This article ran in the Tallahassee Democrat on August 3, 1997.

For those under thirty in the late 1960s, Peter Fonda's portrayal of a countercultural motorcycler in the film "Easy Rider" became a strongly defining moment in their hostile relationship to the South. By 1970 it seemed that "Easy Rider" had done more than Sherman to demolish the South. Like Neil Young's song "Southern Man," the film pointed countercultural babyboomers against the backward ethic of the old Cotton Belt.Yet today we have that same Peter Fonda playing a likeable and reflective Southerner as the main character in the film "Ulee's Gold." What has happened in the past thirty years to prompt such a complete turnabout?

The new image of the South is a result of two important demographic shifts. One affected blacks and the other influenced whites. The first was the Great Black Migration from the South to the North, from the 1930s to the 1960s. In 1940s still three-quarters of the black population lived in the rural South. As northern cities began to experience racial unrest, with the greater black population, the nation realized that the South had not been guilty, but not uniquely guilty. By the late 1960s it was clear that the North had no magic solution for the race problem, either.

By the 1990s conditions had changed even more. When I moved to Tallahassee from Boston at the beginning of the decade, I realized that I'd moved into a far better racial atmosphere. A black would be in danger if he or she walked into white Boston neighborhoods like Charlestown or the North End. So, trained by Boston to expect the worst in race relations, when I moved next to a golf course in Tallahassee I assumed that the blacks on the course were simply caddying for the whites. When I found they were playing together as friends, I realized I wasn't in Boston anymore.It's not that the South has no more hatred, but it's been tempered. And even in the times of the worst segregation in the South, whites and blacks might have hated each other--but at least they knew each other, and worked and lived near each other, which is not as true in the North.

The second demographic shift was the white northern migration to the Sunbelt, which occurred in the 1960s and after. Despite the Republicanization of the South beginning in the 1960s, and although the region remains largely conservative, its social attitudes slowly have become liberalized, on race and on tolerance for nonconformity. But "Easy Rider" wasn't a comment about southern racial attitudes anyway, which was curiously absent from the story. There were hispanics but no blacks in the film. "Easy Rider" was about the relationship of nonconformist, countercultural, mostly northern, white liberals to the very traditional and conformist South.

Many whites didn't feel comfortable in the South, and it wasn't only because of racial injustice. Of course, some of the "Easy Rider" story about backward white southerners who hated strangers was a myth anyway. When I hitchhiked through the South as a northerner (from Oregon) in 1972, I was nervous about the parochial southern resentments I'd seen in the film. Instead I found a family in Laurel, Mississippi who saw me wet in the rain and asked me to sleep on their living room floor.

And southerners had the same misconceptions about Oregonians: that they were loggers who would just as soon cut your hair with a chainsaw as shake your hand. So, while some of the characterizations about the South were right, some were based on the reputation of rural people no matter what region of the country they lived in.

And over the past thirty years the South has mellowed increasingly. Part of the reason is that, like other rural areas, it has become better connected into the national media. Now people in Apalachicola can watch the News Hour with Jim Lehrer or hook up to the Internet as easily as anyone in New York. Both for good and for bad, the South is becoming less distinctive and slowly is losing its culture. Further, the northern transplants have leavened the previous conformity of the South.

Consequently, the rural, antiurban, traditional small towns of the South with Spanish moss and a sense of history, have become increasingly attractive to some boomers as they've aged. Now the South is like the rest of the country, but not too much like it. It's connected into the national culture, but still maintains some of its distinctive ways.

As the case of Peter Fonda shows, the past three decades have made room for all of us along the Gulf. The South has become more tolerant of differences and, in turn, boomers increasingly have embraced the quiet rural lifestyle of the region. Boomers and southerners have met in the middle.

So if over in Wewahitchka you see an aging Captain America on a motorcycle, don't run him down. You might like each other. If he's not an aging northern hippie, he might be a local beekeeper. In fact he might be both.