayne Flynt, whose Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites happened to be on the shelves in our small library. Although I had a big time with the project, I thought little about the paper until late the following summer when I got a package in the mail from Betsy—still Dr. Jacoway to me at the time. Unknown to me, Betsy, undoubtedly amused by her student’s temerity in hunting large prey, had given a copy of my paper to Wayne over the summer. (This is the point at which Wayne’s story usually takes up.)

The paper itself dealt with race relations in a single Ozark community, a community that I had used as a model for race relations in the highland South in general. The seemingly tranquil race relations found in this particular community had led me to take aim at Wayne, Numan V. Bartley, and whatever other historians I could fish out of the slim stacks at the Arkansas College library who seemed to view southern whites as a monolithic bunch, at least when it came to attitudes toward blacks. Or perhaps my desire to find the antithesis to the common white-black southern story had led me to this particular community. I’ll come back to this later. Probably more amused than impressed, Wayne had read the little paper and on the title page had scrawled an encouraging note urging me to explore works on Appalachia for comparison, to continue working on the subject, and to consider applying to Auburn for graduate