The South is not without problems. There are continuing challenges of racial inequities, poverty, health, education, transportation and the environment. But there is an optimism in the South, an uncommon aptitude for teamwork and an economic engine that will permit these challenges to be faced, fought and conquered.

The South is now home to more than 92 million Americans, constituting 35 percent of the nation’s population — up from 31 percent when the National Emergency Council report was written. Like the South of 60 years ago, today’s South grows more rapidly than the nation as a whole. But unlike 60 years ago, when the reason for growth was the excess of births over deaths, today the South grows more rapidly because large numbers of people are moving to Southern states. Nearly one-half of the nation’s population growth is in the South.

One of the most striking differences between the South of today and the South of 60 years ago is the difference in the way Americans move from region to region. Then, there was a great exodus from the South. Today, people are moving to the South in record numbers. The Northeast and the Midwest now both have more people moving out than moving in. The West, like the South, gains more than it loses.

THE SOUTH

IS A PLACE

OF

REMARKABLE

PROGRESS

AND

MOMENTUM.

Urban and business success stories abound across the South:

• Atlanta is home to one of the nation’s busiest airports, which welcomed the world to the Centennial Olympic Games; Cable News Network, which reaches around the world 24 hours each day; and Coca-Cola, now the world’s most recognized trademark.
• Mission Control in Houston is the central nervous system of the nation’s space exploration, which gave rise to the name and exemplified the spirit that built America’s first covered stadium, the Astrodome.
• Commercial successes have been built around the Grand Ole Opry music industry in Nashville.
• Entrepreneurship and creativity transformed the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, the Riverwalk in San Antonio and the Riverfront in New Orleans.
• At the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, two growing cities are connected via one of America’s largest airports.
• Charlotte is one of America’s largest banking centers.
• Miami is the nation’s gateway to Central and South America.
• The Memphis Federal Express hub and the United Parcel Service hub in Louisville daily move nearly all of the nation’s parcels.
• The Research Triangle Park in North Carolina remains the nation’s premier example of the university-business research synergy that it pioneered four decades ago.
• Florida is the nation’s No. 1 vacation destination and America’s gateway to outer space.
• American retailing was transformed by Wal-Mart in the Arkansas Ozarks.
• Virginia’s railroad giants, Norfolk Southern and CSX, stretch throughout the South, the Midwest and now the Northeast.
• In the mountains of West Virginia, Software Valley stretches along I-79 and businesses are commercializing technologies.
• WorldCom headquarters is in Mississippi.
• Some of the world’s largest crude-oil refineries are in Texas and Louisiana.
• The Oklahoma plains are home to aerospace centers, the National Weather Service and Federal Aviation Administration training.
• The South has vibrant ports ringing its coastline — Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, Miami, Tampa, Mobile, New Orleans, Port of South Louisiana, Houston, Texas City and Corpus Christi.
• One of America’s most international stretches of highway, the I-85 international business corridor, extends through Spartanburg and Greenville, S.C.
• There are new world-class automobile-manufacturing facilities in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Because of the remarkable growth in the metropolitan centers of the South and the vitality of Southern businesses, there are more jobs and more productive adults. Today, like the nation, the South has three adults for every dependent under 18 years old.

The national and the Southern age distributions are nearly identical. And, of most relevance to education, schoolchildren make up about 17 percent of the population in both the South and the nation as a whole.

And, even more important, the amount of education typical of Southerners today approaches national levels. More than 79 percent of Southern adults have high school diplomas and more than 21 percent have college degrees. This compares much more favorably with the national rates of 82 percent and 24 percent than in the days of the National Emergency Council, when only 19 percent of Southerners had a high school education and only 4 percent had college degrees.

In the National Emergency Council days, Southerners faced more than their share of health problems, in part because they had much less than their share of physicians, nurses, hospitals and university medical centers. The number of physicians for every 100,000 people in the South may reach the national average early in the next century; it was only 33 percent of the national average in the late 1930s. In terms of the number of nurses, the South now exceeds 93 percent of the U.S. average.

Health-science research centers no longer have to be concerned with malaria in the South, but today the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and Tulane University in New Orleans work to stop the suffering that malaria still causes around the world. Other Southern university health-science centers have become world leaders in fighting disease.

The annual per-capita personal income in the South now stands at 92 percent of the U.S. average. More than half of the United States’ job growth in the 1990s has been in the South. Two of the top five manufacturing-growth states are in the South. These trends and other signs of economic vitality prompted The Economist to assert that the South is “a locomotive powering the American economy.”

Now, the South accounts for a representative share (more than 30 percent) of the nation’s gross domestic product. The assessed value of taxable property in the South now stands at 95 percent of the national and Northeastern averages, compared with only 34 percent 60 years ago. State and local government revenues per person now approach 90 percent of the national average.

Another sign of the economic progress is that today 28 percent of the nation’s bank deposits are in the South, compared with the 11 percent reported by the National Emergency Council.

However, prosperity has not penetrated to every corner of the South. For example, there is a band of more than 600 counties across the midsection of the South with 35 percent of the nation’s poor and 90 percent of the poor, rural African-Americans. Close to one-fifth of U.S. unemployment and more than half of all Southern unemployment is in these counties. In these counties and in the South’s inner cities and rural Appalachia, there are enduring concentrations of poverty, joblessness, inadequate housing, low educational attainment, poor health, high infant mortality and social welfare dependence.

The absence of attention to racial inequities in the report of the National Emergency Council is notable. And it is in such inequities that the continuing challenge for a dynamic, prosperous South can be seen most starkly. The fact that the high school graduation rates and college attendance and graduation rates of African-American and Hispanic youths in the South are too low remains a cause for concern.

Forty percent of all Americans who do not have a high school diploma are in the South — about twice as many as in any other region. And more than half of all Southerners without high school diplomas are concentrated in the South’s midsection, in its inner cities and in rural Appalachia. Frank Porter Graham, University of North Carolina president and chairman of the Southern advisory group to the National Emergency Council, long ago proclaimed, “In the South two great races have fundamentally a common destiny in building a nobler civilization, and, if we go up, we go up together.”

Unemployment, underemployment and poverty clearly remain, but it is equally clear that there are more dollars, resources and will in the South today to tackle these problems.

When it comes to the South’s contributions to the federal coffers, there has been a dramatic change. Sixty years ago the South contributed only 12 percent of federal tax revenues. Today the South contributes 30 percent of federal income taxes collected. In the 1930s, the states and local governments collected about half as much per person as was typical nationally. Today, state and local tax revenues per person in the South approach 90 percent of the national average.

When Franklin Roosevelt was president, half of the South’s population lived in substandard housing. The typical Southerner today is more likely to live in a newer house and is more likely to own that house than is typical of citizens nationwide.

What is possibly most remarkable about education today in the South is not just the tremendous progress in moving schools and colleges toward national measures of excellence but also that the SREB states are leaders of education reforms.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the South was a national leader in the development of two-year college systems to expand opportunities for education beyond high school. Today nearly half of the nation’s college students begin at two-year colleges. They take college transfer courses, receive job training and pursue lifelong learning for personal enrichment and job advancement or retraining.

Again in the 1980s, the South was a leader in emphasizing statewide goals and in developing coordinated statewide plans for colleges and universities, in strengthening the course requirements for graduation from high school and in reporting information on educational performance to the public school-by-school and college-by-college.

It was Southern states that began producing state-by-state results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to give state leaders the most current national average information on student achievement results that are comparable across states. Now, all SREB states and more than 40 states nationwide participate. The latest mathematics results showed that North Carolina and Texas had the largest score gains of any states.

Today the percentage of adults in the South who have attended college is higher than the percentage who completed high school when the National Emergency Council reported 60 years ago.

The percentage of adults in the South who have completed a four-year college degree is now higher than the percentage who spent any time at all in college in the 1930s. Unlike 60 years ago, when fewer Southern children attended school than was typical nationally, today Southern children 5 to 17 years old attend public school at rates above the national average.

Financial resources in the South to educate children and adults also are catching up with the nation. In the National Emergency Council days, the South had to educate 33 percent of the nation’s children with 17 percent of the nation’s school revenues. Today, spending for elementary and secondary school students in the South averages 82 percent of the national average. Public colleges’ and universities’ per-student spending is closer to the national average.

In contrast to the days when teacher salaries in the SREB states lagged far behind the national average and teachers performed their work in schools where the number of students per teacher was among the highest in the country, teacher salaries in the South today stand at 86 percent of the U.S. average. Now, the student-teacher ratio in the South is lower than the national average. Faculty salaries at public four-year colleges in the South stand at 93 percent of the national average.

Today, like 60 years ago, the Southern states spend a larger share of their tax dollars for education — about one percentage point more of tax dollars in Southern states goes for elementary-secondary education and for higher education than is the case nationwide. But these shares have been falling as competition for state tax dollars has intensified.

No longer can it be said that higher education in the South “lags far behind the rest of the nation.” Nationally, about 59 percent of high school graduates enter college within a year after completing high school. The college-going rate in three Southern states exceeds the U.S. average. Two other Southern states exceed 55 percent. And in nine of the 10 remaining Southern states the college-going rate exceeds 50 percent. Nearly half of the nation’s total increase in college enrollment was in the South over the last 10 years.

Focused, long-term commitment to educational improvement has been a Southern hallmark. Early SREB initiatives in interstate cooperation — such as the Regional Contract Program, the Academic Common Market and the Council on Collegiate Education for Nursing — are prime examples. Through these programs, opportunities for people to be educated in specialized subjects not readily available in every state were expanded and scarce resources preserved.

This tradition continues today through the SREB’s new Southern Regional Electronic Campus. Students can take courses at scores of Southern colleges and universities without leaving their hometowns by shopping for courses in this electronic marketplace. The Southern Regional Electronic Campus will have more than 1,000 courses, more than two dozen full degree programs at the associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s levels, and more than 150 participating colleges and universities.

The SREB High Schools That Work initiative over the last 10 years has become the nation’s largest and fastest-growing effort to combine challenging academic courses and modern vocational studies to raise the achievement of high school students.

More than 700 high school sites in 22 states actively participate in the High Schools That Work program.

While various “rankings” of individual colleges and universities have generated controversy, the number of Southern colleges and universities that consistently show up in these rankings does say something about how far the region has progressed. In the most recent U.S. News and World Report rankings of national universities, 24 percent of the top 117 were in Southern states, and 35 percent of the next 112 were Southern.

Compared with the days when there were inadequate medical schools in the South (20), today there are 45 medical schools in the Southern states that graduate more than 5,000 physicians a year — more than 29 percent of the nation’s medical school graduates.

And long gone are the days when all of the college endowments in the South added together did not equal those of Harvard and Yale combined. Today, the University of Texas System endowment exceeds that of Yale and is second only to Harvard. One-fourth of the 100 colleges and universities in the nation with the greatest endowments are in the South. A growing number of Southern universities are adding hundreds of millions of dollars to their endowments in successful fund-raising campaigns, and the University of Virginia is in the final phases of a $1 billion campaign.

As to the South’s meager facilities for research the National Emergency Council spoke of, today 29 of the top 100 universities in the nation receiving federal research and development funds are in the South. That is about $3.3 billion a year for research conducted at universities in the South, whose facilities are often world-class. Close to one-fourth of domestic patents today go to Southerners.

The South’s progress in research capacity was noted by former Florida University System Chancellor Charles Reed, who said that perhaps the single biggest accomplishment during his tenure in Florida was the National Science Foundation’s decision to move the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Florida under the direction of Florida State University and the University of Florida. As Chancellor Reed observed, no one in President Roosevelt’s day could have foreseen this kind of milestone for higher education in the South.

So, where are we in 1998? Americans are moving to the SREB states in record numbers. The amount of education typical of Southerners approaches national levels. University health-science centers in the SREB states have become national and world centers in fighting disease. More than half of America’s job growth in the 1990s has been in Southern states. The South is a new U.S. banking center. The dynamic metropolitan growth means that early in the next century half of all of the metropolitan areas with more than 250,000 people will be in the South. The SREB states are leaders of education reforms. Nearly half of the nation’s growth in college enrollment was at Southern colleges and universities in the last decade.

None of this is to say that the South is without problems and continuing challenges. But Southerners’ optimism, coupled with an uncommon aptitude for facing problems and working together to solve them, bode well for ongoing progress.