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A few years ago Russell Jacoby lamented what he saw as the disappearance of the sort of old-fashioned intellectual “who write[s] with vigor and clarity . . . for the general reader.” In his book The Last Intellectuals, he argued that such folks have become “as scarce as low rents in New York or San Francisco,” replaced by “high-tech intellectuals, consultants and professors— anonymous souls, who may be competent, and more than competent, but who do not enrich public life.” One certainly sees his point, but one also sees (at least I do) that he wasn’t looking very hard. Jacoby should get out more. To places like Auburn, Alabama, home of a distinguished public intellectual who has certainly enriched public life in his home state. Jacoby’s argument, important and provocative as it is, suffers from what might be called Manhattan myopia. For him and for many other New Yorkers, intellectuals write for “little magazines,” not the Mobile Register and Alabama Heritage; they hold forth in Greenwich Village coffee houses or at the 92nd Street Y, not before the Dothan Rotary Club. These Yankees might well adapt Nathanael’s question about Nazareth (John 1:46): “Can any good thing come from Auburn?” To which the answer, of course, is “Sure— and one of them is Wayne Flynt.” Not that Flynt’s in®uence and reputation have been restricted to Alabama . He has spoken at innumerable American colleges and universities, addressed learned symposia in places like Cambridge and Prague and Vienna , and even taken his tales of the American South to audiences in India and the Far East. He has been honored by his peers (most recently with the presidency of the Southern Historical Association), and his achievements as a historian have been well assessed in the preceding introduction. 1 Can Any Good Thing Come from Auburn? John Shelton Reed But few academics of his distinction have been as willing, or able, to engage the citizens of their home place on important issues of the day. Not just in his scholarship but in his public life, Flynt has followed the advice of another great Alabamian and cast down his bucket where he is—with remarkable results. He has been tirelessly active, addressing the meetings and sitting on the boards of groups with names like the Campaign for Alabama, the Alabama Poverty Project, Voices for Alabama’s Children, the American Cancer Society’s Committee for the Socioeconomically Disadvantaged, and Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform. No doubt he is greatly in demand as a speaker partly because he has that “command of the vernacular” that Jacoby believes most American intellectuals have lost. Listen to him tell an interviewer about the pleasures of creek¤shing: “The formula is simple: Find a small Appalachian river or creek. Seine your own bait. Walk in the creek if possible. If not, use a canoe. Never¤sh a lake. Never ride in a boat with a motor.” Even someone who prefers high-tech bass ¤shing with electronic ¤sh-¤nders, or who doesn’t ¤sh at all, can savor those words. The same gift accounts for the fact that apparently every American newspaper you’ve ever heard of, and a good many you haven’t, have called him for comment on various issues. He usually obliges with something pithy and true. (As one newspaperman I know would put it, he “gives good quote.”) When Alabama repealed its antimiscegenation law, for instance, he told USA Today simply, “A lot of white folks want to turn the page.” But Flynt has a well-deserved reputation not just for plain speech but for hard truths. As an Auburn alumni newsletter put it, “If you want an afterdinner speaker who’ll lull you into sweet dreams of the Old South, don’t invite Auburn University Historian Wayne Flynt.” Flynt plainly loves his state and its citizens but often with the wry realism of Zora Neale Hurston, who was known for saying with exasperation, “My people, my people.” It speaks well for Alabama that the invitations to address civic clubs, public libraries, and community forums keep pouring in. More than invitations, in fact. Flynt’s career seems to contradict what Jesus had to say (Mark 6:4) about prophets’ being without honor in their own country: His c.v. is littered with prizes and awards from his fellow Alabamians—from the Alabama Library Association, the Alabama Historical Association, the University of Alabama Press, the Children’s Hospital of Alabama, the Alabama Arthritis Foundation...

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