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Historians tell stories; social scientists compile statistics. They seem to use different languages and do completely different jobs.

So while there are many good statistical studies about the political changes in the American South in the last half-century, and a lot of good oral history projects about the social changes that occurred as Jim Crow segregation was swept aside, the two haven’t been put together very well, says Bill Chafe, Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History at Duke.

Chafe is now leading a project at Duke’s Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) that will attempt to fill a half-century-sized hole in the study of race in the South. “We’re trying to bring together stories with statistics,” he says.

“On the surface, it appears everything has changed” in the last 50 years, Chafe says. Schools are desegregated, black candidates routinely get elected and black access to health care has improved.

“What does it mean that 30 to 40 percent of blacks are in the middle class?” Chafe asks. “How much difference does it make that there has been at least substantial desegregation? What does it mean that there’s a new Latino lumpenproletariat taking on the old traditional black jobs?

“Nonetheless, you could argue that nothing has changed: the same elite powerful interests, mostly white, continue to control Southern life,” Chafe says.

Chafe, who earlier co-directed an oral history project about the Jim Crow South called “Behind the Veil” at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, knows this is a large task. It starts with locking a bunch of professors from diverse backgrounds in a room together.

Weekly meetings for a year may sound tedious, but Chafe waxes lyrical about the discussions that built the current project, to be called the Center for the Study of the South.

“We had these two-and-a-half-hour meetings where nobody stops talking because they’re so excited,” he says. “The whole purpose of this endeavor is to bring together people from different disciplines. And we’ve got a diversity of talent that is also reflected in a diversity of backgrounds.”

Atlanta, an integrated, thriving symbol of the new south.

Diverse indeed: the dozen faculty members in the SSRI seminar were about equally divided between men and women, black and white, younger and older faculty. The group included people like Sherman James, who’s been studying racial disparities in health care for decades, focusing on eastern North Carolina; Charles Clotfelter, who studies education and desegregation; and Paula McClain, interested in race and politics and the impact of the growing Latino population.

“We have this extraordinary degree of expertise about the American South,” Chafe says, “and we have taken on the project of understanding the changes and continuities.”

What few texts there are about race, politics and social structure in the American South are literally classics, 40 years old and more. “We realized there was just a huge vacuum that needed to be filled with new studies about the American South, with race as the critical hinge that will assess what has and has not changed,” Chafe says.

“So we are setting out to see what is different. We are thinking more and more ambitiously,” he says. “Given the talent we have in that seminar, and the resources we have to bring to this, we’re thinking that we can be a standard-setter for research.”

The center plans to combine research and narrative. On one hand, “we’re trying to get money for a brand new survey on race and politics”; on the other, “we’re also asking for money to get a whole lot of people to go out and do oral histories.”

If the Center for the Study of the South sounds a bit reminiscent of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it’s by design: “We don’t see ourselves in competition with them,” Chafe says. “They’re more a humanities center, a culture center, than a social science center.”

But he permits himself a grin. “We hope to be creating the research they’d like to have access to.”

Scott Huler is a freelance author in Raleigh, NC.

This story will also appear in the Fall 2008 issue of Gist from the Mill, the magazine of the Social Science Research Institute at Duke.