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My thesis today, however, is that the real New South has ^indeed arrived in our time, [illegible] All of America has changed markedly since the [illegible] 1940s^. [illegible] But I would suggest that the degree of deep and liberating change which has come to the South is without parallel in any other part of the nation. [illegible]

On the civil rights front, a second Reconstruction, one I am convinced is far more durable than the one which followed the Civil War, has come to the South. De jure racial segregation has fallen, and in its wake a great deal of informal segregation has ended. If there ever was [illegible] Court decisions, Presidents ^{of the US}--especially the Southerner Lyndon Johnson,--the young Freedom Riders and other civil rights activists, and most importantly black Southerners themselves deserve credit for the 20th Century Reconstruction. The places where they did it now sound like the honor roll of some great war--Montgomery and Albany and St. Augustine and Birmingham and Selma and the March on Washington.

Less herald^ed were the confrontations at hundreds of dusr^ty crossroads and voting registrars' offices across the South, as black people put their jobs and homes, even their lives, in the line. I do not think it is any exaggeration to say this was surely one of the most nobly conducted struggles for freedom in human history. And it was victorious.