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For the first decade since the Civil War, more people moved into the 16 states of the South and the District of Columbia from 1960 to 1970 than migrated to other parts of the country. The population drain in which 3.5 million residents fled the region between 1940 and 1950 was reversed in the last census. In a recent survey six of the ten states with the largest growth rate in new manufacturing plants were states of the Old Confederacy. The agrarian economy of King Cotton has been top pled by agribusiness. Sharecroppers have been replaced by machinery; new cash crops and livestock—peanuts, soy beans, poultry—have idled cotton gins and made rural entrepreneurs out of once hardscrabble farmers. Many of the rest simply moved off the land and into the cities of the North, West and, increasingly, of the South itself. There have been vast changes in where Southerners live, how they live, and the ways in which they must share that life with the region's blacks. The South's social and political institutions—and the convoluted psychology that was their mooring—are in the process being shaken into fresh alignments and priorities.
Nowhere can the promise—and the serious problems—of the emerging South be seen as readily as in Jimmy Carter's state of Georgia. The Southern boom has urbanized and industrialized Georgia more quickly and completely than the rest of the Deep South. Georgia leads the region's indexes of growth and change. However, at the same time, per capita income is only 80% of the national average, the dropout rate the nation's highest, government expenditures for education and social services among the lowest. A rich cast of politicians continues to vie for the state's allegiance.
For example, atavism has its champion in Lester ("Pick Handle") Maddox, now lieutenant governor, and progressivism its spokesmen in Atlanta's Jewish may or, Sam Massell, and black vice mayor, Maynard Jackson. Atlanta, the South's showcase, has built skyscrapers and an enlightened image alongside black slums that are well on the way to duplicating the misery and hopelessness of ghettos in Northern cities. Savannah rebuilds its historic colonial neighborhoods while the city fathers worry that air pollution is killing the Spanish moss. The ear of memory rings with the voices of two Georgians who articulated the state's opposites: Racist Demagogue Eugene Talmadge, who once said, "The Negro belongs to an inferior race," and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who promised, "We shall overcome."
A Tripartite State
Georgia's landscape, like its people, is varied. To the south lies the coastal plain. There Savannah, one of the South's busiest seaports, holds itself proud and aloof from the hinterlands.
Offshore are the pristine Golden Isles—Jekyll, St. Simon's and Sea Island, where rooms for $12 a day are still available in high season. Near by, the primordial stillness of the dark brown waters of the Okefenokee Swamp keeps the secrets of another eon. This is Georgia's black belt, where slaves worked cotton in the loamy soil and the plantation aristocracy held sway. Cotton is gone now, replaced by peanuts and the silent agriculture of Georgia pines oozing gum for turpentine.