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Wayne Flynt loves a good story. Anyone who has known him for very long can testify to that. Maybe it’s the Baptist preacher in him. Maybe it’s the southerner in him. And maybe all southerners have a little bit of Baptist preacher in them. Having read too many lifeless histories, I’m convinced it’s not the historian in him. Whatever the reason, Wayne appreciates a good tale, be it fable, anecdote, parable, or just plain yarn. His appreciation for the story has served him well over a long career, whether in the classroom, on the social crusader’s trail, or holding a busy pen. In a scholarly path that has been recognized most often for its social history, Wayne’s dedication to telling stories—to keeping it personal, to keeping the humanity in history—has consistently infused his narratives with life and vitality. I feel honored to have played a role in one of Wayne’s stories for several years now. It’s the story of how he and I came to meet, of how a boy from the Ozarks found his way to Auburn, a place the boy only knew as Bo Jackson ’s university and a place that he had always thought was in Georgia, not Alabama—a popular misconception, I believe, outside the Southeast. Wayne loves this story. He’s told it each time he’s had the opportunity to introduce me as a speaker or to slide me into a conversation with old friends. And in that true southern storytelling tradition—in which doctoring a few of the particulars is not so much changing the story as it is making it better— Wayne tells a slightly different version each time. Here’s one version of the story. As a college junior in the spring of 1991, I had the good fortune to take a course on the civil rights movement from Elizabeth “Betsy” Jacoway, who was teaching on a one-year sabbatical replacement at Arkansas (now Lyon) 2 Revisiting Race Relations in an Upland South Community LaCrosse, Arkansas Brooks Blevins College, a little Presbyterian, liberal arts school in the foothills of the Ozarks. As a requirement for the course, I completed a research paper, a project in which Betsy had required her students to use both secondary and primary sources and one in which I had taken the interpretations of a few southern historians to task. One of these historians was J. Wayne Flynt, whose Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites happened to be on the shelves in our small library. Although I had a big time with the project, I thought little about the paper until late the following summer when I got a package in the mail from Betsy—still Dr. Jacoway to me at the time. Unknown to me, Betsy, undoubtedly amused by her student’s temerity in hunting large prey, had given a copy of my paper to Wayne over the summer. (This is the point at which Wayne’s story usually takes up.) The paper itself dealt with race relations in a single Ozark community, a community that I had used as a model for race relations in the highland South in general. The seemingly tranquil race relations found in this particular community had led me to take aim at Wayne, Numan V. Bartley, and whatever other historians I could ¤sh out of the slim stacks at the Arkansas College library who seemed to view southern whites as a monolithic bunch, at least when it came to attitudes toward blacks. Or perhaps my desire to ¤nd the antithesis to the common white-black southern story had led me to this particular community. I’ll come back to this later. Probably more amused than impressed, Wayne had read the little paper and on the title page had scrawled an encouraging note urging me to explore works on Appalachia for comparison, to continue working on the subject, and to consider applying to Auburn for graduate school. I did a better job of following Wayne’s last suggestion than his ¤rst two and, having been accepted to graduate school, made my ¤rst trip to see Auburn and to meet Wayne Flynt in the summer of 1992. He didn’t remember my name—it turns out that Wayne had met a few folks and read some things in the intervening year—but upon mention of the belligerent paper and Betsy Jacoway, the enthralling memories of the previous summer’s...

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