Link Between Lost Colony and Georgia Wiregrass Pioneers?

- A watercolor by John White of Monacan Dance

Did some of the Lost Colony inhabitants wind up in SE Georgia? While researching another topic, came across an interesting website on Wiregrass Georgia Pioneers with list of surnames that may tie back to surviving families? A Google search also turned up a DNA project tied to the Lost Colony as well as an interesting article in the December issue of American history.

Just to recap from American History article:

On July 4,1587, long before Jamestown or Plymouth, several boatloads of English
folk set foot on dunes near what is today Manteo, N.C. The colonists soon began
running out of food and had to deal with native populations already antagonized by
early explorers. Within a few months of landing, they sent their governor, John
White, back to England for help. Upon his return in  1590, White found that all 90 men, 17 women and 11 children left behind had completely disappeared. Included in the missing was Virginia
Dare, John White's granddaughter, the first English child born in America.
Excerpt from Research Website:
"White finds the location of the fort where he left the colonists, but the village was removed. On a tree White found the letters CRO and further on, to the right of the entrance to the fort, he found the word CROATOAN carved. White had agreed with the colonists before he left that if they were to move, they should carve the location where they were going where he could find it. White says they were discussing moving “50 miles into the main”, although neither he nor anyone else tells us that location. This would adequately protect them from the Spanish who were seeking to destroy them. 

Furthermore, White made a secret pact with them that if they were distressed or in danger when they left, they were to carve a cross above the word. There were no crosses and furthermore, the village was not destroyed, but taken apart and moved, so there was no sign of a hurried departure or distress. The pinnace left for them was also gone, and only heavy useless items remained. White was overjoyed because he knew the colonists had moved to be among their friends the Croatoan, Manteo’s village. "


Missions to find them were launched as early as 1602, but hardly a trace has been
discovered in 400 years.

Surname  list complied by Robert Noles- Excerpt Below
Mr. Noles theory - "It's quite possible that some of the Lost Colony survivors were initially absorbed by one or more of the small friendly Indian tribes along the North Carolina coast. The remnants of some of these tribes were later absorbed by the Indians who were congregating in the Robeson Co., North Carolina area for protection from other unfriendly Indian tribes and to escape the encroachment of the European colonists in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Robeson County Indians later became known as the Lumbee Tribe. Then as the land in southeastern Georgia opened up in the late 1700s for settlement some of the Lumbee descendants and other North and South Carolina residents migrated to what we know today as Wiregrass Georgia. The invention of the Cotton Gin in 1793 is probably greatly responsible for the migration south out of the Carolinas as these pioneers sought to seek their fortune via land and growing cotton."

The DNA Projects:

The goal of this DNA project is to compile a data base of individuals whose names are closely related to the Lost Colony project AND those whose genealogy and family history makes them a good candidate to actually be connected to the colonists or the Native tribes in the geographic area of interest.  Clearly, if the colonists survived, they assimilated into one or more tribes.

Many people are interested in joining the project to compare their DNA to that of the colonists.  Plain and simple, we don’t have the DNA of the colonists yet, or if we do, we don’t yet have the documentation to prove it.

We have established three different projects, each with its own special focus, to help us in our quest to find the colonists. 

Three Lost Colony DNA projects:

1.  The Y-line DNA project, for males who have a colonist surname or a surname of interest and whose families come from either Eastern North Carolina or England or have Native heritage. www.familytreedna.com/public/lostcolonyydna.

2.  The mitochondrial DNA project, for males or females whose maternal line carries the Lost Colony surnames or surnames of interest and who are from Eastern North Carolina or have Native heritage.

3.  The Family Finder project who is for anyone who believes they are descended from the Lost Colonists.  This project was created specifically for those who have taken the Family Finder test.

Source:

Website: Lost Colony Research Group
Website: The Wiregrass Georgia Pioneer Surnames and Genealogies
Lost Colonies. (2011). American History, 46(5), 31.

Searching the Tri-States for Folk Art

EARLY on a gray winter Sunday morning, Jeanne Kronsnoble and Cathy Clayton, friends and owners of different art galleries for almost 20 years, set out from Tampa, Fla., and drove north in a minivan with the middle seat removed. The tourists were flowing south, but they were on a different mission. They carried blankets, sheets of plywood, bubble wrap and cardboard. Maps, dogeared address books, bottles of water, bags of chocolates. And sturdy clothes. They would clump through damp fields and dark spidery places and sit down to midday dinners of baked chicken, turnip greens, cornbread, peach cobbler and presweetened iced tea. There was also a checkbook, and an envelope of cash.

Read Full Story

DUDLEY CLENDINEN,New York Times;ART; A 2,000-Mile Forage for Folk Art., 4/ 4/2004, p40, 1p

Florida Panhandle Through the Eyes of a Tourist

The Florida Panhandle comprises about 12,000 square miles of diverse settings, from densely wooded state parks and oyster-rich river basins to small towns as neat as stage sets and dazzling Gulf Coast beaches with sand dunes as white as sculptured marble. It’s closer in culture to Georgia and Alabama than much of the Northern-influenced Florida peninsula, and has cool winters and a summer high season. Its visitors — just a small sliver of Florida tourists — tend to be the types who seek out off-the-radar regions.

Read the Full Story

Greenfield, B. (2008, March 7). On the Gulf Coast, the South Is Still the South. New York Times. p. 6

History of Fort Caroline

France’s first attempt to stake a permanent claim in North America was at La Caroline, a settlement near the mouth of the St. Johns River in Florida. France was going through a time of religious civil war between the Protestants, known as the Huguenots, and the Roman Catholics. Florida gave the Huguenots a place to settle where they could worship freely.

In 1562, Jean Ribault was sent by France to explore the New World, and on May 1 his ships entered the River of May, now known as the St. Johns River. His men erected a column near the river's mouth claiming Florida for France. In 1564, when the French civil war subsided, three vessels left France under the leadership of René de Laudonnière to settle in northeast Florida.

. A triangular fort was constructed near the river shore and small
thatch buildings were constructed to house the settlers. The area was named "la Caroline" in honor of France's 14 year-old king, Charles IX.  

French explorer Jean Ribault was impressed by the first native peoples he encountered in Florida. The Timucuans under Chief Saturiwa, who met the French at the mouth of the River of May in 1562, were one of a number of Timucua-speaking tribes who inhabited central and north Florida and southeastern Georgia As a result of their contact with the Europeans, thousands of Timucuans died of disease. 

The Timucuans helped their new neighbors adapt to conditions in the “new world”—sharing food and even helping them build a village and fort. The French, well aware of their minority status, initially made every effort to avoid alienating local tribes.  Mistrust turned to armed conflict, and the brief period of harmony between French and Indian came to an end. 

 Timucuan culture rapidly disintegrated. From a population possibly numbering tens of thousands at the time of contact, only an estimated 550 Timucuans were still alive in 1698. Today there are no known Native Americans who call themselves Timucuan.

Like the English pilgrims, most of the French settlers were spirited Protestants — Huguenots who saw the New World as a refuge and an opportunity to establish a model community. But unlike their English counterparts, the French pioneers also counted on direct royal patronage. The Huguenots had come to occupy key positions under the monarchy, and the main backer of the venture, Gaspard de Coligny, was a close adviser to the royal family, admiral of the French navy, and the undisputed Huguenot leader. He moved swiftly to resupply Fort Caroline the following year, dispatching seven ships, a thousand men, and provisions. Meanwhile, the situation at Fort Caroline had become dire as relations with the Indians had grown strained and the incipient French settlement had experienced mutinies. Just as the colonists were about to leave, the relief expedition finally arrived in the summer of 1565.

Hearing of this intrusion, Spain had dispatched Pedro Menéndez de Avilés with an armada under sweeping orders to "take the Florida coast." After the two fleets brushed briefly, Menéndez prudently retreated southward, where he broke ground for a new stronghold, St. Augustine, which has gone on to prosper and is today the oldest European-founded town in the continental United States.

Luck favored the Spanish. The French ships, which were roughly twice as numerous and much better supplied, ran into a hurricane, which blew some out to sea and forced others aground. Meanwhile Menéndez sent his men overland against Fort Caroline. At dawn on September 20, 1565, he and 500 men armed with arquebuses, pikes, and targets surprised the fort and overran it. Such men over 15 not killed at the outset were summarily executed. Only women, girls, and young boys were spared. Over the next few weeks Spanish soldiers mopped up the Florida coast, putting to death any French sailors who had managed to survive the storm and shipwreck.

Reséndez A. MASSACRE IN FLORIDA. American Heritage [serial online]. Winter2010 2010;59(4):25-26

Fort Caroline Background Information

www.nps.gov/timu/forteachers/upload/focabackgrndinfo.pdf

Fort Caroline - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Caroline

Linton Weeks Writes About Willie Morris Upon His Death

On the way to see Willie Morris in Oxford, Miss., one night in the mid-1980s we stopped at a small liquor store and bought a big old bottle of Valpolicella. Over dinner, we told Willie what we had in mind. We wanted to start a publication called Southern Magazine, a monthly exploration of the region's complexities.

Willie, who knew a lot about magazines and a lot more about the South, opened up his mind and his heart. He reached for the sack the bottle was in and enthusiastically began to sketch out ideas before our very eyes.

"Does the South still exist?" he asked in his soft, mellifluous, rhetorical way. "That's what your first issue should be about: Is there still a South?"

On the brown paper bag he jotted down names of writers we should enlist, good friends of his, folks who would help us wrestle with the notion. The list was a Who's Who of contemporary Southern literature.

Willie Morris knew the answer to his own question full well. Of course there is a South. When he died Monday in Jackson, Miss., at the age of 64, he took some of that South with him. But what he left behind is a region and a world made lovelier by his talents and largess.

"He had one of the biggest hearts," said Sid Graves, founder of the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Miss. Graves knew and admired Willie for years. Paraphrasing Tennessee Williams, he said that Willie's heart "was as big as a football."

"He had an extraordinarily keen mind for literature and ideas. I liked to hear him talk about football," recalled Chicago poet and professor Sterling Plumpp. "There was a kind of generosity in Willie Morris that I liked."

"I was always struck," said William Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and former head of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, "by his devotion to friends. His relationships with writers like William Styron, James Dickey, Ralph Ellison and Robert Penn Warren were deep and significant friendships. Many of these writers came to Oxford to honor Willie."

Willie honored Oxford by moving there in 1980 to become writer in residence at the University of Mississippi. Born in Jackson in 1934, Willie grew up in Yazoo City (pop. 7,000), a place he immortalized in several of his books, including "Yazoo" and "North Toward Home." He gloried in small-town life--baseball games, dogs, playing taps for military funerals. He went to the University of Texas on a baseball scholarship and was editor of the campus newspaper, then attended the other Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He married Celia Buchan from Houston. They had a son, David Rae, in England. Under Britain's health plan, Willie told his friends, his son's birth cost him 87 cents. The couple eventually divorced.

In Europe, Willie traveled with fellow Rhodes scholar Edwin Yoder. Yesterday, Yoder, who lives in Alexandria, recalled their many escapades, including the timeWillie, on a lark, dangled from the bridge at Avignon.

After England, Willie returned to Austin as editor of the Texas Observer.

Playwright Larry L. King met Willie at the Observer and they became lifelong buds. In fact, almost everyone who met Willie became a friend for life. "I never knew Willie to do anybody harm or to want to," King said yesterday. "He was a helpful fellow to writers. That's unusual in this business."

In 1963, Willie went to work for Harper's magazine; he was named editor in 1967 and resigned in 1971. He opened the magazine up to new writers and longer pieces, said David Halberstam, a contributor to the magazine (and whose profile there of McGeorge Bundy became the seed of "The Best and the Brightest").

Willie had a mischievous mind. When Halberstam's book was near the top of the bestseller list, he received a phone call one day from a man who said he had written a diet guide that was also very high on the list. "Perhaps we could collaborate on a book that would have stunning success," the man said to Halberstam, who realized about this time that the caller was Willie. "We could call it 'The Best and the Fattest.' "

"Willie had the lowest index of malice of anybody I ever met," Halberstam said. "That probably worked against him as he got up higher in the world of publishing."

He added: "He was not a great infighter. I don't think he was great at protecting his flank. There was part of him that was like a little boy."

In 1976, Willie spent some time here as writer in residence at the Washington Star.

Though he continued to write for a few years in Bridgehampton, N.Y., and loiter with the literati--James Jones, Truman Capote, Irwin Shaw--he longed to see cotton fields instead of potato fields. In 1980, he moved back to Mississippi for good. He chose Oxford, a college town with a palpable literary history. One of his best friends there was Dean Faulkner Wells, the niece of William Faulkner, another Oxford favorite son.

Yesterday morning Dean and her husband, Larry Wells, were sitting at their kitchen table, grieving over the loss of their longtime friend and turning to Willie's writing and other literature for solace. "Larry and I were looking for the words Willie loved the most," Dean said, fighting back tears. They read the poetry of Wallace Stevens and A.E. Housman.

"He really took care of the people he loved," she said.

Oxford, circa 1980, was an exciting swirl of literary activity. Ferris established the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Richard Howorth opened his legendary bookstore. Larry and Dean Wells owned Yoknapatawpha Press, which publishedWillie's books and reprinted some of Faulkner's.

"It was a great time," Larry Wells recalled. "Willie always said, 'I came home and it was not too late.' "

In Mississippi, Willie gave guidance to young writers in the classroom and out. And he wrote new books, including "The Courting of Marcus Dupree," about an outstanding football player; "My Dog Skip," which was made into a movie; "Terrains of the Heart," a collection of essays; and a number of art books including "Homecomings," a collaboration with Mississippi painter Bill Dunlap (who now lives in McLean).

Yesterday Dunlap was remembering all that Willie meant to him and other expatriate Southerners. "He took a bridge out of Mississippi," Dunlap said, "then he took that bridge and came back."

To celebrate the publication of "Homecomings," Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) threw a big bash on Capitol Hill for Willie and Dunlap in the late 1980s. The painter stood up and said a few words. Willie climbed on a table and announced that he was marrying the book's editor, JoAnne Prichard.

She was the one who answered his cry when he collapsed Monday afternoon at his writing table at their home in Jackson. He died in the evening of heart failure.

So, does the South still exist? True to his word, in the first issue of Southern Magazine, which appeared in October 1986, Willie Morris addressed head-on the question he raised along with a glass of red wine on that long, heady night in Oxford. In the answering, he also spoke of the way he chose to live his own life.

"One has to seek the answer on one's own terms, of course, but to do that I suggest one should spurn the boardrooms and the country clubs and the countless college seminars on the subject and spend a little time at the ball games and the funerals and the bus stations and the courthouses and the bargain-rate beauty parlors and the little churches and the roadhouses and the joints near closing hour. . . .

"Perhaps in the end it is the old devil-may-care instinct of the South that remains in the most abundance and will sustain the South in its uncertain future," he wrote. "It is gambling with the heart. It is a glass menagerie. It is something that won't let go."

Linton Weeks. "Willie Morris, Heart of the South." The Washington Post. The Washington Post Company. 1999.HighBeam Research. 27 Aug. 2011 <http://www.highbeam.com

"Old Atlanta Sears" Site Getting a Face Lift

**Used to shop at sears on this site  while a student at georgia tech, great to hear its being redeveloped!**

SQUARE FEET

Ambitious Plans for a Building Where Sears Served Atlanta

By ROBBIE BROWN

Published: August 16, 2011

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ATLANTA — As large as 20 Wal-Mart stores, the cavernous former Sears building now known as City Hall East towers above a motley assortment of restaurants, underground dance halls and a strip club a few miles northeast of downtown. The building, which at 2.1 million square feet is the largest brick structure in the South, according to its owners, has been mostly vacant since Sears left in 1989.

Enlarge This Image

Russell Kaye for The New York Times

According to its owners, City Hall East, once a Sears center, is the largest brick structure in the South.

Related

• Square Feet: A Suburban Town Sees Housing Where Retail Rules(August 17, 2011)

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The New York Times

But now there is a plan to salvage the space. A prominent Atlanta-based developer, Jamestown Properties, which owns Chelsea Market in Manhattan, bought the building from the city last month for $27 million. It expects to spend $180 million to convert it to a mixed-use cluster of restaurants, apartments, office space and perhaps even a rooftop amusement park, all renamed Ponce City Market, by early 2014.

“That’s a big hunk of building, and it’s been dead space for so long,” said David F. Haddow, a consultant and architecture professor at Georgia Tech. “But it’s not going to be easy.”

Others have tried before. The city bought the building for $12 million in 1990 — “the deal of the century,” Maynard Jackson, the mayor at the time, said — but ended up using only 10 percent of the space, mostly for police offices and storage. Then, in 2006, a well-connected former state lawmaker introduced a plan to build apartments there, but that idea fell victim to the economy.

The real estate market in Atlanta is still sluggish. But supporters say the project has a better chance than most. City Hall East is at the junction of four fashionable neighborhoods: Midtown, Virginia-Highlands, the Old Fourth Ward and Inman Park. In a city known for glittery newness, the 1926 building is raw, historic and authentic.

So the conventional wisdom among civic leaders is: right building, right place, right developer. But is it the right time?

“There are clearly challenges,” said David Bennett, a senior policy adviser to Mayor Kasim Reed who helped broker the deal. “There is a 20 percent vacancy rate in Atlanta in the office market, the condo market is in disarray and even the commercial market is down quite a bit.”

The city is so invested in the outcome that Mayor Reed spoke at the purchase ceremony, predicting that a successful development could have a $1 billion economic impact. A kickoff celebration in October will feature a concert by the Indigo Girls and catering by a who’s who of Atlanta chefs.

“We see this as being transformational for that area of Atlanta,” said Ernestine Garey, the executive vice president and chief operating officer for the Atlanta Development Authority. “It is a huge, huge opportunity.”

Early blueprints make Ponce City Market look not unlike Chelsea Market, the renovated biscuit factory that leases space to the Food Network and other technology and media companies. It will contain high-ceilinged office space, a range of restaurants, a food market, apartments, exhibition spaces, a skywalk and perhaps even an amusement park, Jamestown says.

The plan calls for reducing the building’s square footage by nearly half, to 1.2 million square feet, constructing a parking garage with at least 2,000 spaces inside the structure and demolishing many internal walls and ceilings. But Jamestown says it will preserve the exterior and as much equipment as possible from the original Sears department store and distribution center. A giant electrical panel will become the backdrop for a bar, and a train trestle will be repurposed as a pedestrian walkway.

“We think the history is really central to the culture we’re trying to create,” said Michael Phillips, a managing director of Jamestown. “We’re trying to keep the spirit of this place alive and to keep it true to its Southern roots.”

In its heyday, Sears shipped to customers across the Southeast. Older Atlantans remember picking up furniture or clothes there. “That’s where everybody shopped,” Trudie Wade, an Atlanta resident who worked at the Sears in the 1970s, says in a video that Jamestown produced about the building’s history. “It was huge. I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s such a huge store that we’re going to get lost in here.’ ”

Other cities have refurbished Sears stores and distribution centers. In Seattle, a former Sears is now the headquarters of Starbucks. In Dallas, one has 400 apartments and a nightclub. In Boston, one has an REI, a Best Buy and a movie theater.

But Atlanta’s Sears center has its own difficulties because it was vacant so long. The city spent months removing and auctioning the office equipment that had piled up inside over the years, raising more than $100,000.

Architects are still figuring out how to avoid damaging a sewage system from the early 1900s that runs directly through the building’s lower floors. Although it retains its elegant maple flooring and tall glass windows, parts of the building have fallen into disrepair.

“The office spaces quite literally looked like terrorists had run in the front door and people had fled out the back door in a panic,” Mr. Bennett said. But Jamestown says it has faced obstacles with historic buildings elsewhere: Chelsea Market; the former Port of New York Authority at 111 Eighth Avenue, now owned by Google; and Warehouse Row in Chattanooga all required substantial overhauls.

For the 64 years that Sears owned City Hall East, the building was treated “like a Rolls-Royce,” said Jim Irwin, a vice president at Green Street, a subsidiary and development arm of Jamestown.

Tenants are already signing up. Anne Quatrano, an Atlanta chef and restaurant owner who has worked with Jamestown before, said she planned to open a po-boy shop at Ponce City Market.

“It’s a little scary,” Ms. Quatrano said of the building’s uncertain prospects. But if you like the building, the developer and the history of the neighborhood, she said, then you have to trust that customers will come.

ROBBIE BROWN. "SQUARE FEET; In Atlanta, Big Plans for a Big Former Sears Center." The New York Times. 2011.HighBeam Research. 21 Aug. 2011 <http://www.highbeam.com

Pride of Southern Heritage Crosses Racial Lines

Blacks have a complicated love affair with the South. Their ancestors were enslaved in the region for generations, then Jim Crow laws pushed them to the back of the bus. From inner-city slums to old plantation counties, being black too often still means a second-class existence.

Yet surveys show blacks who live in the South are more likely than any other racial or ethnic group _ even whites _ to identify themselves as Southerners. It's a label millions claim with pride and affection, yet uneasiness.

For many black people, feelings for the South come back to family, summer cookouts, stories told on the porch, graciousness, gospel and Atlanta hip-hop. Their emotional ties are no less strong, even as they see a place that has yet to completely live down its past.

"As an African-American Southerner, I enjoy our culture that includes our famousSouthern charm and hospitality," said Stephen Wicks of Savannah, Ga., co-owner of BlackBusinessList.com, a Web-based company that links minority businesses.

"On the other hand, it's very hard to walk the streets and see constant reminders of slavery and white supremacy," he said. "That Confederate statue may simply be a piece of history to my white brother or sister, but to me it represents a very dark period in Americanhistory."

Bryan Stevenson, a Montgomery attorney who specializes in representing death-row inmates, has similar mixed feelings churning within him. A Delaware native educated at Harvard University, Stevenson has lived in Alabama since 1989 handling capital cases.

"I have a lot of happy and pleasant thoughts about living in the South," said Stevenson. "However, I do think that being black means you feel at risk. You frequently feel subordinate because of a lack of power."

That impotence is economic in many ways.

According to Census statistics analyzed by the Center for Demographic Research at Auburn University Montgomery, 27.1 percent of the South's 12 million black residents lived below the federal poverty level in 1999, compared to 23.7 percent of blacks in the rest of the United States. Researchers say at least some of the disparity is linked to higher overall poverty rates in the South, affecting whites as well as blacks.

Southern blacks are also less likely than other U.S. blacks to graduate from high school or college, the analysis showed, and almost half _ 48 percent _ lived in a household with an income of less than $25,000.

On their face, the numbers suggest a people who wouldn't want any part of being called a Southerner. Yet a series of surveys found just the opposite.

Twice-yearly polls from 1991 through 2001 that were analyzed by the University of North Carolina found 78 percent of blacks in the region claimed the label "Southerner," compared to 75 percent of whites. The results punched a hole in the long-held assumption that only whites are proud to be from the South.

"Generally speaking, blacks are about as positive about the South as white folks," said Larry J. Griffin, who teaches sociology and history at North Carolina.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, who along with Martin Luther King Jr. founded the SouthernChristian Leadership Conference, doesn't see any irony. He said it's actually easier for blacks to identify with the region because they don't carry the taint of its history.

"Blacks don't have that sense of guilt," the 84-year-old Alabama native said. "I mean, we never perpetrated any evil acts against people on the basis of race. So I guess we just don't have to carry that burden."

In a way, Lowery said, blacks, more than any other group, have earned the right to call themselves Southerners.

"The changes that have taken place in the South came at the initiative and the insistence of Southern blacks. ... It was Southern blacks who led the way."

A recent study by The Brookings Institution found that the South has had a net in-migration of more than 566,000 blacks since 1995, while the other three regions all had net losses, reversing a decades long trend of Southern black flight. The same study found that college-educated blacks led this new charge back to the South.

"Whites who are moving there are doing it for the economy, the warm weather, the amenities _ they're not moving there to eat grits and become Southerners," said demographer William H. Frey, the study's author. "For blacks, the economy's important for them too. But they see it as coming home. There's a strong cultural bond."

Indeed, some blacks talk about the South in a way that sounds a lot like the stereotypical white Southerner.

David Jansson, an assistant professor in geography at Vassar College, has written extensively on the complexities of Southern identity. In a study comparing the attitudes of blacks in Lynchburg, Va., with those of members of the pro-secession League of the South, he found striking similarities _ affinity for Confederate symbols aside.

"Being Southern meant valuing family, community, a slow pace of life, rural landscapes, and so on," he said.

"Values are stressed here; family, community, honor," said Bianca Matlock, who is from Arkansas and attends historically black Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn.

"Northerners are not used to the gesture of Southern hospitality," she said. "The female values of the `Southern Belle' representing grace and integrity are only found in the South."

As much as she likes the South, Matlock still comes back to Confederate symbols that, to her, are reminders of pain and suffering. She just doesn't understand whites who see them as benign symbols of "The Lost Cause."

"In my nearly white neighborhood, I see the Confederate flag. In fact, my neighbors explained to me that it's a sign of heritage just as the Black Panther sign is to some African-Americans and not of racial implications," she said. "Yeah, right."

Charles Evers, 82, is part of a generation of blacks who endured the worst of the South before desegregation. His brother, former NAACP leader Medgar Evers, was murdered by a white racist in Mississippi in 1963.

Still, he thinks of the South as a place of unending opportunity for blacks, whites and everyone in between.

"I've traveled all over the world, and I'll tell you: There is no place as honest as the South about its racial feelings," he said. "I think it can be the most wonderful place in the world if we can just keep making the progress we have."

_JAY REEVES, Associated Press Writer. "Many Blacks Take Pride in Southern Roots."AP Online. 2005. HighBeam Research. 20 Aug. 2011 <http://www.highbeam.com__