The university was the home of the Southern Agrarians, the literary men who in 1930 published a manifesto for southern rural life, I’ll Take My Stand. The “Twelve Southerners,” the collective authors on the spine, were mainly literary men, novelists and poets, remembered still for their call to preserve humane rural values from corruption by creeping industrialism and materialism. But their version of those values was racially exclusive, and their mission was profoundly political.
