William F. Winter and the New Mississippi: A Biography

13. Fighting for the New Mississippi

248 13 FIGHTING FOR THE NEW MISSISSIPPI Winter’s defeat in the U.S. Senate race in 1984 left him disheartened. He felt he had essentially wasted a year on a fruitless effort, one that he had never really totally embraced. Winter, however, quickly turned his attention to other matters. Harvard University’s Institute of Politics named him one of its six fellows for the spring 1985 semester. Winter taught a seminar entitled, “The South and the Nation,” which covered topics such as “New Versus Old Politics in the South,” “Southern Growth: Blessing or Bugaboo?” “New Emphasis on Education,” and “Southern Writers: Their Impact on the Region.” As part of the course, Winter brought some of the Boys of Spring to campus to serve as guest lecturers: Jesse White, Andy Mullins, Ray Mabus, and Bill Cole all made appearances. Elise Winter and John Wilson, executive director of the Southern Governors Association , also participated in specific sessions. Winter attended the various dinners and luncheons sponsored by the Institute and ventured out on his own to make presentations about the South or the Democratic Party to gatherings in Portland, Maine, and South Boston, to classrooms in Waltham and Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and to public forums at the John F. Kennedy Library and Boston University.1 In the months after the election, Winter also had a chance to serve as a guest commentator on Jackson TV station, WJTV. Walter Sadler, a news anchor at the station who had worked on media for Winter’s 1984 Senate campaign, asked Winter to offer brief comments two to three times a week on the station’s news show. Winter, of course, had experience as a journalist during his Ole Miss days, and even briefly during his World War Fighting for the New Mississippi 249 II tour, and he welcomed the opportunity to present for a Jackson television audience what he promised would be “non-profound observations on our state of affairs.” He also resolved to steer his remarks clear of partisan matters, since no Republicans would be hosting a similar segment. Winter recorded a number of the pieces before he left for Harvard in late January 1985 and taped additional installments throughout the year. The commentaries, which aired throughout 1985, covered Winter’s personal observations about Mississippi history, current affairs, and other miscellaneous topics, ranging from his dog Toby to Boston Red Sox pitcher and Mississippi native, “Oil Can” Boyd.2 Winter’s stint teaching at Harvard and serving as a commentator on WJTV suggested that, although his political career had come to an end, he had no plans to retire completely to private life. When Winter returned from Harvard, he rejoined his old law firm as a senior partner, but he also remained extremely active as a private citizen with the effort to help Mississippi move forward in a world no longer defined by Jim Crow and plantation agriculture.  Winter’s engagement with the broad policy questions concerning economic development and public education in Mississippi and the South resumed soon after the end of his political career. In 1985, Jesse White, at that time the executive director of the Southern Growth Policies Board (SGPB), introduced Winter to George Autry, who headed a North Carolina organization, the Manpower Development Corporation (MDC), founded in 1967 as an anti-poverty group. MDC had started out dealing primarily with workforce retraining, especially in rural areas where southern agriculture had declined. Autry asked Winter to chair a blue-ribbon panel examining the issue of rural economic development in the South. In May 1986, the group’s report, Shadows in the Sunbelt, revealed that the region had increasingly become “two Souths.” While southern cities such as Atlanta and Charlotte had experienced rapid growth, those changes “masked the growing difficulties of the rural South,” characterized by high rates of illiteracy and high-school drop-outs, as well as declining land values , farm assets, and per capita income. Drawing on an insight Winter had recognized while serving as governor, the report recommended that instead of just recruiting northern industry, southern states should focus Fighting for the New Mississippi 250 more on local initiatives that supported rural development and state-level measures to ease the crisis facing southern agriculturalists. The report emphasized education as a key solution to the ills of the rural South. For southern people to get jobs in the new economy...