Lee, known through life as "Roony," was a Virginian of the eighteenth century... Tall, largely built, handsome, genial, with liberal Virginian openness towards all he liked, he had also the Virginian habit of command and took leadership as his natural habit. No one cared to contest it. None of the New Englanders wanted command. For a year, at least, Lee was the most popular and prominent young man in his class, but then seemed slowly to drop into the background... No one knew enough to know how ignorant he was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative complexity of a school. As an animal, the Southerner seemed to have every advantage, but even as an animal he steadily lost ground. Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament. He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting two; but in life one could get along very well without ideas, if one had only the social instinct.

Strike the average of all I have said, and you get as the basic Southerner... an exceedingly simple fellow—a backcountry pioneer farmer or the immediate descendant of such a farmer... In some respects, perhaps as simple a type as Western civilization has produced in modern times... The Southerner, however, was primarily a direct product of the soil, as the peasant of Europe is the direct product of the soil. His way of life was his, not—John Crowe Ransom to the contrary notwithstanding,—as one "considered and authorized," not because he himself or his ancestors or his class had deliberately chosen it as against something else, not even because it had been tested through centuries and found to be good, but because, given his origins, it was the most natural outcome of the conditions in which he found himself.

...That the Democrats of Alabama would be most deeply hurt, shocked and disillusioned should any attack upon racial segregation be adopted as a plank in the 1948 party platform... Such an action by the National leadership of the Democratic party could but force every Southerner into the undesired position of determining which is the greater loyalty, that to the South, or that to the party.

Or take this passage, about the individualism of the plantation world: "[It] was full of the chip-on-the-shoulder swagger and brag of a boy—one, in brief, of which the essence was the boast, voiced or not, on the part of every Southerner, that he would knock hell out of whoever dared to cross him." Plainly, Cash did not mean "every Southerner" to include Southern blacks and Southern women. For a woman to reveal that attitude would have been unladylike; for a black to display it could have been fatal.

I have trouble understanding Southerners. Some of them sound like they're chewing on a dick. And I really have nothing against them individually; one by one they can be quite charming. But when you take them as a whole, there's some really dangerous genetic material floating around down there.

During the turbulent times in the civil rights struggle, people from outside the South totally misunderstood the nature and intent of many Southerners.

In defending the racial status quo, Dixon had actually elevated himself to the role of defender of the white South itself and—in the minds of virtually all white southerners of the time—the "Southland". For African Americans were in no way considered "of the South" in the same way white southerners understood the proposition of their own nativity. Blacks were part of the South, to be sure, but one with alien roots, and only a legitimate part of the Southland when kept firmly "in their place" of subservience, quietude, and dutiful physical labor.

Southerner

Meaning

Noun

Antonyms

Related