"but I believe most people can see that the south in many area's and ways still suffers to this day." I have to disagree with that broad statement. But I do agree that a lot of people still perceive the South a backward state full of hicks. This is mostly due to the way movies still portray the South in my opinion.
Most of the suffering is the poor black and poor white people who never got a technical education or even a HS education. Like any major city we have areas of Atlanta that we consider the Ghetto much like south Chicago, areas in Baltimore, Oakland, CA, NJ, PA etc. That is just a normal fact of life of many big American cities.
If you are even half-way ambitious and willing to work almost anyone can find a living wage in Atlanta and in rural areas of Georgia. The recent past 5 years of inflation has hurt the elderly and young the worst in Atlanta. Housing prices are through the roof and many of the Z generation will never own a home in Atlanta. That is why the building of apartments in Atlanta are growing like mushrooms at every 5-10 acre of undeveloped land.
I was born in Ohio, and grew up in the deep south. I was a Yankee in the eyes of most of my peers in school. It was mostly good natured teasing except for a few guys from families who seem to have never gotten over the Civil War loss of the confederacy.
The south never really had an recovery with the destruction of the plantation system due to the freeing of the slaves. However most of the south was dirt poor during the plantation system. Only a relative few of the families were rich plantation owners and most of the others were poor farmers farming small plots or sharecroppers who were also poor.
The industrial revolution passed the south and the manufacturing centers were in the Northeast and IL and OH.
But in the 60's and 70' and till this day, what little manufacturing left in the US migrated to the South. Atlanta is the regional capital of the south and has never stopped growing since the 1950's. Has the busiest airport in the world which used to be Chicago. We have a large influx of educated black families moving to Atlanta because of the opportunities here. We now have a very large movie production business here in Georgia that rivals Hollywood.
State economies ranking: GA #11, TN #12, NC #14, NY #45, OH #37, MI #36, CA #29 so parts of the south are doing quite well these days. This is for year 2023. So you can see we are doing quite well in the South these days and not just in Atlanta. Yes there are several southern states that are not doing as well as GA, TN, NC and I am not sure why that is other than the fact they don't have Atlanta in their state.
One thing that gave GA a big boost since 1945 was Senator Richard Russell and Senator Nunn who were very powerful and long tenured politicians. And Senator Russell saw to it that the South and GA in particular got huge military bases located in Georgia and other southern states. Back in the 40-60's the voters tended to keep their politicians at the national level in office for 20 years or more and the congress and senate seniority system put them in very powerful committee chairmanships.
This post is just to bring a different perspective to a previous post by Treasureguy56. I think his statement I quoted is mainly about how people from other states think of the south even today. And from that standpoint it was an accurate statement.
