From the perspective of today, The Strange Career of Jim Crow is an odd book. C. Vann Woodward’s slim volume was groundbreaking at the time, changing our understanding segregation’s origins on a fundamental level. Its main thesis was that Jim Crow as not inevitable, it was a choice. That insight recalls George Orwell’s famous dictum that “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” But white supremacist propaganda was then so ingrained that it took a great historian to unearth a truth that now seems obvious. Martin Luther King, jr. called the book “the historical Bible of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Beyond its rather quotidian thesis, Strange Career is an odd read because of its optimism. The most recently revised edition came out in the 1970’s, when it was still possible to believe the changes wrought by King and his comrades had changed the South for good. In fact, the South essentially stopped making progress around 1980. The region’s per capita income ceased its path toward convergence with the national average, education continued lagging, incarceration soared. In the Jim Crow era, the South had a lower Black incarceration rate than the North. Now, Louisiana is the most incarcerated society in the world.

Despair would seem to be in the offing based on the appalling regression in Southern relations we have seen since Jim Crow finally met its demise. The ugly core of the South, white supremacy, remains intact, if a bit tarnished. It seems that white majorities simply will not let go of the privilege forged in blood over nearly half a millennium, defending relentlessly against challenges that ranged from slave rebellions to King’s Second Reconstruction. Certainly, many Yankees are eager to write off the Old Confederacy as a national embarrassment and encourage it to get the hell out of the Union.

The reason I cannot accept this judgment is not based on history or progress, though there have been both, however halting and inadequate. It is instead due to a hidden element of the Southern character that I see every time I drive through rural North Carolina. Poverty is always on display; the state has among the largest concentrations of mobile homes in the country, right up there with Alabama and Arkansas, two cauldrons of racism. But the remarkable thing is that in the face of all this deprivation, life goes on, often without signs of distress. The people of the rural South–and the South is still a rural society–live their lives with a bit of resignation, a bit of perseverance, a bit of hope that has not died despite centuries of encounters with events that ought to have been fatal for it.

The South is one of the most resilient societies on Earth. And that owes precisely to its poverty and its relentless bigotry. Southern African Americans and in particular the Black church have shaped a culture of grace that has never vanished from the region despite all the South’s atrocities. I am not here to sentimentalize or to excuse. As the most morally formidable president since Abraham Lincoln, one Barack Obama, put it, Southern racism is “less coded,” more raw, than its genuinely egregious Northern counterpart. Yet somehow despite centuries of strife the white and Black and now Brown people have managed to share a region, to live lives that were never islands.

Hope is ultimately an expression of faith. It is not an ideology because it is not a system based on observation. Ultimately, hope is a choice to approach the future with the belief that the past is not determinative. The past haunts the South, but somehow this eldritch force has not prevented generations of people from going about their lives in the face of a tyrannical history. As Emily Dickinson when Jim Crow was being erected,

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

Dickinson lived her life in New England and surely did not have the South in mind when she wrote those verses. But they could be the credo of the South, if it chooses to embrace hope, not fear or hatred, as its defining creed.