Tracy Thompson is a native of metro Atlanta and author of the new book, “The New Mind of the South”. The following is adapted from a Livingston Lecture she gave in March at the Atlanta History Center.

Wrenching change: Ours is the story of one huge wrenching social change after another. Race is the fundamental reason the South is of such enduring importance in American history. This is where the ideals of American democracy were first tested against the realities of different skin colors.

Immigration: The amount of change in the past 45 years is mind-blowing. The biggest change of course is immigration. Today, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee lead the nation in births to Hispanic mothers. The first generation of those babies are now teenagers, and in a year or so, they will begin to vote, young people who are politically active and quite aware of the fact the Republican Party in the South has not been very friendly to them. Today, 10 percent of Gwinnett County's population is Asian, 21 percent is Latino. There is a Hindu temple in Riverdale in Clayton County, and in Fayette County, there's a mosque down the street from the courthouse. So is this the end of the South as we once knew it? Well, of course it is. But that's not to be confused with the end of the South.

African-Americans: The other piece of the immigration picture is the black re-migration into the South. For most of the 20th Century, Chicago and New York were the two metropolitan areas with the biggest black populations. For the last few years, Atlanta has overtaken Chicago. The affluent young black professionals you see today working in these downtown high rises are the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of people who left Mississippi or Alabama or Georgia in 1935 or so with nearly nothing.

Religion: Religion in the South has become a lot more politicized, and politics in the South are starting to sound a whole lot more like religion. At a Baptist church in Clarksdale, Miss., I had expected to encounter familiar hymns and a familiar order of service. Instead, the sermon that day happened to be about the story of the wheat and the tares, and how real Christians need to make sure that they're not pulled into a consortium of cultural Christians who look like Christians, but aren't really. That's not an evangelical message of winning souls, which you would have heard 50 years ago. That's a fundamentalist message about maintaining one's purity. Religion used to be something that bound Southerners together. Today, it's divisive.

Racial reconciliation: It's a spontaneous grassroots kind of thing. When I left Georgia in 1989, people had just begun to talk about commemorating the 1946 lynching of two black couples at Moore's Ford in Walton County. Today, there are several kinds of movements happening all over the South. The chapters of the past that they're dealing with are incredibly painful, but it's vitally important that they be remembered, not as a way of picking at old wounds, but as a way of teaching us where we've come from and who we say we are.