A question arose in class yesterday that also appeared the first week of school. What are our impressions of the south? I'm also taking philosophy this semester and we're learning about Socrates right now, and I think Socrates might have asked, "Well, what defines the south?" In the picture I've posted above, of the Mason-Dixon Line shows Virginia falls below the line. Is Virginia part of the South and was not Virginia a major hub of the Civil War? Were Jim Crow laws present and active in Virginia into the 1950s? Would it be safe to assume that Virginia is part of the South? People said in class yesterday that when they think of southerners they think uneducated, inarticulate, and slow.... Are Virginians inarticulate, uneducated, and slow? Being from Texas myself, the land of steers and queers as someone put it in class the first week, I've never considered any one part of the nation uneducated, inarticulate, or slow, there are stupid people everywhere. So to get on with my blog, I'm going to ask the question, why is the reading that we've been assigned important for us to read?
My history teacher in high school once told a fellow classmate who was complaining about learning things that happened over 200 years ago. "Why is this stuff important to me??" he had complained. The teacher, who I assume had been asked this very same question a hundred times or more, replied "So history doesn't repeat itself." That made total and complete sense to me. If we learn from our mistakes as a country in whole, hopefully future generations don't make the same mistakes past ones have. One of the greatest travesties in American history is the treatment and prosecution of black Americans. The south was more slow to accept black American rights and more slow to accept them into society and today, as people pointed out in class, there are still issues needed to be resolved. But it's an issue that nationwide, not concentrated in one area. My senior year, my English teacher had us read a book called Native Son. Native Son was set in 1930s and written by a black American author, Richard Wright. Alot of books portraying racism in the early to mid century are based in rural south, which I will admit had some of the most corrupt and racist politicians of the era. Native Son however, was based in Chicago, and the comparisons between south and north, rural and urban are eye opening. Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech said,
So you can see, in 1964, racism was a problem everywhere.
A Lesson Before Dying is an important book to read for anybody who longs for equality in all of America. It shows how corrupt court systems were, from public defenders to the jury. How unequal it was for black Americans to talk to public officials. And how unbalanced the public commodities were granted. Never again should any race, gender, sexuality, or religion be subjected to the absolute horrors faced by black Americans struggling for basic American civil liberties. We need to read this book and others like it so history does not repeat itself in today's and future generations with any culture in any section of the nation. Jim Crow laws might have existed in the South but believe me, there are ignorant, uneducated, slow, and inarticulate people everywhere.
Oh, and I asked my mom, who's a 60 year old veteran of Texas if Texas was from the South, and she said "We're considered Westeners."
The picture above is from WikiTravel of the United States of America South.
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