Finally, Virginia, stretching four hundred miles from her coal country to her beaches; tobacco and peanuts; the gem that is Williamsburg, the plantation country, the somnolent Northern Neck, Mr. Jefferson’s University, the hunt country, the changelessly changing capital city where I write. This land of ours is many-rivered, and the rivers have lovely names: the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee, Pee Dee, Yadkin, Tombigbee, Brazoo, Mobile, the York, the James, the Mattaponi. Our mountains are mostly old, worn down, the edges rubbed off: the Blue Ridge, the Alleghenies, the Great Smokies, the Ozarks. Our summers are hot and humid; the winters are uninteresting outside of Florida; but spring in the South is a cool _rosé_, and October in Virginia is a sparkling champagne. I speak to the court in this brief, as Your Honors will have noted, with an affection that ought perhaps to be brought back in bounds; along with the most beautiful horses in the world, we have some of the meanest mosquitoes south of New Jersey, an oversupply of shif’less dogs, and vast quantities of stinging nettles; we have sandflies, horned toads, and chiggers; we have our fair share of men who give short weight, of bigoted men, unkind, intolerant; we are given in a Cavalier South to drinking too much, and in the Bible Belt, to drinking not enough; we have men who honk at traffic lights, and women who giggle, and politicians who are full of wind; the Southern Shintoism that is sometimes a blessing is as often a curse; some of our cities are dirty, and most of our streets have lumps in them. But this is the many-faceted, cloudy, crystalline compound called the South. Yet, no, _it is not the South_. The truism of “many Souths” will not stand too much weight. Every region in the country has its contrasts, its extremes, its anomalies, its measurable differences. An essential point can be missed in overconcentration on the Rural South, the Urban South, the New South, the Old South, the Liberal South, the Conservative South. There remains a great and well-understood meaning simply in _the_ South; there is, in fact, a sense of oneness here, an identity, a sharing, and this quality makes the South unique in ways that New England, and the Midwest, and the West do not approach. The Confederacy was, as a matter of law, a state in being; but it was first of all, and still is, what so many observers have termed it: a state of mind. And running through this state of mind, now loose as basting thread, now knotted as twine, now strong and stubborn as wire, coloring the whole fabric of our lives, is this inescapable awareness: the consciousness of the Negro. III