“Now it is time to talk about what we are called on to do in this latter day South. Now it is time for us to have an accounting of just where we are.”

It was just over thirty years ago in the spring of 1971 that former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford, then the president of Duke University, spoke to a meeting of the L. Q. C. Lamar Society in Atlanta. The South was just coming out from under the shadow of the long night of racial segregation that had consumed so much of its energy, stifled its idealism, and held it back on every front. The Lamar Society was composed of a group of mostly young southerners who amid the turmoil of the 1960s had organized to provide a more reasonable and responsible voice than that coming from most of the region’s politicians.