"Wallace gets the people to weaving with him, and tells them, 'If you don't know what I'm talkin' about, ask the cab driver or the policeman... he'll tell you.' And he will. He'll be glad to use all the old words."

Despite the threat of a possible Wallace sweep in the deep South this fall, McGill displays a degree of optmism and faith in the eventual efficacy of the political process that has become increasingly rare in discussions of the racial quagmire in the North.

"I'm delighted to see the rise of this so-called Black Power," McGill claims. "It's a very healthy thing for the whole electorate."

McGill is confident that the coalition of black voters and moderate middle class whites, which has served for 15 years to keep Atlanta's mayor's office out of the hands of the rednecks, will survive and eventually broaden its base into the countryside. "The pre-1962 and 1964 molds are already broken," he wrote recently. "In the cities, where most of the population is, the Negro voter is aggressive, organized and active."

Whether McGill's New South will somehow escape the miasma of the Northern ghettos, or whether the tentative displays of good faith in Atlanta will harden into cynicism as bigotry yields to black economic stagnaton, remains to be seen. For now, McGill is still testy and hopeful:

"I'm not one of these people who say you've got to accept the world as it is. I don't. I object to the world as it is. But I do think you've got to begin with the world as it is. And that's a very different sort of a thing."