The economic gaps are still there, as evidenced in the welfare rolls, in the number of families in which both husband and wife are working fulltime, the number of persons holding two jobs to make ends meet, and the popularity of discount malls as the modern versions of the old company stores. Spend some time watching the people standing in the lines at the hamburger drive-thrus and the discount stores. They may be fatter than their tenant farm and cotton mill ancestors, but look into their eyes. Now Praise Famous Men , with its Alabama tenant farmers of the 1930 s. Southern workers and housewives eyes today are the same eyes that stared at us in WPA photographs. The hollow resignation and tired surrender in human eyes are the same in the urban and industrial South that they were when this was a region of farms and small towns.
Redemption still has a long ways to go.
Quality of life in the South still has a high hill to climb.