Dirty Boots: The Loss of Good Service

In the final paragraph of The New South, 1945 – 1980: The Story of the South’s Modernization, historian Numan V. Bartley wrote an epitaph for the well-intentioned post-Civil Rights Sunbelt South of the 1970s. The book was published in 1995, so Bartley could remark with the benefit of hindsight that the new service economy had resulted in mostly low-wage jobs that were picked up by women and blacks, while “corporate and professional people prospered.” What Bartley described at the end of his book was the South of my childhood, an… Read more Dirty Boots: The Loss of Good Service →