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The genesis of the Southern Growth Policies Board can be traced back to an April 1971 speech given by Terry Sanford, former North Carolina governor and then-President of Duke University. Speaking to the LQC Lamar Society, he called upon Southern leaders to come together to take charge of their destiny and plan for the future. “Some years ago I took a train to New York, waking up in the early dawn to peer out on the New Jersey countryside,” he told the gathering. “There I saw the familiar wastelands with stagnant streams colored by chemical wastes, and the backside of a city with dingy tenements, crowded against each other….The purpose of my train trip was to urge some corporate officers to put industry in North Carolina. My impulse was to turn around. If this, I thought, is industrialization, then why do we want to kill our land?” 1
“How do we look at the mistakes of the rest of the country and find ways to keep our cities clean and livable?” he said, going on to propose that the Southern states come together to plan for their future. “Why not have a Southern Regional Growth Board. The governors could put it together and the governors could make it work. A Southern Regional Growth Board could, acting through the states, draw interest and help from the national government, take care of our own regional opportunities, and set a pattern for the rest of the nation.”
Governor Sanford did more than just talk, following up on this idea with a staff group at Duke University and subsequently calling a working conference at Duke that August that brought together governor’s aides, foundation representatives, Lamar Society members and others to discuss the concept in more detail. The final touches on the plan were made at a formal planning conference at Duke in October 1971. At that meeting, the assembled governors, lieutenant governors, legislators and other Southern leaders finalized an agreement to create, via interstate compact, what they decided to call the Southern Growth Policies Board. Among those in attendance were Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia, Governor Arch Moore of West Virginia, Governor Robert Scott of North Carolina, Lieutenant Governor Robert Riley of Arkansas, and then Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi, William Winter.
In a speech to that organizing group, Governor Sanford described what he saw as the role of Southern Growth. “Ultimately it could be the clearinghouse and data bank to serve the informational needs of governors and legislators for facts, forecasts, ideas and common experience.” He went on to say that the organization “will serve to harness the intellectual resources of our region to the problems of our region. And through the Board, this knowledge will be politicized, and become part of the governmental world of action – action guided by the best of knowledge and the best of organized forethought.” 2
In November of 1971, the Board became a reality when nine governors jointly announced the issuance of executive orders adhering their states to the Southern Growth Policies Board Agreement. The initial meeting of the Southern Growth Policies Board was held in December, at which point bylaws were adopted and officers and executive committee members were selected, including Virginia Governor Linwood Holton as Chairman and Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter as Vice Chairman.
↔Commission on the Future of the South
1 Meeting of the LQC Lamar Society, Atlanta, Georgia, April 30, 1971.
2 Durham, North Carolina, October 3, 1971.
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