South Loses Invaluable Academic

Sunday’s News and Observer contains an editorial written by Rob Christensen highlighting the important academic contributions and recent passing of Southern historian George Tindall.

Tindall was regarded, along with the late C. Vann Woodward (a UNC-CH graduate) and John Hope Franklin of Duke University, as part of the holy trinity of 20th-century Southern historians.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Tindall, Woodward and Franklin took Southern history out of the magnolia-scented Lost Cause legends of the Civil War and administered the smelling salts of reality.

Tindall’s most important academic legacy is his insistence on including all Southerners in Southern history. His contributions to Southern History fundamentally challenged and changed the way Southerners view their history and themselves.

All three insisted that Southern history had to be written in black and white," Luker said. "Prior to their generation, Southern history had been written as a history of white people. That produced such a badly skewed and romantic vision of the South that we can look back on it with amusement and sadness."

In his personal life, Tindall was ahead of his time. In the 1950s he made sure that dinners were held in hotels where white and black historians could eat together, and he sent his children to the first integrated day-care center in Chapel Hill.

Because of Tindall’s breadth of knowledge regarding the American South his passing marks not only the loss of a great Southern academic, but a cultural resource.

Tindall knew things about the South that escaped most others -- from the Mississippi Chinese to the mulatto communities in the Appalachian mountains.

"In that sense," Luker said, "he really had no peer and no replacement, unfortunately."