Southern University Conference – 2001

Transcription

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"Southern Cultures"
TABLE OF CONTENTS
About the Southern University Conference
Members of the Executive Committee
Program
Proceedings
Selected Speeches
4
5
6
9
19
"Telling Stories Funny: A Look at Southern Humor"
"Introductory Remarks"
John Shelton Reed
"Signifying on the Signifier: A Central Thrust of Southern Women's
Humor
OR
The Incredible Shrinking You-Know-What"
Anne Goodwyn Jones
"Adventures in a 'Foreign Country':
African American Humor in the South"
Trudier Harris
"New Nation, New South, New Tasks"
George Keller
"Washington Update"
Willialll E. Troutt
Constitution and By-Laws
Past Meetings and Officer Rosters
Current Membership
65
71
78,
3
ABOUT THE SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE
The Southern University Conference was organized in 1924. Thirty-three
institutions constituted the membership. There are now fifty-two members
from thirteen states. The officers of the conference are a president, an
immediate past president, a vice president, a secretary-treasurer, and four
members-at-large of the executive committee. The first president of the
conference was W.P. Few of Duke University, who was succeeded by
Chancellor J .H. Kirkland of Vanderbilt University. A complete list of officers
is published elsewhere in this volume.
Membership in the conference is by invitation, and since the conference is
essentially a liberal arts group, institutions primarily technical and
professional in purpose are not eligible for membership.
The purpose of the conference as stated in the Constitution is the
consideration of "matters pertaining to the upper division of college work,
to graduate work, and to all common interests of its members." The
conference is definitely not an accrediting agency, and no formal financial
or other reports are required annually of its members.
The conference holds annual meetings, which the chief executive officers
of the member colleges are expected to attend. Interested visitors are
welcome to attend the meetings of the conference except for the executive
sessions.
Unencumbered by the work of standardization,
the members of the
conference are free to engage in discussion pertaining to the progress of
education and various educational experiments that are being made by the
members "to the end that all may benefit by the efforts of one."
After each annual meeting a volume of proceedings of the Southern
University Conference is usually published, and in it are contained the formal
reports and addresses presented on the program.
4
President
David E. Shi
Furman University
Vice President
AnnR. Die
Hendrix College
Secretary-Treasurer
Andrew A. Sorensen
The University of Alabama
Immediate Past President
Michael F. Adams
University of Georgia
Member-at-Large (2001)
John M. Palms
University of South Carolina
Rita Bornstein
Rollins College
(Vacancy)
(Vacancy)
5
PROGRAM
SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE
HOTEL INTER-CONTINENTAL MIAMI
MIAMI, FLORIDA
MARCH 9-11, 2001
Friday, March 9, 2001
4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
REGISTRATION -
6:30 - 7:30 p.m.
RECEPTION - Pool Deck
Dress: Business Casual
7:30p.m.
Executi ve Committee Dinner Meeting
Trinity
Lobby Level
Saturday, March 10, 2001
8:30 a.m.
CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST - Sattdringham
9:00a.m.
Call to Order - Sandringham
Welcome
Roll Call
Recognition of New Presidents and Chancellors
Necrology Report
9:15 a.m.
Shi
Shi
Sorensen
Sorensen
Sorensen
Introduction of Program
6
Shi
9:30 a.m.
Telling Stories Funny: A Look at Southern
Hll1110r
John Shelton Reed
William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology and
fOIIDerDirector of the Howard Odum Institute of Research in
Social Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Trudier Harris
J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Anne Goodwyn Jones
Associate Professor of English, University of Florida, and
currently a Fellow, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities,
Charlottesville, Virginia.
10:45 a.m.
Refreshment Break
(Meeting reconvenes at 11:00 a.m.)
William Koon
Professor of English, Clemson University.
James Cobb
B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor and Chair of the
Department of History, University of Georgia.
12 noon
Announcements
ADJOURN
and photograph
7
Shi
Saturday Afternoon Free
6:30p.m.
RECEPTION - Mezzanine West
All Southern University Conference members, spouses, and
guests.
Dress: Sem i-fo rmal
7:30p.m.
DINNER - Chopin Ballroom
Speaker - William E. Troutt
Trustee, American Council on Education,
Washington, D.C.
Sunday, March 11, 2001
8:30 a.m.
CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST - Sandringham
9:00 a.m.
Call to Order and Welcome - Sandringham
Introduction of speaker
9:15 a.m,
New Nation, New South, and New Tasks
George Keller
Higher Education Consultant.
10:30 a.m.
Refreshment Break
(Meeting reconvenes at 10:45 a.m.)
10:45 a.m.
BUSINESS MEETING RECONVENES
Reports:
Executive Committee
Secretary- Treasurer
Committee on Audit
Committee on Resolutions
Committee on Nominations
Membership Committee
Concluding Remarks
12 noon
Shi
Shi
Shi
Sorensen
Palms
Lucas- Taucher
Shi
Shi
President-Elect Die
ADJOURNMENT
8
Proceedings of
Sixty-Fourth
Annual Meeting
of the
On Friday evening, March. 9, 2001, the conference convened for an opening
reception on the pool deck of the Hotel Inter-Continental Miami in Miami,
Florida.
Saturday Morning Session
March 10,2001
The Sixty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Southern University Conference
was called into official session on Saturday, March 10, 2001, at 9:00 a.m.
at the Hotel Inter-Continental Miami in Miami, Florida. President Shi
presided at the opening session and welcomed members of the conference.
President Shi introduced Dr. Andrew A. Sorensen, secretary-treasurer of
the conference, who called the roll of member institutions and requested
allpresidents, chancellors, and representatives to stand and introduce
themselves and their guests to the conference. The official conference roster
of members and guests in attendance follows:
Baylor University
Berea College
BirminghamSouthernCollege
Converse College
Eckerd College
Emory University
Furman University
Guilford College
Hendrix College
Mary Washington College
Millsaps College
Dr. Donald Schmeltekopf,
Prov.9stal1dYPf9rJM(J\l~Y)':
...,
'.. . Dr.LarryJ?~hip.~,J:>resi~eJ1t.(tli1ti¢XJ.·::'::'
Dr..•H.·'n"viIi ·Pent1el<l,·P1"Q,,<>sfilb.ql)~all(J3tsi¢l :,':::,'
Ms.:·Nancy'O.·, (Jr~y~p~¢si4ert(,(p~Yi.a,Mq~$B:Q)'::r"
r». Eugene 'l-Iotc1Ikiss •.II1teHnlPre:side~i(S~e}··.:::
Dr. William H. Fox. Senior VP. Institllti0tlqlf\dvan(;em~nt«3arQl)
Dr.:1)(lVicl.E.,Slj.i~])l~~Sif1~f1t(~\lst1n)'.:
Dr. Donald W.McN{nilar~preSid~l1l(lJ.t.itt#)·. '.::
".•'••'....••••...
: 1)r·Annft.I)i§rgr~si~ell~i.'
Dr.· Philip Hall, VP forAAtin<iDean9ff*clllty:(lJ,#rPritA)
.,':'"
Dr.' Frances Lucas-Tauchar, Pres iden t •(j>a1Jl)
9
Mi~sissippiUniversity·for Women
:Rhpdts yoUege
::l{oUinsCollege
S()utl1~l11JYleth()distlJniversity
Dr.Vahn Hansen.Vf'
Dr.Willimu
for AcademicAffairs
~.~.TrouU,l'fesidellt(Carole)
Dr• Ritp>Bornstein; PresidentIblarland.Bloland)
Dr, Ross C. Murfln.Provost/Vl'Academic
Affairs (Pam)
Transylvania University
Dr. Charles L. Shearer, President (Susan)
TrinityUniversity
Dr. JohnR, Brazil, President (Janice)
·:·TheUl1iv¢rsityofAlubarilu
DI: .Andrew A.Sorensen, President
Yniv~rsity()fRiChnlond
Dr William E.Cooper, President (ClarissA Holmes)
:::;.wIliy¢tsJty.• f Sguth ••Caroliuh
Pro John M. Palms, President. (Norma)
·,··tJniye.¥sfi},:pf'fennessee.;at.Chattanooga
Dr. Bill· W• Stacy,.ChallceIl()r (~~~)
:••:1vIi§sl~SippiiJniversity forWomen
Dr.Vahn Hansen, VPforAcaderhicAffairs
·:.·.·R6od~s:·9bllege -.
. . .Dr. William E.Troutt, President{Carole)
/:.ltoHitis·CoiIege
Dr. Rita Bornstein, .President (Harland :Bloland)
:::-:,$611tlieiJ{Nt~thodistUni versity
. Dr. Ross C. Murfin, ProvostIVpAcacienlicAffairs·
(Pam)
:::Tl'an§Y"v4Ili~ .lJniversitY
Dr . CharlesL.Shearer,PteSidellt·
(Susan)
'.::tritl~iy versltY
])r.JohllR. :Brazil,I'resideht{Janice)
.:"'TlieJjnlversity of Alabama
Dr. Andrew A. Sorensen, President
:·lJIlivef~itY of Richmond
Willianl Er.Cooper, President (Clarissa Holmes)
:.·ynivefsitY.ofSouthCarolina
.Dr. John M. Palms, PresidentrNorma)
lJhiver$itXof Tennessee at Chattanooga
DI~.Bill W, Stacy, Chancellor (Sue)
.. ¥and.eri)lItJJni versity
Dr, Thomas G.Burish, Provost::.)y~hingt()nandLee University
Dr. John W .:Elrod; President (Mimi)
:.·Woff()r<I:Coilege
.
Dr. Benjamin B. Dunlap, President.Canrie)
·Yaqq~rbilt UIJiyersity
. Dr. Tho111aSG. Burish,Provost
: . Dr. JohnW. Elrod,Presidel1t(Mimi)
,.:?Yft.~P~p~t()Ilan.4~ee '{Jni versity
J)r~··~enjanlin·. J.3 .•·.D:llnlap,president·(Antle)
:.::::.jXVBff'<?!.g:.B9U~g~·
9
e .
Yrii
The Secretary a1l1101l1lcedti,e follolvi1lg 1lelVpreside1lts and clla1lcellors
of 11lenlber i1lstitUti01lS:
Dr. Jake B. Schlunl, President, Southwesteln University
Dr. Eugene Hotchkiss, Interinl President, Eckerd College
Dr. Benjamin B. Dunlap, Wofford College
Dr. Joe Lesesne, President Enleritus, Wofford College
Presidellt Shi i1ltrodllced ti,e follolvi1lg guests and speakers:
Dr. John Shelton Reed, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dr. Jan1es Cobb, University of Georgia
Dr. Tludier Han'is, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dr. Anne Goodwyn Jones, University of Florida
Dr. Willian1 Koon, Clenlson University
Mrs. Roxanne Gregg, Conference Coordinator, The University of Alabailla
Mrs. Kay Hudson, Conference Coordinator, Furnlan University
10
Necrology Report
There were two members who passed away during the past year:
Dr. Delos P. CuIp, University of Montevallo, 1963-1968, October 2000.
Dr. Samuel A. Banks, University of Richmond, 1986-1987, September 12, 2000.
President Shi then assigned committee positions for the 200 1 meeting as
follows:
Committee on Audit:
Dr. John M. Palms, University of South Carolina
Dr. Bill W. Stacy, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Committee on Nominations: (Executive Committee of SUC)
Dr. Rita Bornstein, Rollins College
Dr. Ann H. Die, Hendrix College
Dr. Andrew A. Sorensen, The University of Alabama
Dr. David E. Shi, Furman University
Committee on Resolutions:
Dr. Frances Lucas-Taucher, Millsaps College
Dr. Larry D. Shinn, Berea College
Dr. Joe Lesesne, President Emeritus,
Wofford College
Committee on Membership: (Executive Committee of SUC)
Dr. Rita Bornstein, Rollins College
Dr. Ann H. Die, Hendrix College
Dr. Andrew A. Sorensen, The University of Alabama
Dr. David E. Shi, Furman University
President Shi requested that each chairman be prepared to submit a report
for the above named committees at the Sunday session.
11
President Shi introduced the conference theme "Southern Cultures." He
then introduced Dr. John Shelton Reed, William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor
Emeritus of Sociology and former Director of the Howard Odum Institute
of Research in Social Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. His presentation was entitled "Telling Stories Funny: A Look at
Southern Humor." Dr. Reed then introduced the following speakers, who
each gave a brief and entertaining presentation:
Dr. Trudier Harris, J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and
Dr. Anne Goodwyn Jones, Associate Professor of English, University of
Florida, and currently a Fellow, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities,
Charlottesville, Virginia.
Following a question and answer session, a mid-morning refreshment break
was held.
The presentations continued as Dr. Reed introduced the following speakers,
who also each gave brief and entertaining presentations:
Dr. William Koon, Professor of English, Clemson University; and
Dr. James Cobb, B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor and Chair of
the Department of History, University of Georgia.
Following a question and answer session, President Shi concluded the meeting by
announcing that the official photograph would be taken outside the Sandringham
Room and that members and guests were invited to a reception and dinner in the
Chopin Ballroom at 6:30 p.m.
12
SUNDAY MORNING SESSION
MARCH 11, 2001
President Shi convened the meeting at 9:00 a.m. and welcomed everyone
to the second session of the conference. President Shi introduced the speaker,
Dr. George Keller, Higher Education Consultant. His presentation was
entitled "New Nation, New South, New Tasks."
After a question and answer session, President Shi announced a refreshment
break.
President Adams reconvened the meeting and called for the report from the
Secretary- Treasurer.
Report of the Secretary-Treasurer
2000-2001, Dr. Andrew A. Sorensen:
The Southern University .Conference met March 10-12, 2000, at the
Renaissance Orlando Resort in Orlando, Florida.
The Proceedings of the 2000 Conference were distributed by U.S. Mail in
February 200 1
Fifty-five institutions currently comprise the membership of the Southern
Universities Conference and as of March 1 of this year, the Southern
University Conference account balance at The University of Alabama's
Agency fund in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is $70,733.88. An account statement
of the financial condition of the Southern University Conference was
reviewed by the Executive Committee at our meeting on Thursday evening,
and was presented to the Audit Committee at this conference.
13
Dr. Sorensen reported that thirty-four institutions are represented at this
year's conference - the highest number in the past five years. He also
made special mention and offered his profound thanks to Roxanne Gregg,
his Administrative Assistant, and Kay Hudson, David Shi' s Administrative
Assistant, for their extraordinary skills in organizing the logistics for this
conference.
Report of the Audit Committee,
Dr. John Palms, Chair:
The audit report was reviewed and the books are in good order.
Report of the Resolutions Committee, Frances Lucas-Taucher, Chair:
WHEREAS, in the course of human events, the 64th Annual meeting of the
Southern University Conference has transpired in Miami, Florida, March
9-11, 2001, with the theme "Southern Cultures;" and
WHEREAS, our maximum leader,first among equals, David E. Shi,
accompanied by Our Lady of the Burnished Kneecaps, Susan, has elevated,
amused, instructed, and inspired the assembled hosts of presidents, provosts,
deans, and ministers, caine boasting his newfound trailer park endowment
- but since the Furman gift is so confusing - he doesn't know whether to
shoot himself or go bowling; and
WHEREAS, our impresario extraordinaire, John Shelton Reed, did assemble
and introduce most winsomely a quintet of wits and connoisseurs of wit,
including himself, for the express purpose of defining what is most
charmingly and inimitably Southern about ourselves; and
WHEREAS, Trudier Harris did convey most memorably to an all-white
audience that they have often missed the point of black humor, though
blacks and whites in the South are knit together inextricable like the fingers
of one hand clapping, and reminded us that any restaurant that doesn't
serve pig tails, black-eyed peas, ham hocks, and collard greens wasn't for
integration; and
WHEREAS, Anne Goodwyn Jones in her short, pithy, and sometimes
cutting remarks, did cause sober reflection among the exogenous portion
of her audience, provoking an awareness that men and women may differ
on the nurturing of roots, and discussed the unthinkable tattoos of Shorty's
14
Bar and Grill in Chattanooga, Tennessee ... now we know where jewelry
comes frornl; and
WHEREAS, William Koon did offer touching testimony that a Southern
mother is reluctant to see her son combust as the result of smoking in bed,
and that barber shops and beauty parlors are to Southerners what the Lyceum
and the Academy were to Ancient Greeks; and
WHEREAS, James Cobb did usefully vouchsafe thatredneck humor has
often served as a critique of bourgeois platitudes in a way inaccessible to
Marxists, Yankees, and other grits-less interlopers, with song lnemoriesIf I had shot her when I met her, I'd be out by now; and
WHEREAS, William E. Troutt did report for Stanley O. Ikenberry, assessing
the state of higher education in America with few concessions to an audience
hungry for salacious details; and
WHEREAS, George Keller did admonish us at the beginning of a new
millennium in the new implications of newness, lifting us from prurient
depths to the heights of his wise and witty observations; and
WHEREAS, we were too engaged in transcollegiate debate to join in the
South Beach Winter Party of 10,000 gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, and
transgender celebrants, restricting ourselves to connubial austerity; and
WHEREAS, Roxanne Gregg and Kay Hudson had efficiently and elegantly
provided every detail for an effective and decadent conference; and
WHEREAS, Roxanne, dispensing with the traditional ladders, multiple
mega cameras, and endless poses and flashes did unceremoniously usher
in the New New South with two understated snaps, leaving the presidents
with no time to organize their annual riot.
NO~ THEREFORE,
BE IT RESOLVED THAT our new leader of
unbeatable enthusiasm, Ann Die, will lead us through next year - with her
drippy Southern charm and grace, writing numerous thank-you notes along
the way.
15
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that until we gather again for mutual
enlightenment, we should ponder the Country and Western croon, "I'd rather
have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."
The report of the Resolutions Committee was unanimously accepted.
16
Report of the Nominations
Committee,
Dr. David Shi presented the following
consideration by the Conference.
Dr. David Shi, Chair:
slate of officers for 2001-2002
President
Dr. Ann H. Die, President'
Hendrix College
Vice President
Dr. Rita BornsteinRollins College
secretary-Treasurer
Immediate
for
Dr. Andrew A. Sorensen'
The University of Alabama
Dr. Jake Schrum"
Southwestern
University
Dr. David E. Shi
Furman University
Past President
Member-at-Large
(2002)
Dr. Donald W. McNemar
Guilford College
Member-at-Large
(2003)
Dr. Frances Lucas-Taucher
Millsaps College
Member-at-Large
(2004)
Dr. Robert C. Khayat
University of Mississippi
Member-at-Large
(2005)
Dr. Bill W. Stacy
University
I
of Tennessee
at Chattanooga
Effective 8/ l/200 1, resigned as President of Hendrix College, thereby relinquishing
President.
2 Effective 8/1/2001, became
3 Effective 8/112001, became
..Effective 8/1/2001, became
sue
President. per Executive Committee.
Executive Conunittee .
per Executive Committee
sue Vice President. per
sue Secretary-Treasurer,
17
duties as SUC
Other Business
The meeting was turned over to the 2002 President of the Southern
University Conference, Dr. Ann H. Die. She thanked David Shi for his
service as President.
The 2002 Annual Meeting will be held at the Eldorado Hotel in Santa Fe,
New Mexico, March 22-24, 2002.
The meeting was adjourned.
18
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19
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"Telling Stories Funny: A Look at Southern Humor"
"Introductory Remarks"
John Shelton Reed
When David Shi asked me to organize a program for this meeting, I
thought about the time, a few years ago, when I was visiting Millsaps
for a semester. One of my duties - rather, one of my privileges - was
to put together a symposium on any subject I wanted.
While I was thinking about what to do, I happened to read a New York
Times Book Review, and one of the books reviewed that week was
described (1 m quoting) as "full of brash, irreverent, New- York-style
one-liners." A few pages later, another review referred to (quoting again)
"the deft, rapier wit of the British."
41
I got to thinking about those phrases. Do we ever hear about "brash
irreverent Mississippi-style
one-liners," or "the deft rapier wit of
Tennesseans"? I don't think so.
But SOl1le of the funniest people I know are Southerners.
Lots of
Southerners have even made their livings by being funny: Bill Arp,
Mark Twain, Stepin Fetchit, Pigmeat Markham, Junior Samples, Brett
Butler, George Wallace (the black comedian, not the white governor) - these folks and many, many others. (And if some of those names
make you uncomfortable - well, we'll get to that.)
Think about country music. I won't start reciting funny titles for you
- you can find lists of t~·
.n the Internet -. i"Lll I'll have some more
to say in a minute about Hee Haw. Ray Stevens has specialized in
writing funny songs (OK, one title: "Take Your Tongue Out of My
Mouth, I'm Kissing You Goodbye"). Even many more or less serious
songs have funny lines; in Betty's Being Bad, for example, Marshall
Chapman wrote one of the all-time great country lyrics: ".45's quicker
than 409 / Betty cleaned house for the very last time." (Save that
thought.)
20
Even the blues can be funny, although it usually depends on context
and is hard to excerpt. But how about this, from B. B. King: "Nobody
loves me but my mother / And she could be jivin' too." (That's the first
entry, by the way, in the indispensable Roy Blount's Book of Southern
Humor, a book that should be in every Southern household.)
On radio, in the movies, on television, funny Southerners have been a
staple for almost as long as those mediums have been around. From
Andy Brown to Andy Taylor (on "Amos 'n' Andy" and "The Andy
Griffith Show," respectively, if you missed the references), from the
white-face minstrel show of Hee Haw to the Southern Living world of
Designing Women, Americans have been bombarded with a great many
different versions of the amusing South, sorne more amusing than others.
(Flying here from California yesterday I watched 0 Brother, Where
Art Thou?, which has its moments.)
When it comes to Southern politics - the old style, at least - well, "Marse
Henry" Watterson, the turn-of-the-century
editor of the Louisville
Courier-Journal, sure was understating it when he wrote that "Humor
has played no small part in our politics." We've seen an astounding
array of office-holding scoundrels and wags in these parts, a great many
of whom have been at least intermittently funny, often on purpose.
Southern political humor has filled several books, but let me tell one
story that was a favorite of "Fiddling Bob" Taylor of Tennessee.
Governor Taylor liked to tell about the man who wanted to predict his
son's future. He put a Bible, a silver dollar, and a bottle of whiskey on
a table and hid to see which the boy would choose. He figured that if
the boy took the Bible, he'd be a preacher; if he took the dollar, he'd be
a businessman; and if he took the bottle, he'd be a drunkard. Well, the
littleboy came into the room, put the dollar in his pocket, took a swig
from the bottle, and picked up the Bible. "My God!" said the father.
"He's going to be a politician!"
I also like Bob Taylor's description of the Mason-Dixon Line as "a
great crimson scar of politics across the face of the grandest country
21
God ever made. There it is," he said, "and there it will remain, the
dividing line between cold bread and hot biscuits."
And it's not just professional and semi-professional
humorists like
entertainers and politicians who have been funny. As Roy Blount
observed: "Being humorous in the South is like being motorized in Los
Angeles or argumentative in New York -- humorous is not generally a
whole calling in and of itself, it's just something that you're in trouble
if you aren't."
Southerners of all kinds have shown a gift for joking, in all sorts of
settings.
A couple of weeks ago I was at the Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary in Louisville, where I heard why, if you're going
fishing with a Baptist, you'd better take two. If you only take one,
he'll drink all your beer.
Southerners have even been hU1110rOUS
in battle, .for crying out loud. In
1878, in an article called "Johnny Reb at Play," one veteran observed
that "there could be no greater mistake" than to view the Confederate
soldier as a "melodramatic, [or] tragic, character" because "he was in
the largest sense a humorist." Many reminiscences of the War are spiced
with tales of practical jokes, snipe hunts, louse races, and songs about
goober peas and Yellow Rose. Confederates joked about inflation: One
army surgeon reported that he "made $2000 on a barrel of peach brandy
after drinking off of it a week."
They even joked about killing: Private
Sam Watkins noticed that his company's officers took the braid off their
uniforms before battle, so Yankee riflemen wouldn't recognize them as
officers. Watkins said he thought this was a mistake. He said he always
shot at privates, because they were the ones who were trying to kill
him. He said he always thought of officers as "harmless personages."
Eighty years later, in another war, on another continent, Ernie Pyle wrote
about the men in a South Carolina artillery unit: "Practically everybody
had a nickname - such odd ones as "Rabbit" and "Wartime" and "Tamper"
and "Mote."
Most of them had little education, and their grammar was
atrocious, but
they accepted their hardships with a sense of gaiety and
good humor that is seldom found in Army outfits."
22
Humor's not the only thing that has permeated Southern life, but it has
been one of the things.
.
I'll get back
let's begin
Southerners
that question
way.
to what Millsaps has to do with all this eventually, but first
to ponder the question of what it means to say that
tend to be funny in Southern ways. We're going to explore
all morning, but let me pick up the ball and carry it a little
Roy Blount says that when he's being interviewed about being a
Southern humorist, if he's lucky, he gets asked whether Southerners
laugh at different things than Northerners do.
"Yes," he says. "Northerners."
That's a little Southern joke. But if we take the question seriously, it
seems humor is indeed one of what Edgar Thompson called the
"idiomatic imponderables" that make up a culture. Humor, like wine,
doesn't always travel well, and Americans from different regions
sometimes don't appreciate one another's vintages.
You probably know "Car Talk," that NPR program where two brothers
give automotive advice, one-up each other, and put down cars and people
they don't like. Now, I've lived in Boston, and I can tell you that Tom
and Ray Magliozzi are utterly typical Boston-Italian wise guys - well,
OK, smarter than average, but their aggressive conversational style is
completely unremarkable where they come from. But for Southerners
the constant interrupting and needling takes some getting used to. Roy
Reed summed it up pretty well: conversation in the Northeast, he said,
is "hurled stones"; in the South it's more like "moonshine passed slowly
to all who care to lift the bottle."
Apparently so many listeners complained about how rude the Magliozzis
were that South Carolina Public Radio dropped "Car Talk" for a while.
(I gather it's back now -- which speaks either to South Carolinians'
growing tolerance for northeastern modes of discourse or to the growing
number of Yankee migrants in the Palmetto State.)
23
Naturally it works the other way, too. Northerners don't always get
Southern jokes. Sometimes they have to be explained, which of course
is death to any sort of humor.
I remember watching the musical comedy based on Doug Marlette's
comic strip "Kudzu." The Reverend Will B. Dunn complains that his
town of Bypass, North Carolina, is "so backward even the Episcopalians
handle snakes." We were sitting with a woman from Massachusetts an intelligent, well-educated, with-it woman - but she just didn't get it.
At intermission she asked why the audience had cracked up. I did my
best to tell her, but by the time I finished even I didn't think it was
funny anymore.
Ben Robertson had a similar experience the time he told a general in
the Polish army that the Polish boys who played football for Fordham
were puzzled when University of Georgia players called them "damn
Yankees." After all, they were Dodgers fans. When the general didn't
understand why that was funny, Robertson tried to explain, but got
hopelessly tangled up in the many meanings of "Yankee" and gave it
up as a bad business.
Jerry Clower, the Reverend Grady Nutt - not to mention Moms Mabley
or Brother Dave Gardner - all really require some background to
appreciate properly, or sometimes even at all. Roy Blount and Molly
Ivins are both successful outside the Southern context, but watching
.either of them work a Southern audience, you realize that they are
basically bilingual. It's like hearing Sam Cooke's steamy performances
on the chitlin circuit rather than his innocuous hit records.
Just so, I notice that last year Jim Cobb treated this group to Jeff
Foxworthy's line about how "You might be a redneck if you've ever
been too drunk to fish." That's understood differently by those of us
who have relatives like that - not to mention those of us who've been
too drunk to fish.
This business of humor getting lost or mangled in translation happens
in another, very important circumstance.
L. P. Hartley once observed
that "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."
24
It's not our native land. We can only be tourists there - at best,
naturalized citizens. Often we don't understand what's going on.
One of the things they do differently in the past is that they laugh at
different things.
Consider the species of literature
known as
"Southwestern humor." That phrase refers to a body of literature that
came out of the Southern frontier in the antebellum period. It was
written by folks like Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson J. Hooper,
George Washington Harris, Joseph B. Baldwin, and a few dozen lesser
lights. (Mark Twain came out of this school, but transcended it.)
Southwestern humor wasn't unprecedented. You can find its antecedents
over a century earlier in the Virginia aristocrat William Byrd's
description of North Carolina white trash - that is to say, as he saw it,
North Carolinians
in general.
Byrd wrote that Tar Heels didn't
distinguish Sunday from any other day, which would be an advantage
if they were hard-working, but as it was, he said, "they keep so many
Sabbaths every week that their disregard of the seventh day has no
manner of cruelty in it either to servants or cattle."
That sort of set the tone. But this kind of humor reached its full
flowering in the antebellum period. Indeed, one student of Southwestern
humor tells us that by then it "had no counterpart in the humor of any
other section of the United States. It was distinctly and peculiarly
Southern; and it was provincial, wholly local."
There's something really puzzling about Southwestern humor, though:
It isn't funny. Not only that: If's hard to believe it ever was funny.
Why this is? Why doesn't it translate into twenty-first century Southern?
A valuable book by Wade Hall, called The Smiling Phoenix, identifies
four defining features of this kind of Southwestern humor. Let's look
at them:
First, it was violent. It was all about pain. It's hard to parody, but in
1850 the Galveston Weekly Journal did it, with a verse that still is funny:
25
They fit and fit,
And gouged and bit,
And struggled in the mud
Until the ground
For miles around
Was kivered with their blood
And a pile of noses,ears, and eyes,
Large and massive reached the skies.
Could be a country song, couldn't it?
A second characteristic of Southwestern humor is exa~~eration, which
is why it's hard to parody. It's essentially a species of caricature. And
the subject of this caricature is always poor whites. That's the third
characteristic.
Not only the writers but the written-about were white.
(I started to say that Southern whites haven't found violent black folks
amusing, but I then recalled a number of razor-totin' exceptions who
came along later. That's a subject for another day - and probably another
analyst.)
Now, violence still figures in Southern humor. Some of you will know
Brother Dave Gardner's story about turning Miss Baby's head around.
(It can't be summarized.)
Hank Williams Jr. sings about giving his
brother-in-law an "attitude adjustment" with a tire-iron. The group
Confederate Railroad has a song about a dumped girlfriend who gets
violent (it's called "She Took It Like a Man").
Southerners still find exaggeration funny, too. Many of Jerry Clower's
stories rely on it. Lewis Grizzard used to joke about his checkered
marital history: he said he'd seen bumper stickers in Atlanta that said
"Honk if you've been married to Lewis Grizzard." Moms Mabley's
got a great line: "Old man say to me: 'When I was a boy, I used to live
in the country.' Damn, when you was a boy, everybody lived in the
country!" And Lord knows common Southern white folks can still be
funny: That's what "Hee Haw" was all about, and those country songs,
and Jeff Foxworthy.
26
So if violence, exaggeration, and poor whites - in various combinations
- are still funny, what's the problem with Southwestern humor? The
problem, I think, is not with who's talked about or what's said about
them, but with who says it, to whom.
The fourth characteristic of Southwestern humor is that it was almost
always written by educated, indeed professional, men for educated (and
often non-Southern) audiences. Almost all the Southwestern humorists
were politically conservative, too, but that's not the problem. I'd argue
that most humorists are conservative, at some level. What is a problem
is smugness. As Roy Blount observed in that book of his I keep quoting,
"[W]hat surely leads to spoilage in Southern or any other humor is
condescension."
And Southwestern humor is tainted with a sort of
Whiggish amusement at the antics of the lower orders.
Obviously, the same is true of a lot of racist humor, and in both cases
the use of dialect is a giveaway. When speech is rendered sort of pseudophonetically, with all manner of supposedly comic misspellings thrown
in, it not only makes this stuff hard to read, it emphasizes the social
gulf between the subjects of the account and the gentleman-narrator
(who of course speaks and spells correctly).
After the Civil War, for the white South, condescension toward the
comical poor white was largely replaced by condescension toward the
comical Negro, who became the principal butt of white Southern humor
during Reconstruction and for decades afterwards.
(The social and
political functions of that change are too obvious to fool with. Let's
just say that Uncle Remus was the best of a very bad lot.)
To the extent that poor white folks were still around in Southern literary
humor, they became kinder and gentler. The eye-gougers and ganderpullers and sharpsters of Southwestern humor were largely replaced by
the rustic philosophers and village swains of sentimental local color.
Wade Hall suggests, or at least implies, some possible reasons for that
change, among them that the War had made violence less funny, that
white Southerners wanted to present a united front and had to soften
27
the class distinctions of antebellum days to do it, and that post-War
Southern humor was more often written by women. Could be. Certainly,
for whatever reason, there seems to have been a general triumph of
Victorian - one could almost say Methodist - gentility in white Southern
humor, at least of the literary sort. As Opie Read wrote in 1885, in the
Arkansaw Traveler, "The days of vulgar humor are over in this country.
[T]he reading public is becoming more refined .... The humorist of the
future must be chaste and truthful."
Well, Read was too optimistic: Some years later the Lester family of
Tobacco Road breathed new life into the classic white trash formula,
and - as I said - violence, exaggeration, and poor white characters still
playa prominent part in Southern humor. But with a difference: the
judgmental gentleman-observer
is gone.
Think about the stories of the late Jerry Clower, for example. At first
glance the capers of the Ledbetter family might seem to straight out of
A. B. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes: You've got Tater Ledbetter, a parttime veterinarian, who examines a cat and bills the owner a few dollars
for medicine and $500 for the "cat-scan." Odell Ledbetter proves he's
not dumb by working a jigsaw puzzle in two weeks that the box says
. should have taken "4 to 7 years." Clower even tells some stories about
"ring-tail roarers" that look a lot like A. B. Longstreet's Ransy Sniffle.
But there's a difference. It matters that Longstreet was a graduate of
Yale, a Methodist minister, and a college president like y' all, while
Jerry Clower went to Mississippi State on a football scholarship and
worked as a fertilizer salesman. It matters that Longstreet was writing
books for a refined, literate, and largely non-Southern audience, while
Clower was working the Grand Ole Opry, Dollywood, and Christian
radio. Clower never set himself up to be better than the people he was
joking about. His humor was Jacksonian, not Whiggish, more like
Davey Crockett than like A. B. Longstreet. He was entitled.
At base, Southwestern humor, like the racist humor that largely replaced
it, was based on prejudice. Clower's humor was based on - I won't say
identification, but sympathetic understanding.
It will wear better, I
28
suspect. Humor based on prejudice can be funny - don't misunderstand
me: I'rn not preaching to you - but only if you share the humorist's
prejudices. When times and prejudices change it becomes mystifying
at best, deeply offensive at worst. I think that's what happened to
Southwestern humor. And perhaps to white racist humor as well: I
don't think I've heard a racist joke since my father-in-law died.
There's another kind of Southern humor that I find deeply attractive.
It's kind of the limiting case of humor based on sympathetic
understanding: It's based on one's own shortcomings and misfortunes.
This strain may always have been present in the humor of ordinary
Southerners - I suspect it has been - but it's certainly rare in the written
record. I'm happy to say that there seems to be a lot more of it these
days, perhaps just because we're hearing more from ordinary
Southerners than we used to.
There's plenty of this kind of thing in country music, where a lot of the
funny songs about violence involve the singer's getting beaten up.
Remember the B. B. King lyric about how nobody loves him. And
even Lewis Grizzard, who certainly had a mean streak, could make a
good, wry joke at his own expense. He said once, for example, that he
didn't think he'd marry again - "I'll just find a woman who hates me
and buy her a house."
Southerners don't have a monopoly on this sort of humor - just think
of Woody Allen - but we seem to do it well, and in our own way, with
our own material. And it certainly beats some of the alternatives.
You may recall that when Bill Clinton gave his interminable nominating
speech for Michael Dukakis back in 1988, the biggest applause line
was this: "In conclusion."
In conclusion - to get back to Millsaps,
finally - with reflections like these running throughmy mind, I decided
what we needed was a symposium on Southern humor. I decided this
despite Roy Blount's warning about the "fundamental truth: that nothing
is less humorous, or less Southern, than making a genuine, good-faith
effort to define and explain humor, particularly Southern humor."
I collected a bunch of folks I knew would have sometime interesting to
29
say on the subject, and we had a sort of all-day singing and dinner on
the grounds. If I do say so myself, it was a tremendous success. What
you all are going to hear today is a sort of "greatest hits" compilation
from that gathering.
30
Signifying on the Signifier: A Central Thrust of
Southern Women's Humor
Or
The Incredible Shrinking You-Know- What
by Anne Goodwyn Jones
Southern women's humor, It sounds like a contradiction in terms,
an oxymoron, like southern intellectual history or southern scrod. Men
are the ones who telljokes, right? You don't see men fall into confusion
in the middle of a story and say, blushing and suddenly shy, "Oh, I just
can 't tell a joke." It·'s men who wrote the classic southern humor of the
Old Southwest. It's eye gouging, lip ripping, nose chewing, bragging
and boasting men, on the Alabama and Mississippi frontier, who
portrayed themselves as "half-alligator and half-cooter," who defended
their honor by mutilating one another, and who thought it the height of
humor to destroy a quilting party or palm off a herd of wild spotted
ponies on an unsuspecting community.
Women's job has been to keep men's hUlTIOrclean, or at least keep
it out of the house. So Ted Ownby implies in his book Subduing Satan:
Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920.
The southern women's world of evangelical purity aimed to subdue
men and their pleasures, to bring them into the fold. For men, this
meant, besides cutting out drinking, gambling, cockfighting, and other
masculine delights, cleaning up their language and, presumably,
laundering their jokes. Hence the very thought of southern women's
humor feels like a self-contradiction.
But Ownby's study ends in 1920, and southern women seem to have
changed. Or maybe they have just come out of the kitchen closet. Some
of the jokes you can hear today from the sainted lips of southern ladies
would curl the toes of the most reprobate nineteenth century cootergator. In fact, some of them are so blue that I am too personally shy to
let the words pass between my own sweet southern lips. Hence my
subtitle: "The Incredible Shrinking You-Know-What."
I know what a
you-know-what is; you know what a you-know-what is, or you soon
will; so we should have no problem understanding southern women's
humor without losing our dignity, and our funding.
31
Before we start shrinking you-know-whats, though, I have a few
thoughts about southern women and humor I'd like to pass along. It
has struck me in reading some of the best twentieth century southern
women humorists-Florence
King, Lisa Alther, Molly Ivins, Zora Neale
Hurston, Fannie Flagg, Beth Henley, Rita .vIae Brown, Lee Smith,
Flannery O'Connor,
and of course Eudora Welty-that
there is
sometimes an uncertainty about what should be the territory of women's
humor, about what is laughable for women and what is off limits. In
this sense the history of southern women's humor is the history of
expanding the limits of what is laughable.
Barbara Bennett, in her
1998 book Comic Visions, Female Voices:
Contemporary
WOlnen
Novelists and Southern HU1110r,thinks this should be amended to read
"what is laughable in the presence of men." I'm not so sure. I think
there may be a history of women's self-censorship among women too.
Even more drastic is self-deprecatory or self-degrading humor. Yet for
a long time the favorite target of southern women's humor was southern
women themselves. Here are a couple of examples:
--Do you know why southern women don't like group sex?
--Too many thank you notes.
And maybe you have heard the Atlanta story of the Buckhead dowager
who decided during World War II to do her part for the war effort. She
called down to Fort MacPherson and told the captain she'd like to invite
some enlisted men for Sunday dinner.
"Just make sure they are good CHRISTIAN boys," she told the captain.
Sunday came, the doorbell rang, and there stood three strong tall African
American soldiers.
"Who ARE you all?" she asked ..
"Ma'am, we're the soldiers corne for dinner."
"There must have been a terrible mistake," the southern lady said.
"No ma'am," the soldiers answered. "Cap'n Goldberg, he don't make
no mistakes."
Think of Flannery O'Connor.
What do we laugh at? A Bible
salesman steals the wooden leg of a snobby intellectual woman, in
"Good Country People." A fat, ugly Wellesley girl throws a fit in a
doctor's waiting room, in "Revelation."
A retarded girl gets left in a
roadside diner, in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." A forgetful
old woman leads her family to mass murder, in "A Good Man Is Hard
to Find." A bossy mother is gored to death by her bull, in "Greenleaf."
32
And so forth. It is true that O'Connor deliberately
skewers her
characters for reasons that have to do with her beliefs about the way
the grace of God works in the modern world. She wants to shock us to
set us free. But her targets are, over and over again, southern women
very like her mother, like her closest family and friends, and very like
herself. Even the kinder, gentler humor of Lee Smith and Eudora Welty
can raise the self-deprecation flag just a bit for a southern woman. Are
we laughing at or with Edna Earle, in "Why I Live at the P.O"? Can
you do both at once? Possibly. Here, for example, is Lee Smith's
character and local newspaper columnist Joline B. Newhouse, from
"Between the Lines":
"Peace be with you from Mrs. Joline
B. Newhouse" is how I sign my columns.
Now I gave some thought to that. In the
first place, I like a line that has a ring to it.
In the second place, what I have always
tried to do with my column is to uplift my
readers if at all possible, which sometimes
it is not. After careful thought, I threw out
"Yours in Christ." .... I am in Christ but I
know for a fact that a lot of them are not. .
. . "Peace be with you," as I see it, is
sufficiently religious without laying all the
cards right out on the table in plain view.
No one can say this isn't funny. But it would be interesting to compare
how often southern men's jokes take themselves as their target. If
southern humor is self-deprecating generally, as has been argued today,
is women's humor more so? I suspect it is.
That general self-deprecation may emerge from awareness of the
beleaguered position of the South in national ideology: we will preempt the Yankees by laughing at ourselves. The self-deprecating strain
in southern women's humor has to do, also, with stereotypes
of
womanhood within the South: we'll laugh at ourselves before the men
do. Even the positive stereotypes of southern women, black and white,
have worked against women making fun and laughing out loud.
Southern women have been called on to be nurturing, not mean;
dignified, not lewd; beautiful, not grotesque; stabilizing, not disruptive.
33
In fact, Emily Toth has argued that women writers in general "rarely
violate ... the Humane Honor Rule-that
is, 'Thou shalt not make fun
of something a person cannot change.'" Hence the "appropriate targets
for [women's] humor are the choices that people make," she writes,
not, for example, their physical appearance.
It's hard for me to swallow this argument.
It seems to me that
humor in general is often mean and lewd and grotesque. It's always, I
would maintain, disruptive, if it's any good. The very act of laughing
disrupts the body, like sneezing and other less polite events. Jokes
depend on the unexpected, the incongruous, on breaking boundaries
and rules. How can WOOlenbe funny if they are following a Humane
Honor Rule? One answer to this double bind is to make fun of oneself:
enter self-deprecation.
Southern women laughing at southern women
is a form of staying in line, within the boundaries of traditional southern
patriarchal culture, just as southern men's self deprecatory humor is a
way of staying within the boundaries of the national denigration of the
South.
Thus the notion of southern women's humor even now sounds like
an oxymoron-unless
the humor is self-directed.
Of course there is
that notable exception:
humor directed at a northern woman. John
Reed recently sent the panel the following southern female version of a
joke you probably know. Sitting next to a northern girl on a long plane
flight, a southern girl opened the conversation by asking, naturally, about
her family and her home. "So where do y'all come from?" she asked,
politely.
"From a place where we know better than to end sentences with
prepositions," the Yankee snapped back.
"Oh," said the southern girl. "Let me rephrase that. Where are
y'all from, bitch?"
If southern women's identities and southern women's humor are
premised on staying in line, then expanding the territory of the laughable
can expand the possibilities
for the identities of southern women
themselves. As Mab Segrest puts it, "Laughter is revolution." (Is selfdeprecating laughter by the same token a subtle form of suicide?)
Because of this link between the boundaries of humor and the boundaries
of identity, sometimes what is supposed to be funny can end up sounding
more like defiance. Some southern women's sexual humor strikes me
this way, as though the effort to step off the pedestal and claim a
previously forbidden female desire is too taxing to leave room for wit.
34
{example) But not all of it: here's one that does find room for wit,
from Florence King's Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: "No
matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street."
To complicate things still more, the tone of such risky humor
depends to a great degree on the audience we imagine for it. One
audience will hear defiance where another hears only wit. So it is that
a great quantity of southern women's humor has remained in the closetor the kitchen-brought
out only to very privileged audiences, usually
of other southern women.
Rayna Green's research into southern
women's bawdy lore makes the point in telling of the trust women had
to call upon in order to allow male folklorists to hear for the first time
the kind of humor southern women had been telling in the kitchen for
decades.
So now we have come to the question. 'What IS that hidden humor?
What IS signifying on the signifier? What IS this you-know-what?
Gentlemen, kindly cover your ears.
A young southern woman was eagerly anticipating
her first
weekend, and first sexual experience, with her new boyfriend. She
couldn't stop talking about it at work on Friday, until one of her coworkers said, "You know, my boyfriend told me he saw your boyfriend's
you-know-what in the bathroom, and it has "Shorty" tattooed on it."
So her co-workers were all ears and eyes when their friend came in to
work on Monday. And they were surprised to see her looking so healthy,
so happy, so ... satisfied. "What happened?" they asked.
"Well," she told them. "When his you-know-what is ready for
action, you can read the whole tattoo. It says "Shorty's Bar and Grill,
Chattanooga, Tennessee."
Clearly this joke has to stay in the kitchen because it questions the
good old boy myth that it's not how deep you fish, it's how you wiggle
your worm.
Then there is the Atlanta mother whose young daughter asked her
"Where do babies come from?" Sparing no details, she told her daughter
the whole story, you-know-what and all. A week later, her daughter
asked to talk to her again. "Mama, I woke up last night and your door
was open," she said. "I understand where babies come from. But I
have another question now. Why did you have Daddy's you-knowwhat in your mouth?"
"Well, honey," said Marna, thoughtfully.
"That's where jewelry
comes from."
35
I don't need to tell you why THIS joke stayed in the kitchen.
Once they come out of the kitchen, though, jokes about you-knowwhats pop up allover southern women's humor, regardless of race or
class.
36
"Adventures in a 'Foreign Country':
African American Humor and the South"
by Trudier Harris
Many African Americans have a love/hate relationship with the
South. That's where most of us originated, but it's also the place that's
caused us a lot of pain. On the one hand, we have historically migrated
out of the South. We followed the drinking gourd during slavery, and
we celebrated our newfound freedom in the northern United States or
in Canada. During the Great Migration of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, we mythologized the North. We celebrated with Rudolph
Fisher's King Solomon Gillis the "cullud policernens" we found in
Harlem, one of those northern heavenly promised lands. And when we
couldn't migrate, we found ingenious ways of letting the world know
how things were "down South." There is the popular story of the black
sharecropper
in the Deep South who is invited
"to accompany
his
landlord to a radio station where he is to tell the rest of the nation how
well colored people are treated in his state." Sam and his boss arrive,
and the dialogue develops this way:
'Now there's the microphone, Sam, [the boss man says] Jest talk
into it.'
'This is the microphone, boss?'
'That's right, Sam.'
'And when I talk into it, the whole world can hear me?'
'That's right, Sam.'
'Outside of Mississippi? Allover the world?'
'Sure enough, Sam. Jes ' you go ahead and tell 'em.'
So Sam walked over to the microphone, grabbed on to it with both
hands and hollered:
'HE-E-E-E-ELP!'
(Levine, 318)
Thus, on the one hand, black folks wanted to leave the South. On
the other hand, we couldn't stay in the North. We had to make our
annual pilgrimages home-frequently
in rented Cadillacs-designed
to impress our "backward, country" relatives. For the longest time, the
South was anathema. Consider the story of the pregnant black woman
who visits relatives in the South, where her pregnancy extends into the
tenth and eleventh months. When a baffled doctor finally puts a
37
stethoscope to the mother's stomach, the baby is heard proclaiming, "I
won't be born down here. I won't be born down here." Or consider the
case of the northern black student who finds his missionary calling in
work in the South. He is "awakened in the middle of the night by a
voice which proclaimed: 'Go to Mississippi! Go to Mississippi!'
'All
by myself?' the frightened student inquired. 'Have no fear,' the voice
reassured him. 'I'll be with you-as far as Memphis.' (Levine, 329).
So black folks who had migrated north generally stayed out of the
South-until
1974 or thereabouts, when inflation hit and the price of
sugar rose to two dollars and forty-nine cents for a five-pound bag and
when heating oil bills in colder climates skyrocketed.
Then, all of a
sudden, those southern peas and greens, open spaces, and sunshine
became very attractive. It became chic for black folks to migrate back
to the South.
In folklore and humor, however, black folks have always tread the
territory of the South, and they named it HOME. This home is
recognizable by its benefits as well as its limitations, and often the
limitations exceed the benefits. Southern limitations in the case of one
weary black traveler are preferable to so-called northern equal treatment.
· · · a young black man ... came to Chicago because he heard
that there all men were created equal. After three months he
loses his job and is reduced to begging. He knocks on the door
of a house, where he is treated with great respect, "Good
morning, sir. Something I can do for you?' but is denied help.
Finally he makes his way south into Tennessee, where he knocks
on the door of the first house he comes to and is greeted by a
fat white man:
'What can I do for you, nigger?'
'Boss-man, I'm hongry.'
'Bring your black self to the back door and I'll give you
something to eat. '
'Thanks God, I'm back home.' (Levine, 323-24)
In literature, popular culture, and folk culture, the South as a place
of mixed memory and the site of the creation of a particular brand of
determination led black Americans to replay its meanings again and
again. While James Baldwin asserted in Just Above My Head, his 1979
novel, that black Americans could look at a map of the territory below
the Mason-Dixon line and scare themselves to death, Ernest Gaines
38
has consistently found his creative fire in southern soil and characters.
His descriptions of Louisiana plantations and people have earned him
many literary accolades.
Raymond Andrews has created a mythical
territory in northeastern Georgia called Appalachee County, about which
he wrote three novels before his death in the 1980s. Randall Kenan, a
young black North Carolina writer, has given us memorable southern
characters who claim the South and its traditions in such works as A
Visitation of Spirits and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. Instead of
rushing out of the South, Andrews and Kenan transformed the South
into a healthy, regenerative force for their characters. So too does Alice
Walker. She claims Georgia soil for several of her works, including
The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) and The Color Purple (1982).
These contemporary black writers allow characters to grow, prosper,
and reach their full potential in a territory that previously only meant
death and repression to them.
The black folk imagination-from
tales of encounters with sheriffs
to dealing with generic forms of confinement-has
demonstrated that
the South has always been fertile soil on which to work out the blues
motif (laughing to keep from crying) inherent in being descended from
a people so strongly identified with that territory. The humor reflects a
mixture of love and revulsion,
immersion
and transcendence.
Comedians such as Jackie "Moms" Mabley have done their share in
"re-inventing" the South, for as long as the exorcising force of humor
was operative, African Americans could never be defeated by racial
uglinesses. In a sense, we could argue that African American hUlTIOras folk narrators and popular comedians presented it-did
more for
black people's attitudes toward the South than any legislation.
Put
simply, for African Americans,
humor made the South not only
endurable but transcendable, for humor reduced the South to a laughably
manageable level of insanity. That reduction might be exemplified in
the black preacher who told his flock that he did not believe in hell.
"Oh, no rny friends," he intoned, "The Lord would not repeat himself
by making a place called Hell when we already have a place called
Georgia." (Levine, 317)
The love/hate relationship blacks have with the South is manifested
in everyday life as well as in the humor. Expressions such as "down
home" used in reference to the South locate the point of origin for most
39
black Americans. It has been documented that, when asked the question,
"Where are you from?," black people invariably identify their Southern
homes even if they have lived out of the South for two or three decades.
In fact, William Wells Brown used the title My Southern Home: Or,
The South and Its People for a collection of essays he published in
1880; Richard Wright would similarly draw upon connotations between
slavery and the South in Uncle Tom's Children (1938), and Alabama
writer Albert Murray entitled one of his books South to a Very Old
Place. The South is home just as America is home, and black people
have exhibited their claims to the territory by asserting the right to
criticize it. Criticism, James Baldwin argues of his relationship to
America, is ultimately what one earns by loving one's country. I cannot
speculate on how many black people would say they love the South,
but demographics
would certainly
suggest that they are more
comfortable in it than history might warrant-or
perhaps it is precisely
history that occasions that comfort.
It is noteworthy, in the humor in which black folks focus on Southern
territory, that black people frequently draw upon racial stereotypes and
derogatory self-references as a part of the laughter. The nature of humor
is such that abbreviated references, especially to stereotypical habits,
are frequently
preferred
to those that are spelled out and that
commonplace or slang references take precedence over more formal
ones. Therefore, it is common in the humor to see black people paint
themselves as driving Cadillacs, toting razors, stealing, or referring to
themselves as "niggers" (as you have already heard in a couple of the
jokes I've presented).'
Black men may stereotypically be in pursuit of
"the white woman"-less,
it seems, for the woman herself, than for
what she represents.
She is objectified into a prize to be won or a
metaphor for overstepping the bounds or limitations imposed upon black
men. If the subject matter of the humor is at times brutal, it reflects the
brutal circumstances from which it is derived.
The subject areas upon which the humor focuses are wide-ranging.
Many deal with efforts on the part of whites to maintain the status quo
and how black people are caught in the web of negotiations involving
1
It is difficult, even in the most altruistically intended context, to argue positive connotations for this
word. Yet African Americans invariably use it among themselves, most often affectionately but sometimes derisively. Whites generally still only intend it derogatorily. For example, at the conference at
which I presented an earlier version of this paper, a white man who has Iived in the South all his life
and wanted to illustrate "the changing same," asked privately if he could tell me a joke he had heard .
recently. He wanted to ensure that I would not be offended by it. The joke took the form of a
question: "What do you call a nigger?" Answer: "An African American who has just left the room."
40
the pushing of legal, physical, and psychological limits of confinements.
Attempts to change laws, for example, from obtaining voting rights to
eating in diners, are fair game for the humor. The broad area of
integration (of bus stations, restaurants, schools) in an effort to broaden
access to democracy perhaps serves as the prime subject area for sources
of humorous interactions between blacks and whites. The territory' on
which custom and law clash, that is, practices governing private
interactions between blacks and whites in the South, also find their
way into the humor. For example, law may determine that blacks and
whites can intermarry, but custom forbids the practice. Those who
violate such customs-usually
black men in liaisons with white
women-are
punished swiftly.
Crossing geographical,
legal, and
interpersonal boundaries-those
were the taboo actions that led to much
civil rights legislation and that define much African American humor
about the South. All of these areas of negotiated access were clearly
serious and often involved life-threatening issues, yet these are the areas
in which we see humor serving its primary function: that of release.
Humor is the balm against pain, the laughter in the face of insane actions
and customs directed against black individuals and black people
generally.
Instead of reflecting upon the severe slap to humor dignity that
refusal
of service
in a diner would mean, a black person
unceremoniously informed that "We don't serve niggers here" could
reply with: "I don't eat 'ern."? A similar saving of face in the possible
loss of dignity is the following little anecdote. A black man goes into a
restaurant, orders, and is served a whole chicken. Just before he begins
eating, a group of white men gathers around his table and asserts, as
punishment for his violation of taboo, that they will do to him whatever
he does to the chicken. He sits awhile, desperately thinking how he
can get out of the situation, then he turns the chicken up, kisses its rear
end, gets up, and walks out. The joke turns upon the, stereotype of the
chicken loving black person that dates back to enslaved persons being
caught in the slaveowners ' henhouses, but it also is a tribute to the
black man of wits who is able in a pinch to outwit his hostile opponents.
2
For two other versions of this tale, see Daryl C. Dance, Shuckin' and Jivin ': Folklore front Contemporary Black Americans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 201.
41
Turning the tables, changing the joke and slipping the yoke (as Ralph
Ellison would say), or simply having the lucky foresight to say "You've
got the old coon at last" as the salvation to identifying a raccoon in a
box are but a few instances of black people using their wits to get out
of near fatal situations. The seeming ease with which black people
negotiate these racial waters reflects the depth of their familiarity with
the territory on which they are forced to play as well as their knowledge
of their opponents in that territory.
Another encounter in a restaurant during early days of integration
suggests that at least some storytellers felt that their own culture was
preferable to anything into which they could integrate with white people.
The most common joke [of the integration mode] tells of a Negro
who decides to test the new integration by eating in a plush
restaurant.
Greeted politely by the headwaiter, she orders
pigtails and black-eyed peas only to be told they are not on the
menu. She then requests chitterlings, rutabagas, and corn bread
and is again met with a negative response. 'Then I know you
got ham hocks and collard greens,' she says finally. 'Regretably,
no,' the waiter replies. 'Honey,' the old lady tells him as she
rises to leave, 'I knowed you-all wasn't ready for integration.
(Levine, 319-320)
It is clear that, while many black people may consider the South
home, they have repeatedly been treated almost like strangers, or, worse
than strangers, as if they were in a foreign country. I borrow the phrase
"foreign country" in reference to the South from Moms Mabley, and it
is Moms who has provided us with many humorous 'accounts of
adventures in as well as responses to the South. She has joked about
the voting registration situation, about segregation in general, and about
specific racist encounters. She has the uncanny ability, like poet Sterling
Brown, to make the absurd manageable by making it laughable. On
the impossibility of blacks voting in the South, she says:
Now hear this. Mom just got back from down there. Behind
the scorching curtain in Selma. While 1 was down I even hear
'em give a boy a literacy test where them cats have to go thu
before they can vote. And this boy happened to be a college
graduate, you see. So he went up to the desk; the fellow behind
it say, "Let me hear you say the Constitution backwards." He's
giving a literacy test and he's talking about the Constitution
42
backwards .. Said, "Let me hear you say the Old and New
Testament frontwards and backwards." He said it forwards and
backwards. He give him a Chinese newspaper. He said, "Let
me hear you read that paper." Fellow looked at it. He say,
"What does it say? What does it say?" "Says don't make no
difference what 1 do you ain't gonna let me vote nohow."
Even God can't break down some racial barriers in the South. " ...
story of the elderly black man who has been trying for years to become
a member of a white church in the South. Finally the minister tells him
to take his request to the Lord. Some time later he returns to the minister
and reports, 'I ax the Lord if'n He wouldn't pervide a way fer dis ole
nigger to be 'mitted .... The Lord say, 'go on nigger! I'se been trying
to get in there myself iot twenty-five years and I ain't made it yet!'"
(Levine, 319).
If prejudice in the South extended to maintaining the status quo in
voting and in churches, it certainly extended to more personal, private
relationships.
Law might allow one thing, but custom governed more
often than not. Says Morns:
Colored fellow down home died. Pulled up to the [heavenly]
gate. St. Peter look at him, say, "What do you want?" "Hey
man [the guy says], you know me. Hey Jack, you know me.
I'm old Sam Jones. Old Sam Jones, man, you know me. Used
to be with the NAACP, you know CORE and all that stuff, man,
marches, remember me? Oh man, you know me." He just broke
down there. "You know me." He [S1. Peter] looked in his book.
"Sam Jones," he say, "No, no you ain't here, no Sam Jones."
He said, "Oh man, yes, I am, Look there. You know me. I'm
the cat that married that white girl on the Capitol steps of
Jackson, Mississippi." He [St. Peter] said, "How long ago has
that been?" He said, "About five minutes ago."
If Mississippi justice was so swift that Sam Jones did not get his reward
(the prized white woman) on earth, then surely he cannot be denied
entry into heaven. His desperation enhances the urgency of that desire.
And the joke obviously allows laughter at the absurdity of taboos,
injunctions against marriage across racial lines.
How do human beings salvage dignity in impossible situations?
One way, as Zora Neale Hurston continuously argued, is to laugh.
Another is to pretend that the offense is something else, as Audre Lorde's
43
mother did when she and her daughters were spat on. Living in southern
territory means keeping constant vigilance and exhibiting an unending
willingness to be flexible, because if you're black in that "foreign
country," anything is liable to happen.'
In traditional African American literature and folktales, travel
through the South has been particularly perilous, for it may frequently
involve violations of spatial taboos that whites hold sacred. Many are
the tales of signs posted on various off-limits Southern territories that
assert: "Nigger, read and run. If you can't read, run anyhow." Or "No
niggers or dogs allowed." However, some black folks are better able
to traverse those forbidden boundaries than others.
One notable
negotiator is Slim Greer, a character African American poet Sterling
Brown created and incorporated into many of his poems. Slim, who is
"no lighter/ Than a dark midnight" nonetheless manages to pass for
white and court a white woman in Arkansas until his blues-playing
ability makes a suspicious white man conclude: "No white man/ Could
play like that .... " In another poem, Slim goes to hell only to discover
that it is Dixie. But one of his real stops in Dixie is especially
noteworthy; it highlights a peculiar practice in Atlanta:
Down in Atlanta,
De whitefolks got laws
For to keep all de niggers
From laughin' outdoors.
Hope to Gawd I may die
If I ain't speakin' truth
Make de niggers do deir laughin'
In a telefoam booth.
Slim Greer hit de town
An' de rebs got him told,"Dontcha laugh on de street,
If you want to die old."
3In her autobiography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1982),
Audre Lorde recounts how, when she was growing up in New York, her mother would attempt to
ignore white people spitting on her daughters by asserting that they were spitting into the wind and
the spittle just accidentally sprayed her daughters' clothing. Lorde comments: "But it was so typical
of my nlother when I was young that if she couldn't stop white people from spitting on her children
because they were Black, she would insist it was something else. It was so often her approach to the
world; to change reality. If you can't change reality, change your perceptions of it" (18).
44
Den dey showed him de booth,
An' a hundred shines
In front of it, waitin'
In double lines.
Slim thought his sides
Would bust in two,
Yelled, "Lookout, everybody,
"I'm coming through!"
Pulled de other man out,
An' bust in de box,
An' laughed four hours
By de Georgia clocks.
Den he peeked through de door,
An' what did he see?
Three hundred niggers there
In misery.Some holdin' deir sides,
Some holdin' deir jaws,
To keep from breakin'
De Georgia laws.
An' Slim gave a holler,
An' started again;
An' from three hundred throats
Come a moan of pain.
An' every time Slim
Saw what was outside,
Got to whoopin' again
Till he nearly died.
An" while de poor critters
Was waitin' deir chance,
Slim laughed till dey sent
Fo' de ambulance.
45
De state paid de railroad
To take him away;
Den, things was as usural
In Atlanta, Gee A.
(Brown, Collected Poems, pp. 81-82)
Slim escapes punishment because his unusual actions can be cast into
the "crazy nigger" syndrome, that realm of permissibility into which
black males in the South managed to violate law or custom and live in
spite of the violation. They are the kind of men about whom Richard
Wright writes in an essay entitled "How Bigger Was Born'" in reference
to his creation of the character Bigger Thomas in Native Son (1940).
It is also worth noting that the joke hinges upon a concept that
black people cultivated historically, that is, a specific space for the
containment of sound, such as a pot placed in the middle of a forbidden,
impromptu religious gathering in the woods near a plantation. Of this
phenomenon, folklorist and cultural analyst Alan Dundes writes: "If a
Negro wished to laugh out loud at his master, he might do so only at
considerable risk. So he suppressed the desire to laugh and went instead
to the 'laughing barrel,' where he could laugh to his heart's content
without fear of being heard. This traditional outlet is strikingly similar
to the custom of placing an inverted wash kettle in the center of the
floor during a prayer meeting so that the sounds of the singing might
go into the pot and thereby not disturb the white folks at the plantation
house."!
It is interesting, therefore, that Brown appropriates this
tradition from African American culture as the site for illustrating the
absurdity of Southern Jim Crow laws and, in this case, the humorous
consequence for a traveler who violates them.
Black travelers on southern territory are frequently held accountable
for violating economic taboos, that is, for the cars they drive and the
clothes they wear. Many are the tales of black men in the JilTI Crow
South who owned "white" cars, in that white people considered the
cars too "good" for black folks. In order to keep their dignity, their
persons, and their cars undamaged, these men would wear chauffeurs'
caps when they went driving and pretend that they were working for
.. Richard Wright. "How Bigger Was Born". printed as the introduction to Native SOil (New York:
Harper and Row, 1966). pp. vii-xxxiv.
S Alan Dundes provides this explanation
in entitling his early collection of essays on African American
folklore Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel (Englewood Cliffs. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. 1973).
xiii-xiv.
46
wealthy whites." The other side of the practice of black northerners
driving Cadillacs into the South in the mid-20th century was that many
of them were fearful of doing so.
A northern Negro decided to drive 'down home' to Mississippi
for an annual reunion, and he wanted to return in style. He
bought a Cadillac with all the accessories, loaded it with all of
his fancy clothes, and began his trip. 'As he drove through
Kentucky with his shades on, everything was cool. But when
he got on the other side of Nashville going into Memphis, the
scareder he got. So when he got to Memphis, he parked his
Cadillac and caught a bus into Mississippi.'
(Levine 324)
Various versions of a joke portraying a black man in a Cadillac depict
the following encounter. This version reflects a more militant, 1960ish creation.
This fellow, you know, came down South. And you know it
was in this town, you know, it was prejudiced. He rolled in,
had one of these big, long Cadillacs, one of these $400 suits
thrown on, diamond rings. A colored fellow. When he ran on
up, white fellow sitting down chewing tobacco. "Fill the tank
up, will you chief?" "You talking to me, boy?" "Yeah, I'm
talking to you." "You know where you at, son?" "Yeah, I know
where I'm at." He said, "Well, down here, you say 'mister' and
you say it snappy, you hear." "Now, I don't say 'mister' to
nobody." He [white feller] said, "You see that bush out there
'bout two hundred yards? Fly on top of it." He said, "I see it."
So the old white fellow reached up and pulled the trigger, blew
the fly clear off the bush. Didn't even touch the bush. He said,
"That's what happens when you don't say 'mister,' boy."
He said, "Well, you trying to show off? You got a saucer
on you?" "Yeah, I got a saucer." "Throw it in the air." This
old fellow throwed the saucer in the air, other fellow reached in
the car, got an apple, throwed it in the air, took a straight razor,
whipped it out, 'fore the apple hit the ground, peeled, cut the
core out, sliced it up so thin that it land in the saucer, hit the
ground, it was apple sauce. White fellow jumped up and said,
6
Mildred, D. Taylor, who has written several books about the Jim Crow South in Mississippi, deals
with that taboo in Roll of Thunder; Hear My Cry (New York: Dial, 1976), in which the young female
narrator's uncle, visiting from the North, drives a "silver Packard" "a few months newer" than the one
belonging to the most prestigious white man in town.
47
"What you want, sonny?" "Just regular." (Abrahams, Deep
Down in the Jungle, 237-238)'
.
°Thisjoke, obviously of more recent political times in its twist ending,
allows the black man to become an active force in his own fate-in
contrast to Slim Greer. Ellison's notion of changing the joke and
slipping the yoke is even more striking.
By using a weapon
stereotypically associated with black males, the black man turns the
tables on his presumed enemy by a superior show of skill. The added
dimension is that the white man is portrayed as willing enough to admit
a level playing field, to recognize and give way before the superior
skill-a fact that would not have happened in earlier such tales. The
black man here violates speaking taboos, patterns of interracial social
interactions; and the presumed psychological space that is traditionally
assigned only to the white man. For a competition to be concocted,
played fairly, and culminated by the success of the black victor is a
milestone in the humor. The tale is so popular that Moms Mabley has
a version of it, and there are at least three others I have discovered in
addition to the one quoted above.
In another Cadillac tale, a black man uses the vehicle as the
particular expression of his desire to violate taboo:
This Black guy say, [excitedly] I'm gon' get me a white
woman, a white Cadillac, and a white suit, and ride down the
roads 0' Georgia in dat car!"
The [other black guy] say, "Well, you go right ahead-you
know what I'm gon' do. I'm gon' get a black woman, a black
Cadillac, a black suit, and ride down them same roads 0'
Georgia-and
see your black ass hanging." (Dance, Shuckin'
and Jivin '; 107 -108)
Custom renders the local version of justice swiftly, but the joke also
posits acceptable laughter at a black person who is so gleefully
insensitive to the tragic consequences of trespassing established racial
taboos. The second speaker knows that history, knows that whites will
respond in a certain way, knows that racial taboos may as well be
immutable, for violation is tragic and fatal.
The arena of legal justice in encounters in the form of courtroom
scenes, however, also find their way into the humor. Southern blacks
find themselves jailed or fined for not saying Mister Mule when the
mule happens to be white, or for not putting sufficient emphasis upon
7
For a tale that uses the apple cutting motif without the car and gasoline components,
217.
48
see Dance, p.
Miss in requesting Miss Muriel cigars. And there is the standard joke
of a black person being arrested for walking against a red light and,
taken to court, offering the explanation that, since the white folks walked
with the green light, he or she just assumed that the red light was for
black folks to walk (even Zora Neale Hurston reputedly once used this
as an explanation).
Favorite joking situations concerning the legal system centered
upon cases where innocent blacks were arrested while guilty
whites went free. A white man driving a convertible
in
Mississippi runs into two Negroes, hitting them so hard that
they fly straight up into the air. One lands in the back seat of
the convertible and is charged with illegal entry, while the other
lands about 150 feet down the road and is charged with leaving
the scene of a crime. The attitude toward southern justice found
most frequently in black humor is well summarized by the
popular joke concerning the judge who interrupts a lynch mob
and pleads, 'We've always been considered a progressive
community and I think we're progressive enough so's we can
give this boy a fair trail and then lynch him.' (Levine 319-19)
For black people treating the South in their humor and folklore, the last
laugh may be all they get, but what a great laugh it is. They celebrate
with their heroes as well as with the unnamed wielders of money power
who can bring a racist social system to its knees.
It was on a hot day in Georgia when Jack Johnson [the black
heavyweight champion of the world] drove into town. He was
really flying: Zoooom! Behind his fine car was a cloud of red
Georgia dust as far as the eye could see. The sheriff flagged him
down and said, 'Where do you think you're going, boy, speeding
like that? That'll cost you $50.00!' Jack Johnson never looked
up; he just reached in his pocket and handed the sheriff a $100.00
bill and started to gun the motor: ruuummm, ruuummm. Just before
Jack pulled off the sheriff shouted, 'Don't you want your change?'
And Jack replied, 'Keep it, 'cause I'm coming back the same way
I'm going!' Zooooooom. (Levin 433)
And then there's the story of the unnamed black men who get a southern
white racist to change his mind, for green power comes to mean more
than poor white power.
49
There [were these black] traveling salesm[e]n, and
[they] went into this Southern nightclub.
They were not
welcomed, but [the management] could not put them out. So
the manager told the maitre d", 'Every time they order a round
of drinks, double the price. That'll get them out of here in a
hurry. '
So they sat there and drank and drank and drank. Finally
the maitre d' went to the manager and said, 'They've run up to
sixty-four dollars a round ... ' Say, 'What must I do?'
The manager said, 'Sixty-four dollars! What must you
do! Go back there and get the rest of that white trash out 0'
here!' (Dance 223)
African American humor focusing on the South and race relations
in general may well be called "dark laughter," the title of Oliver W.
Harrington's collection of political, social, and racial cartoons. For
situations that are frequently life threatening, it is at times hard to
imagine guffaws associated with them. Yet black people managed to
create the essence of the blues-to
laugh to keep from crying-in
and
about a land that was/is as much hell as it was/is home. And for all the
migration North, for all the justified complaint about treatment in the
South, I have never heard a black person say of the South: "It's nice
place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." As more and more
black people are living "there," it is clear that a healthy sense of humor
is a prerequisite for that experience.
50
Works Cited
Abrahams, Roger D. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative
Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia.
Chicago: Aidine,
1963.
Brown, Sterling A. "Slim in Atlanta," in Sterling A. Brown: Collected
Poems, ed. Michael Harper. New York: Harper Colophon, 1980,
pp.81-82.
Dance, Daryl C. Shuckin' and Jivin': Folklore from Contemporary Black
Americans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.
Harrington, Oliver W. Dark Laughter: The Satiric Art of Oliver ~
Harrington. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.
Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: AfroAmerican Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom. New York:
Oxford, 1977.
Lorde, Audre. Zatni: A NeHJSpelling of My Name, Freedom, CA: The
Crossing Press, 1982.
Mabley, Jackie "Moms." Albums.
Taylor, Mildred D. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. New York: Dial,
1976.
Wright, Richard. "How Bigger Was Born." Printed as introduction to
Native Son. New York: Harper and Row, 1966, pp. vii-xxxiv.
51
New Nation, New South, New Tasks
by George Keller
It is an honor for me to be asked to address this distinguished body
of presidents from most of the finest academic institutions in the South.
For you, it might be considered an act of daring for this organization to
invite someone who was raised in New Jersey, educated in New York
City, and is currently living in Maryland, a fringe southern state like
Oklahoma or Missouri, to speak with you today.
In defense, I can offer only three small items. I am married to a
woman from Knoxville, Tennessee. I have had the privilege of working
with several southern institutions over the years. And I am writing
another book and have read a considerable portion of the best research
about and histories of recent developments
in the colleges and
universities of the South.
What I thought might be of interest to you as leaders of higher
learning is my sense of what is happening to this nation and how it is
affecting colleges and universities, what I perceive to be happening to
the South and to southern higher education, and what I believe may be
some new tasks for presidents of southern colleges and universities.
My hope is to help a tiny bit in your decision making and initiatives in
the years ahead.
Delivered at the Southern University Conference meeting in Miami, Florida, on March
11, 2001. George Keller, a former faculty member and dean, is an award-winning
higher education analyst, writer, and university planner, and a Baltimore-based consultant.
52
Our changing nation and its universities
It is presumptuous, of course, to claim to describe what is happening
to America in a brief talk. After all, one could mention a plethora of
changes from the growing importance of China in foreign policy to the
increase in tattoos and body piercing among the young. So I will limit
my observations to three areas that are directly relevant to all of you:
students, instruction, and finances.
Nottoo long ago, the students in our colleges and universities were
relatively young, a small percentage of their age group, heavily male,
and mostly middle and upper class Christians and Jews. But recently
higher education's clientele has been changing dramatically.
There are more students wanting a college education than
ever. An estimated 60% of all high school graduates now
enroll in some kind of college.
There are more women.
More than 55% of all
undergraduates
are now female. And women comprise
nearly half of all students in law school, and roughly onethird in schools of medicine, dentistry, architecture,
business, and even theology.
There are many more older students. Approximately 40%
of all enrollees are now over 25 years of age. The University
of North Carolina at Asheville has opened a new College
for Seniors, and the Elderhostel movement continues to
grow.
The students are more ethnically and religiously diverse.
Each year since 1965, when the immigration laws were
altered, the United States has been taking in-legally
and
illegally-more
immigrants than all the other developed
countries of the world combined. And 85% are Latinos or
Asians. Religiously, many of them are Moslems, Buddhists,
Rastifarians, animists, and believers in other faiths. Also,
more students are citizens of foreign countries, especially
those in our graduate schools.
Fewer students come from two-parent homes. Last year
32% of all births in this nation were out-of-wedlock, and
the divorce rate has doubled since 1960. So nearly 40% of
all students will soon be the product of single-parent
households, requiring greater financial aid and better oncampus advising and counseling.
53
More college students than ever want to develop their bodies
as well as their minds. Jogging, exercise, athletics, yoga
and tai-chi, and low-fat diets are popular. Hundreds of
universities and many smaller colleges have been pressed
to build fitness centers on their campuses. Women's sports
are multiplying.
These, and other changes among the paying customers of higher .
education, have prompted new initiatives by faculty members and
administrators in multiculturism, adult education, financial aid and
admissions, new kinds of facilities, and other areas. Many educational
leaders today speak frequently of the importance of "diversity" and
"lifelong learning."
In our increasingly knowledge-based
society,
colleges and universities have come to resemble medieval cathedrals
or great public libraries, instructing all kinds of persons from puberty
to senility. Colleges and universities are the new epicenters of our
economy and our culture.
Faculties are also changing the way they teach, and more instruction
is being done by persons who are not tenured professors and in places
away from the campus.
Learned lectures are gradually being replaced increasingly
by discussions, seminars and self-driven explorations.
The use of technology is expanding swiftly, both in the
classroom and through Web-based and on-line courses,
video cassettes, and films.
There is an increased use of internships, travel and study
abroad, and other forms of experiential experience for
learning.
At the larger, more research-oriented
universities,
instruction is more and more being delegated to graduate
students, adjunct faculty, and part-time instructors. At many
community colleges, one-half or more of the teaching is
done by persons and practitioners who are contracted to
teach only specific courses.
A growing minority of college and university instructors
see their classes not as opportunities
to investigate
impartially or teach objectively but as sessions to advocate
for gender, racial, or other ethnic causes or as soapboxes
for political and social reforms. 1
54
Then there is the troubling matter of financing colleges and
universities.
Since colleges and universities do not lend themselves
easily to productivity gains, and since they now require large capital
investments in equipment and digital hardware, the costs of higher
education have been rising about 40% faster than the Consumer Price
Index.2 Moreover, as knowledge and research have become more vital
to our society, the better scholars have commanded ever larger salaries.
Also, the expenses of libraries, athletic programs, student aid; energy
use, and marketing have escalated. Today going to college or university
is four times rnore expensive-in
real dollars-than
in 1960.
In sum,America's
demography, family life, technology, religious
affiliations, and techniques of higher learning are shifting. For higher
education, the future isn't what it used to be. The very structures of
our institutions, their instructional content and teaching force, and
financial costs are all being altered, mostly by changes in the nation
largely beyond the control of presidents, provosts, and professors.
The new South-again
As if the changes in the nation were not enough to contend with, I
believe the presidents of colleges and universities in the South have a
special set of changes with which they must deal. I certainly do not
want to claim one more time that there is a "new" South. The postCivil War period, after the abolition of slavery, was said to create a
new South.3 The post- World War II period, when southern states changed
economically, was claimed to usher in a new South, no longer heavily
agricultural." And the period since Brown v. Board of Education (1954),
when desegregation and affirmative action legislation brought blacks
and females into previously closed jobs, political positions, and higher
education, has been said to inaugurate another kind of new South.
But I want to suggest that the intellectual leaders gathered in this
room have both the necessity and the opportunity to provide a new
form of leadership for the South.
First, the necessity. There is abundant evidence that the South has
become "modern," as sociologists such as John Shelton Reed have
acknowledged. From 1940 to 1965 the South lost more than six million
people who chose to live elsewhere. But from the 1960s to the present
the South has been gaining population. People are now relocating in
the South, and today the South is the nation's most populous region.
55
The economy too has changed dramatically,
as you know.
Agriculture, the principal economic activity for two centuries, has
declined and only five percent of the South's labor force is now in
farming. The South has become mainly a service economy. From 1980
to 1995 the South led the nation in investments from abroad. The
average southern family income has risen so that it is nearly that of the
national average.
As recently as 1950 the South was two-thirds rural; today two-thirds
of the population live in urban or small-city settings.
Cities like
Charlotte, North Carolina; Orlando, Florida; and Dallas, Texas; have
become the centers of national businesses. New symphony orchestras,
art museums, medical centers, and gourmet restaurants have sprouted
like mushrooms throughout the South.
This more modern South requires a highly educated and expert
workforce such as the southern states have never had before. Better
schools, colleges, and universities are now an indispensable necessity
for the South. Your institutions are the new kingpin.
But southern colleges and universities also have a never-before
opportunity to playa larger role. Everyone in this room knows about
the heritage of poverty and neglect that southern universities have had
to endure in the past. Prior to 1860 only Virginia and South Carolina
supported their state universities to a small extent. The state of
Tennessee appropriated almost no funds at all to its state university
during the entire 19th century.f Even in the first four decades of the
20th century, southern colleges and universities
were nourished
financially
largely by church donations,
tuition charges, and
philanthropic foundations. Between 1902 and 1934 eight foundations
gave $88 million to 127 southern colleges and universities in an effort
to raise the intellectual level of the region's people.6
The growth of southern higher education was assaulted repeatedly
by a lethal quartet of opponents: small farmers, fundamentalist religious
groups, segregationists, and politicians without vision. As late as 1965
the noted scholar of education, Allan Cartter, could write that the South
"cannot as yet boast a single outstanding
institution
[of higher
education.]." 7
But beginning in the 1960s numerous southern colleges and
universities burst into unprecedented excellence, aided by the increasing
prosperity of the modern South and bold leadership.
No longer did
56
people around the rest of the country respect only a few institutions
such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University
of Virginia, Vanderbilt, and Davidson College. Suddenly many statesAlabama, Florida, "Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas-began
investing in their state universities.
Private colleges such as Furman,
Berea, University of the South, Trinity (in Texas), Hollins, Stetson,
Centre, Washington & Lee, and Hendrix, historically black institutions
like Morehouse-Spelman,
Hampton Institute, and Xavier of Louisiana,
and universities such as Duke, the University of Miami, Baylor, Emory,
Rice, and the University of Richmond all rose in stature, aided by larger
endowments, strategic planning, and aggressive recruiting of faculty
and students.
As I see it the efflorescence continues. More recently, institutions
such as Rollins, Rhodes, and Roanoke Colleges, Elon College, the
College of" William & Mary, and the College of Charleston,
the
Mississippi University for Women and the University of Southern
Mississippi, the University of South Carolina and George Mason
University,
Carson-Newman
College and St. Mary's College of
Maryland continue the march toward new heights of academic quality
.
8
an d reputation.
In my opinion, no region of the United States has improved its higher
education institutions in the past 30 years as much as the South.
Research and scholarship have increased, and undergraduate instruction
has never been more rigorous or tailored. So, the opportunity for persons
like you and your colleagues to playa more important and visible role
in providing direction and vision for the South of tomorrow has
increased enormously.
The tasks ahead
This brings me .to what I think are the highest priority tasks for
southern campus presidents. To me there are two that I suggest are
especially urgent.
One is to document and broadcast the astonishing rise of southern
higher education, to become more loquacious and bold in telling folks
in the region that advanced training and higher learning are now as
central as cotton and tobacco once were to the flourishing of southern
life and culture. As Numan Bartley has observed, "There is no history
of higher education in the South." 9 And Thomas Dyer, who wrote that
57
fine history of the University of Georgia, agrees. To Dyer, "Southern
higher education ...is an uncharted wasteland, compared with most areas
of southern historiography." 10 This void should be filled.
There seems to be no shortage of scholarship about the literary
achievements, the political shenanigans, the military campaigns, and
the religious activities of the South. And the continual psychological
and socio-cultural scrutiny of the "mind of the South" and the peculiar
characteristics of "southern culture" seems to be a major industry of
the region. But the role of colleges and universities in southern life is
usually missing. Higher learning should now take its place alongside
other of the influential, necessary, and shaping forces in southern
society. II You presidents are in a position to see that this is done.
I plead for each of you singly-and
perhaps with this association
of presidents collectively-to
speak out more often and vigorously about
the new centrality of intellect and knowledge in the nation and especially
for its vital role in the continued progress of the South. We hear too
seldom from the best minds of the South.
The second task is more difficult but equally, if not more, important
than the first task. It is this: to help conceive a fresh vision for the
South. That vision should be one that combines intellect, innovation,
the arts, ethnic and racial pluralism, and entrepreneurial capitalism with
the traditional devotions of the South such as family, religion, manners,
community, love of stories, and past history.
Scholars of the South like John Shelton Reed and James C. Cobb
are convinced that southernness "will remain different," 12 although
they also argue that the South must continue to become more modern
and more intellectual. They want the region to inject its own flavor of
modernity from the churches, families, closeness to the land, and a
.
13
d eep conservatism.
To me, and to others, many southerners have too often clung to the
past and neglected to imagine, strategize, and plan for a new kind of
future-not
a future that imitates that of the Northeast or California
but one that is distinctively southern and yet modern and intellectual
and cultured too. Now that the South has developed newly energized,
higher quality colleges and universities, your institutions should be the
wellsprings, the hothouses, for crafting such a vision. In fact, your
very campuses could become models of the new kind of outlook,
behavior, and intellectual daring that southerners could exhibit, one
that incorporates the best of the old and the best of the new.
58
·May each of your colleges or universities remain ample, well
endowed, and independent. And may each of you constantly keep in
mind that you and your fellow scholars playa critical role in building a
new civilization-here
in the South but also for the rest of the nation
and the world.
59
REFERENCES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverberg,
The Shadow
University (Free Press, 1998).
William Baumol and Sue Anne Batey Blackman, "How to Think
About Rising College Costs," Planning for Higher Education
23 (Summer 1995): 1-7.
Edward Ayres, The Promi s e of the New South (Oxford
University Press, 1992); C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New
South: 1877-1913 (Louisiana State University Press, 1951).
Neil McMillen (ed.), Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War
lIon the American South (University Press of Mississippi,
1997): Arthur Goldschmidt, "the Development of the U.S.
South," Scientific American 209 (September, 1963): 225-232;
Numan Bartley, The New South; 1945-1980 (Louisiana State
University Press, 1995).
John Whitehead, "Southern Universities: Are They Rising?"
History of Education Quarterly 26 (Winter 1986): 553-568.
Jennings Wagoner, "Higher Education and Transitions
in
Southern Culture," Journal of Thought 18 (1993): 113.
Quoted in Bartley, The New South, p. 445.
See, for examples: Nancy Diamond, "Catching Up: The Advance
of Emory University Since World War II," in Roger Geiger (ed.)
History of Higher Education Annual 19 (1999): 149-183;
George Keller, "The College That Transformed Itself: Elon,"
Planning for Higher Education 25 (Spring 1997): 1-12.
Bartley, The Ne\tv South, p. 500.
Thomas Dyer, "Higher Education in the South Since the Civil
War," in Walter Fraser (ed.), The Web of Southern Social
Relations:
WOlnen, Family, and Education (University of
Georgia Press, 1985), p. 136.
An example might be E. Merton Coulter's College Life in the
Old South (Macmillan, 1928), which shows how antebellum
southern colleges helped create the distinctive qualities of the
leadership class.
John Shelton Reed, Southerners: The Social Psychology of
Sectionalism (University of North Carolina Press, 1983), p.114.
James C. Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture (University of
Georgia Press, 1999).
Coulter, College Life, pp. 275-76.
60
Washington Update
by William E. Troutt
I am no Stan Ikenberry.
I know Stan Ikenberry, but I am no Stan
Ikenberry. I know Stan wishes he could be with you this evening. I am
very pleased to offer a few brief comments about how ACE views the
current climate for higher education in Washington.
Unlike Stan, I am a Southern though and a longtime resident of
Nashville, and I have no problem answering the questions, "What
happens when you playa country song backwards?"
The answer of
course is you get back your dog, your pick-up truck, and your wife.
In talking with Stan last week, I know if he could be here he would
offer the following thoughts - a couple of observations and a couple of
issues.
Observation 1. HiKher Education
Af:ain Maybe It Isn't.
Is On The Aeenda And Then
On the campaign trail we heard more about higher education than we
are hearing right now. Right now we are hearing K-12, K-12, K-12.
There was a good bit of talk on the campaign trail about higher education
including the prospects of a $5,100 Pell award for freshman.
Today the Pell Grant news is positive. The Bush budget includes an
additional billion dollars for Pell Grants, but much of that increase will
be needed to pay for last year's increase. This year's proposed Pell
Grant increase will be closer to 5% or about two hundred dollars. This
is far below the higher education community's goal of a six hundreddollar increase.
On a very positive note, the administration has dropped its proposal to
"frontload" the Pell Grant increase for freshmen. This is a tribute to
the concerns many of you have shared with the administration about
this proposal.
61
Observation 2. In Some Ways Times Appear To Be ChanKinK In
WashinKton And Then AKain Maybe They Are Not. We have in
Washington today a fragile spirit of bipartisan cooperation.
Some of
us were at the NAICU meeting with Senator Ted Kennedy on the eve
of his going to the White House to watch Thirteen Days with President
Bush. At that time, he was making all kinds of nice comments about
the good start of the new administration. Well, partisan passions about
different tax proposals will likely alter this unusual tone.
The tax cut debate obviously cuts both ways for higher education. A
small tax cut may mean we lose some items of importance to us such as
the charitable IRA rollover. A larger tax cut would of course mean less
discretionary spending.
Higher education is trying to avoid getting pinned down on these issues,
especially on an issue so sensitive and the phasing out of the estate tax.
Right now the budget battle is still in very general terms. There is a lot
of "feel good stuff' being discussed. Everything will really heat up
next month.
I would also like to share a few words about two emerging issues. Issues
that have far reaching impact potentially on our campuses.
Issue 1. Deregulation of Higher Education. Three years ago our Cost
Commission
report to Chairman
Buck McKeon called for the
deregulation of higher education as a way to lower institutional costs.
Congressman McKeon now says his higher education priority for this
year will be "to push back any unnecessary regulatory burdens on higher
education. "
In the next couple of weeks you will be receiving a letter from his
office asking for your identification of "regulatory burdens." We hope
everyone will take this request seriously. It could produce some very
positive results for all of us.
62
Issue 2. Public Concern Over Rising Tuition May Be Making A
Comeback. We are currently hearing some "low level rumblings" about
rising college tuition. This low level rumbling could escalate into a
major conversation if the next round of tuition increases are higher
than might be expected. A weakening economy, state cuts in higher
education spending, lags in endowment earnings, all are signals of
concern that tuition rate increases will be higher than what many people
would deem acceptable.
The NACUBO sponsored project on college costs also known as "The
TransparencyProject" may help us here. This project is moving along
nicely under the leadership of Dick Spies of Princeton. It could be a
very helpful part of the next round of conversations about college costs
and prices. So far this project is yielding some very positive results in
its efforts to develop a methodology where at least similar institutions
can use a common methodology to talk about costs. In all cases, costs
are significantly exceeding price, the spending is in the right places i.e.
on instruction and student support, and it shows very clearly how
mission matters.
We continue to face a number of big hurdles in the conversation about
college price and costs. One of the biggest is the lack of knowledge
about higher education economics.
Our approach to economics just
doesn't make common sense "to most people. For most people, price
equals cost plus profit, but in higher education price equals cost minus
subsidy.
We also have to overcome a big hurdle in helping people understand
what actually drives tuition increases. The National Commission on
The Cost of Higher Education was given a list of eleven potential cost
drivers ranging from financial aid to presidential salaries. We have a
lot of work to do in helping people to understand why our costs continue
to be higher than the CPI, to understand issues about subsidy sources,
endowment spending, and college wealth.
A common way of describing college costs can help. A better vocabulary
with a common distinction about "cost" verses "price" can help.
Certainly telling our own success stories about managing to lower costs
can only be positive as well.
63
I know Stan would close, as he always does, with a good work of
optimism. It is becoming increasingly apparent to the public how much
access to learning for life matters. It is a great time to be serving higher
education.
64
CONSTITUTION
AN.D IY.IAWS
PROC;EDURES FOR ADM.I~SSION OF
NEW MEMIE:R!:
PASTMEETlN~GS AND
OFFICERS· ROSTER
CURRENT MEMBERSHIP
65
CONSTITUTION OF THE
I.
Name - This organization shall be called the Southern University
Conference.
II.
Purpose - This organization is formed for the purpose of
consideration of matters pertaining to the upper di vision of college
work, graduate work, and to all common interests of its members.
III.
Membership and Voting A.
B.
C.
1
The membership
of this conference
includes only
institutions of acceptable educational standing and limited
to college of liberal arts and sciences as part of their
organization.
The initial membership of this conference consists of the
following institutions: Vanderbilt University, University
of North Carolina, University of the South, University of
Mississippi,
Washington and Lee University,
Duke
University, University
of Tennessee, University
of
Alabama, University of Texas, Randolph-Macon Women's
College, Centre College, Agnes Scott College, University
of Georgia, University of Richmond, University of
Chattanooga, Millsaps College, University of Florida, Rice
Institute, Florida State College for Women, University of
Kentucky, College of Charleston, University of South
Carolina, Emory University, Davidson College, Wofford
College, Mississippi State College for Women, Southern
Methodist University, Birmingham-Southern
College,
Texas Christian University, Alabama College.
Additional
institutions
may be invited to join the
conference at any annual meeting for which the conference
members have officially voted by majority to include this
item on the agenda, the vote to be recorded one year prior
to the induction of new members.'
Amended by action of the conference on April 5. 1963.
66
D.
2
1.
The president of the conference
shall appoint a
Committee
on Membership
composed
of four
members, appointed to four-year terms. At the
beginning, one member on the committee shall be
appointed for four years, one for three years, one for
two years, and one for one year.
2.
General criteria for membership,
processing and
evaluating all recommendations
and procedures and
policies involved in the election of members shall
be established
upon the recornmendarion
of the
Executive
Co mm itt e e and adoption
by the
conference. Criteria, policies, and procedures shall
be reviewed at five-year intervals.
3.
The Committee
on Membership
will make
recommendations
for membership to the Executive
Committee.
Upon approval
by the Executive
Committee, the proposed institution will be presented
to the conference as a whole for final consideration
and vote.
4.
Approval
of new membership
shall require a
favorable vote of ninety percent of the members
present at the executive
session of the annual
meeting.
The conference members shall vote by
written ballot. 2
5.
At any regular meeting on the recommendation
of
the Executive Committee, any member institution
may for cause be dropped from membership by a
three-fourths vote of the members present.
Each member institution may appoint as many delegates
as desired for the annual meetings, but shall have only
one vote.
At the 1968 annual meeting of the conference, it was voted that the approval of new members shall
require a two-thirds vote of the members present at the executive sessions of the annual meeting.
(See 1968 Proceedings, page. 11.)
67
IV.
Officers - The officers of the conference shall be a President, a Vice
President,
a Secretary and Treasurer, an Executive Committee
composed of three officers, above named, and four others elected by
the Conference.
The President and Vice President shall be elected
annually and shall hold office for one year or until their successors
shall have been elected. The secretary and treasurer shall be elected
for a term of three years. The four elective members of the Executive
Committee shall be elected for a term of four years, except that in the
beginning one shall be elected for one year, one for two years, one
for three years, and one for four years.'
v.
Duties of Officers - The duties of the officers shall be such as usually
pertain to the several offices: the presidents shall preside at the meetings
of the conference and act as chairman of the Executive Committee. The
secretary and treasurer shall publish the proceedings and keep in the bank
the funds of the conference, paying out the same under such rules as may
be provided in the by-laws or otherwise by the conference. The Executive
Committee shall prepare business for the conference, fix the time and
place of annual dues subject to the approval of the conference, call special
meetings, make necessary appropriations not otherwise provided for, and
in general act for the conference while it is not in session, but the acts of
the constitutions shall always be subject to the revision of the conference.
VI.
Meeting - The conference shall hold one annual meeting at such time
and place as may be determined by the Executive Committee. Fifteen
delegates representing fifteen members at any regular meeting shall
constitute a quorum for all purposes.
VII.
Power of the Conference - Decisions by the conference of questions not
pertaining to its organization shall always be considered advisory and not
mandatory,
VIII.
Amendments - The constitution and by-laws of the conference may be
altered or amended at any regular meeting at which quorum is present, by
a two- thirds vote of the members present. Notice of a proposed
amendment must be given at the regular meeting preceding the one at
which action is taken.
3
At the 1947 annual meeting of the conference, it was voted that the retiring president should serve
for one year as a member of the Executive Committee. (See 1947 Proceedings, page II.)
68
BY-LAWS
1.
It is expected that each member institution will be represented
at annual meetings by its chief executive officer. If it is
impossible for that official to attend, a dean or other
representative may represent the institution. An institution
that is not represented for three successive years automatically
forfeits its membership in the conference.'
2.
Members of the conference shall have the right to choose
other institutions for consideration as suitable members by
the Executive Committee.
3.
The Executive
Committee
shall have authority to fill any
vacancy that may occur between annual meetings in its own
body or in the list of officers.
4.
The rules contained in Roberts Rules of order shall govern
this conference in all cases in which they are applicable, and
which they are not inconsistent with tile by-laws or special
rules of order of the conference .
.. Adopted April 15. 1955. to replace fa filer By-Law No.1.
69
POLICIES AND PROCEDURES
FOR
'THE ADMISSION OF NEW MEMBERS5
1.
The present membership of the Southern University Conference may be permitted
to increase to a total of not more than 66. The limit thus set is to be reviewed
thereafter by the Committee on Membership during five-year intervals.
2.
In general, consideration of new members will be undertaken
but as provided in the constitution, a majority of the members
may vote to have members considered at the next meeting.
upon the secretary of the conference to remind the members
the appropriate time of the review procedure.
3.
The procedures for considering and processing new members will be as follows:
5
at five-year intervals,
at an annual meeting
It will be incumbent
of the conference at
a)
An institution must be proposed jointly by three member institutions,
at least one being from the state in which the proposed institution is
located. The proposed must be sponsored by a statement of the proposed
institution's qualifications.
The proposal is to be submitted to the
secretary for the conference by a date selected by him and announced
to the conference members.
b)
Following the consideration of the information submitted by the
sponsoring institutions and of other available data, the Membership
Committee will present its recommendations
to the Executi ve
Committee, the number of institutions recommended not to exceed the
limit previously set by the conference.
Adopted by the conference at its annual meeting held in Atlanta, Georgia, April 13, 1944.
Amended by action of the conference on April 10, 1951.
Amended by action of the conference on April 5. 1963.
70
MEETINGS
OF THE
April 6, 1935 - Atlanta-Biltmore Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia
Organizational Meeting
December 6, 1935 - Brown Hotel, Louisville, Kentucky
1 President - W.P. Few, Vice President - J.L. Newcomb;
2 Secretary-J .R. McCain
December 4, 1936 - Hotel John Marshall, Richmond, Virginia;
President - W.P. Few; Vice President - J.L. Newcomb;
Secretary-Treasurer - J.R. McCain
November 1-2, 1937 - Theology Building of Emory University
Emory University, Georgia
President - J .H. Kirkland; Vice President - H. W. Cox;
November 2-3, 1938 - Washington Duke Hotel, Durham,
North Carolina
President - J.L. Newcomb; Vice President - Alexander Guerry;
October 30-31, 1939 - Atlanta-Biltmore Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia
President - J.R. McCain; Vice President - A.A. Kent;
Secretary-Treasurer - Charles E. Diehl
October 21-22, 1940 - Hotel Peabody, Memphis, Tennessee
President - Francis P Gaines; Vice President - A. B. Butts;
October 13-14, 1941 - Tutwiler Hotel, Birmingham, Alabama
President - John J. Tigert; Vice President - E.O. Lovett;
Secretary- Treasurer- Charles E. Diehl
J
2
Temporary Officer.
Serving in place of Dr. Archie M. Palmer, resigned.
71
October 19-20, 1942 - (Because of war conditions, this annual meeting was omitted)
President - Rufus C. Harris; Vice President - Charles E. Diehl;
Secretary- Treasurer- Charles E. Diehl
October 18-19, 1943 - (Because of war conditions, this annual meeting was omitted)
President - Rufus C. Harris; Vice President - Charles E. Diehl;
April 12-13, 1944 - Atlanta-Biltmore Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia
President - Rufus C. Harris; Vice President - L.H. Hubbard;
Secretary-Treasurer ~Charles E. Diehl
April 11-12, 1945- (Because of war conditions, this annual meeting was omitted)
President - A.B. Butts; Vice President - L.H. Hubbard;
April 10-11, 1946 - Hotel Peabody, Memphis, Tennessee
President - A.B. Butts; Vice President - L.H. Hubbard;
Secretary -Treasurer - Charles E. Diehl
April 16-17, 1947 - The St. Charles, New Orleans, Louisiana
President - Alexander Guerry; Vice President - Raymond R. Paty;
April 14-15, 1948 - Atlanta-Biltmore Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia
President - Umphrey Lee; Vice President - Raymond R. Paty;
Secretary-Treasurer - E.M. Gwathmey
April 13-14, 1949 - Robert E. Lee Hotel, Lexington, Kentucky
President - John E. Pomfret; Vice President - Goodrich C. White;
April 11-12, 1950 - Tutwiler Hotel, Birmingham, Alabama
President - Goodrich C. White; Vice President-Martha
Lucas;
April 11-12, 1951- Edgewater Gulf Hotel, Edgewater Park, Mississippi
President - B. Harvie Branscomb; Vice President - Matt L. Ellis;
April 9-10, 1952 - Edgewater Gulf Hotel, Edgewater Park, Mississippi
President - Theodore H. Jack; Vice President - W.W. Pierson;
72
President - John D. Williams; Vice President - W. V. Houston;
April 14-15, 1955 - Daytona Plaza Hotel, Daytona Beach, Florida
President - George M. Modlin; Vice President - M.E. Sadley;
Secretary-Treasurer - E. M. Gwathmey
President - Troy H. Middleton; Vice President - John L. Plyer;
April 4-5, 1957 - Shamrock-Hilton Hotel, Houston, Texas
President - W.V. Houston; Vice President - Anne G. Pannell;
Secretary-Treasurer - David A. Lockmiller
April 17-18, 1958 - Williamsburg Lodge, Williamsburg, Virginia
President - Philip Davison; Vice President - J. Earl Moreland;
April 23-24, 1959 - The Tides Hotel, St. Petersburg, Florida
President - A. Hollis Edens; Vice President - Charles P. Hogarth;
April 21-22, 1960 - Hotel Fort Sumter, Charleston, South Carolina
President - John L. Plyer; Vice President - P Stewart Macauley;
Secretary-Treasurer - Howard M. Phillips, Sr.
President - Edward McCrady; Vice President - George H. Richter;
April 3-4, 1962 - The Wanderer ReS011Hotel, Jekyll Island, Georgia
President - Peyton N. Rhodes; Vice President - M.E. Sadler;
April 4-5, 1963 - Sheraton-Charles Hotel, New Orleans, Louisiana
President - Willis M. Tate; Vice President - Woodrow M. Stikler;
April 23-24, 1964 - Grove Park Inn, Asheville, N011h Carolina
President - George D. Grice; Vice President - O.C. Aderhold;
, Secretary-Treasurer - Howard M. Phillips, Sr.
73
April 22-23, 1965 - Velda Rose Tower & Motel, Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas
President - O.C. Aderhold; Vice President - Howard W. Tribble;
April 28-29, 1966 - The Broadwater Beach Hotel, Biloxi, Mississippi
President - Harold W. Tribble; Vice President - Wilson E. Elkins;
Secretary- Treasurer - Charles P. Hogarth
April 12-15, 1967 - Palm Beach Towers, Palm Beach, Florida
President - Frank A. Rose; Vice President - Marshall T. Steel;
Secretary-Treasurer - Charles P. Hogarth
April 3-6, 1968 - Williamsburg Lodge, Williamsburg, Virginia
President - David W. Mullins; Vice President - David Mullins;
May 1-2, 1969 - The Royal Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana
President - David W. Mullins; Vice President - Wallace Alston;
Secretary-Treasurer - Charles P. Hogarth
April 8-10, 1970 - The DeSoto Hilton, Savannah, Georgia
President - Wallace M. Alston; Vice President
Secretary -Treasurer - Charles P. Hogarth
- Wilson H. Elkins;
April 14-15, 1971 - The Palm Beach Towers, Palm Beach, Florida
President - Wilson H. Elkins; Vice President - Herbert E. Longnecker;
April 14-15, 1972 - The Sheraton of Biloxi, Biloxi, Mississippi
President - Herbert E. Longnecker; Vice President - Charles P Hogarth;
Secretary -Treasurer - Charles D. Hounshell
ApliI27-28, 1973 - The Mills Hyatt House, Charleston, South Carolina
President - Charles P. Hogarth; Vice President - Gordon W. Blackwell;
Secretary- Treasurer - Charles D. Hounshell
April 19-20, 1974 - The Arlington Hotel, Hot Springs, Arkansas
President - Gordon W. Blackwell; Vice President - Porter L. Fortune;
Secretary- Treasurer - Charles D. Hounshell
April 25-26, 1975 - The St. Anthony Hotel, San Antonio, Texas
President - Porter L. Fortune; Vice President - Thomas A. Spragens;
Secretary -Treasurer - Charles D. Hounshell
74
April 22-24, 1976 - The Williamsburg Inn & Lodge, Williamsburg, Virginia
President - Thomas A. Spragens; Vice President - David Mathews;
Secretary-Treasurer - Charles D. Hounshell
April 14-16, 1977 - The Chattanooga Choo-Choo Hilton Inn, Chattanooga,
Tennessee
President - Philip G. Hoffman; Vice President - Alexander Heard;
Secretary-Treasurer - Charles D. Hounshell
April 6-8, 1978 - The Kiawah Island Inn, Kiawah, South Carolina
President - Alexander Heard; Vice President - James S. Ferguson;
Secretary-Treasurer - Neal R. Berte
ApliI19-21, 1979 - The Greenbriar, White Sulpher Springs, West Virginia
President - F. David Mathews; Vice President - Samuel R. Spencer;
Secretary-Treasurer - Neal R. Berte
April 17-18, 1980 - The Savannah Inn & Country Club, Savannah, Georgia
President - Samuel R. Spencer, Jr.; Vice President - Charles E. Bishop;
Secretary -Treasurer - Neal R. Berte
April 26-28, 1981- The Breakers, Palm Beach, Florida
President - Charles E. Bishop; Vice President - Robert E.R. Huntley;
Secretary-Treasurer - Roy B. Shilling, Jr.
March 18-20, 1982 - The Grand Hotel, Point Clear, Alabama
President - Robert E.R. Huntley; Vice President - Edward M. Collins, Jr.;
April 7-9, 1983 - The Houstonian Hotel & Club, Houston, Texas
President - Edward M. Collins; Vice President - Joab M. Lesesne;
March 23-24, 1984 - The Hyatt on Hilton Head Island of Palmetto Dunes, Hilton
Head Island, South Carolina
President - Joab M. Lesesne; Vice President - Thomas A. Graves, Jr.;
, March 8-9, 1985 - The Cloister, Sea Island, Georgia
President -Thomas A. Graves; Vice President - Neal R. Berte;
75
March 14-15, 1986 - The Four Seasons Hotel, San Antonio, Texas
President - Neal R. Belie; Vice President - William E. Moran;
March 3-4, 1987- The Homestead, Hot Springs, Virginia
President - William E. Moran; Vice President - James T. Laney;
Secretary-Treasurer - Robert M. Ayers, Jr.
March 17-19,1988 - Windsor Court Hotel, New Orleans, Louisiana
President - James T. Laney; Vice President - Frederick W. Obear;
Secretary-Treasurer - Robert M. Ayers, Jr.
March 30-Aprill, 1989 - Sonesta Sanibel Harbour Resort, Fort Myers, Florida
President - Frederick Obear; Vice President - John D. Wilson;
Secretary-Treasurer - Han)' E. Smith
March 29-30, 1990 - Stouffer Resort Hotel, Orlando, Florida
President - John D. Wilson; Vice President - Shirley S. Chatel';
Secretary-Treasurer - Harry E. Smith
March 22-24, 1991- The Boca Raton Resort & Club, Boca Raton, Florida
President - Shirley S. Chater; Vice President - John E. Johns;
March 20-21, 1992 - The Omni Hotel at Charleston Pace, Charleston, South Carolina
President - John E. Johns; Vice President - Roy B. Shilling, Jr.;
March 26-27, 1993 - Stouffer Vinoy Resort, St. Petersburg, Florida
President - Roy B. Shilling; Vice President - John M. Palms;
Secretary-Treasurer - Han)' E. Smith
March 18-20, 1994 - Eldorado Hotel, Santa Fe, New Mexico
President - John M. Palms; Vice President - Ruth Schmidt;
March 31-April 2, 1995 - Kiawah Island Resort, Charleston, South Carolina
President - Clyda Rent; Vice President - Richard Monill;
Secretary-Treasurer - H. Douglas Lee
76
Aplil12-14, 1996 - The Ritz-Carlton, Naples, Florida
President - Richard Morrill; Vice President - E. Roger Sayers;
April 4-6, 1997 - The Ritz Carlton, Amelia Island, Florida
President - Peter H. Armacost; Vice President - Patricia A. Sullivan;
March 20-22, 1998 - Boca Raton Resort & Club, Boca Raton, Florida
President - PatriciaA. Sullivan; Vice President - James H. Daughdrill, Jr.;
Secretary-Treasurer - R. Kirby Godsey
March 19-21, 1999 - The Renaissance Vinoy Hotel & Resort, St. Petersburg, Florida
President - James G. Daughdrill, Jr.; Vice President - Michael R. Adams;
March 10-12,2000 - The Renaissance Orlando Resort, Orlando, Florida
President - Michael F. Adams; Vice President - David E. Shi;
March 9-11, 2001 - Hotel Inter-Continental Miami, Miami, Florida
President - David E. SIn; Vice President - Ann H. Die; Secretary-Treasurer,
Andrew A. Sorensen
77
Members of the Conference
Agnes Scott College (1935)*
Austin College (1975)
Baylor University (1955)
Berea College (1973)
Birmingham Southern College (1935)
Centenary College of Louisiana (1994)
Centre College (1935)
The Citadel (1985)
College of Charleston (1935)
College of William and Mary (1941)
~
Converse College (1937)
Davidson College (1935)
Eckerd College (1988)
Emory University (1935)
Furman University (1950)
Guilford College (1988)
Hendrix College (1936)
Mary Washington College (1965)
Mercer University (1959)
Millsaps College (1935)
Mississippi University for Women (1935)
Morehouse College (1968)
Randolph-Macon College (1990)
Rhodes College (1937)
Rice University (1935)
Rollins College (1988)
Southern Methodist University (1935)
Southwestern University (1981)
Stetson University (1958)
Texas Woman's University (1941)
Transylvania University (1979)
Trinity University (1969)
University of Alabama, The (1935)
University of Georgia (1935)
University of Kentucky (1935)
University of Louisiana at Lafayette (1961)
University of Louisville (1936)
:
University of Maryland College Park (1957)
University of Mississippi (1935)
University of Montevallo (1935)
University of North Carolina at Asheville (1989)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1935)
78
Decatur, GA
Sherman, TX
Waco, TX
Berea, KY
Birmingham, AL
Shreveport, LA .
Danville, KY
Charleston, SC
Charleston, SC
Williamsburg, VA
Spartanburg, SC
Davidson, NC
St. Petersburg, FL
Atlanta, GA
Greenville, SC
Greensboro, NC
Conway, AR
Fredericksburg, VA
Macon, GA
Jackson, MS
Columbus, MS
Atlanta, GA
Ashland, VA
Memphis, TN
Houston, TX
Winter Park, FL
Dallas, TX
Georgetown, TX
DeLand, FL
Denton, TX
Lexington, KY
San Antonio, TX
Tuscaloosa, AL
Athens, GA
Lexington, KY
Lafayette, LA
Louisville, KY
College Park, MD
University, MS
Montevallo, AL
Asheville, NC
Chapel Hill, NC
University of North Carolina at Greensboro (1950)
University of Richmond (1935)
University of South Carolina - Columbia (1960)
University of Southern Mississippi (1989)
University of the South (1935)
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (1935)
Vanderbilt University (1935)
Wake Forest University (1941)
Washington and Lee University (1935)
Wofford College (1935)
*DATE OF ADMISSION
79
Greensboro,
Richmond,
Columbia,
Hattiesburg,
Sewanee,
Chattanooga,
Nashville,
Winston-Salem,
Lexington,
Spartanburg,
NC
VA
SC
MS
TN
TN
TN
NC
VA
SC

Southern University Conference – 2001

Transcription

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