Winter's Promise (1980)

With this issue, we close our eighth full year of publishing Southern Exposure. Most issues — unlike this one — have taken a topical focus, exploring one or another aspect of the broader American experience as it relates uniquely, or not so uniquely, to the South. Books in the Southern Exposure series now cover subjects ranging from military spending to architecture, religion to labor organizing, land use to sports. Hopefully, we've helped build a library that not only informs, but that also inspires our readers to deepen both their appreciation for the power of the human spirit and their commitment to challenge those institutional systems that would restrain it.

Each of us on the staff of Southern Exposure has been moved in one way or another by the waves of suffering and celebration that come into our office and are channeled onto these pages — the shakily handwritten letter with an urgent message from an older reader; the closeup faces of Florida's migrant workers: the partly bitter, partly confident testimony of an 80-year-old veteran of the fight for social justice; the joyful voices of J.P. Stevens workers explaining what it means to finally win a union contract; the stinging poetry of a self-taught prisoner: an expose of a chemical company poisoning an entire river valley. Fortunately, for our sanity and perhaps for our sensitivity to the ongoing struggles in our society, we on the staff are not confined to our small offices in Durham, North Carolina. The words and images inspire us, too, as an organization, to move beyond the role of documentor or reporter to take an active part in a variety of projects affecting the shape of the South's future.