Published on: 2003-09-20

Reed says seeds of South sown across U.S.

By Alice Thrasher
Staff writer

Sociologist John Shelton Reed is a recognized expert on things Southern.

He has written books about the South and has lectured about the region around the country and abroad.
Reed, a Tennessee native and a retired sociology professor from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has lived in the South for most of his life.

On Friday, he shared his scholarly ideas of "What is the South?" with students at Fayetteville Technical Community College. He will present the same lecture during the Southern Writers Symposium today at Methodist College. The deadline to register has passed.

Reed, who is 61, said the region has undergone many changes since the Deep South was the Land of Cotton. At one time in its history, people voted largely for Democrats for president, and the economy lagged further behind the rest of the country than it does today.

He said the South has been split into the Southeast and the Southwest and is divided by the Mississippi River.

He said, for example, that Southern Living magazine has not been able to gain a hold in the magazine market in Texas. Texans, he said, prefer to read about themselves.

Southern culture

What has emerged in more recent years is the "cultural South," Reed said.

"The cultural South is a much more vital and vibrant South, and I am quite confident that it will be around for a long time," he said.

Reed said surveys of 1,200 households conducted in recent years by UNC-Chapel Hill show that many people consider themselves Southerners, even if they do not live in one of the original 11 Confederate states.

He said the majority of people interviewed in Kentucky and Oklahoma, two states that were not part of the Confederacy during the Civil War, say they consider themselves Southerners.

"Fifty-one percent of the people in Florida do tell you that they are Southerners, but not in south Florida," Reed said.

As people from the South move to other regions of the country, they take some of their tastes, speech and preferences with them.

"With so many non-Southern young people saying y'all, it could become an Americanism in 15 years," Reed said.

Reed has written or edited more than a dozen books, including "1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South," written with his wife, Dale Volberg Reed.

He is a contributing writer for the Oxford American and a founding co-editor of the quarterly Southern Cultures.

Staff writer Alice Thrasher can be reached at thrashera@fayettevillenc.com or 486-3569.