New York Times writers generally take a dim view of folks who live in places such as Alabama and her Deep South sisters, so I was not surprised to see the Good Gray Lady looking down her snoot at South Carolina when the presidential primaries focused the nation’s eyes on her.

After all, this is the state that led the exodus from the union back in 1860, that flew the Confederate battle flag from its State House dome until a few years ago, and that still has a statue of “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman on the State House grounds.

Proof positive that we’re a bunch of unreconstructed racists.

“They still honor Benjamin Tillman down here,” wrote NYT columnist Bob Herbert, “which is very much like honoring a malignant tumor.”

Well, I don’t mind his comparison of the old white-supremacist governor and U.S. senator to a malignant tumor, but I’m not sure we honor him down here. Somebody put his statue on the State House grounds back in the early 20th century, when the state was still smarting from the licking it took in the Civil War and the indignity it suffered during Reconstruction. But nowadays, I suspect the dominant feeling toward Tillman, among those South Carolinians who are aware that he existed, is embarrassment, not honor.

It’s easy to take swipes at us. Herbert pointed to the documentary, “Corridor of Shame,” which showcased the neglected condition of the state’s rural schools.

“If you were to walk into some of those schools, which are spread along a crescent-shaped corridor on either side of Interstate 95 from the southern edge of North Carolina to the northern edge of Georgia, you might forget you were in the United States,” the columnist wrote.

Geography lesson: I-95 enters Georgia in the vicinity of Savannah, which is on the Atlantic some 300 miles south of Georgia’s northern border with North Carolina. The eastern coastline of the United States breaks sharply to the west along about Cape Hatteras, and most of Georgia lies west, not south, of the Palmetto State. Mr. Herbert may have been looking at the I-85 corridor, which does run from the southern border of North Carolina from Kings Mountain to Lake Hartwell, which is in Northeast Georgia. But that corridor is far from the economic, cultural and educational wasteland he describes. It contains the cities of Greenville, Spartanburg and Anderson, which have the tax bases to support decent school systems. And, like cousins Montgomery, Birmingham Huntsville and Mobile in Alabama, they offer a quality of life a few degrees nicer than that of comparable cities above the Mason-Dixon line. Just ask the newcomers, black and white, who have settled here from Up North.

The I-95 corridor through South Carolina is indeed an economically depressed area, and parts of it may remind you of the Third World. If you take away the small urban centers of Florence and Orangeburg and the ritzy resort area of Hilton Head, the area along I-95 between the glitzy South of the Border tourist stop and the suburbs of Savannah consists of tobacco fields fading into cypress swamps, with I-95 itself serving as the chief economic engine. And that may be the image Yankee tourists get as they make a beeline down the coast from New York City and its environs to Orlando and Miami. But judging the entire state by the I-95 corridor would be just as unfair as judging New York State by the South Bronx or all of New Jersey by the slums of Newark.

South Carolina may indeed have a long way to go in shedding the burdens of its past. But it’s a past the present generation did not create; it inherited it. Solving the problems along the “Corridor of Shame” is a long-term challenge, and it will require the support of elected officials and the good will of the entire populace. Economic development is needed to pay for the improvements in the educational infrastructure, and South Carolina has put great emphasis on economic progress since the middle of the 20th century.

Politically, its voters showed they’re not far removed from the national mainstream when they gave Barack Obama their support over Hillary Clinton and native son John Edwards for the Democratic presidential nomination. They showed they were in tune with the national trend in choosing John McCain in the Republican primary.

The South Carolina Democratic Party is divided roughly 50-50 between whites and blacks. Few blacks vote in the Republican primary. I can remember when the only primary that mattered in the state was the Democratic primary, and it was white-only. If you won the Democratic primary, you won the election because the Republican Party was impotent, able to do little more than swing postmaster’s jobs to its members when the nation elected a Republican president.

The state has come a long way since then. This year the Democrats picked a black man for the presidential nomination, and he was not just the choice of black voters. About 25 percent of the white voters also voted for Obama when a white woman and a native son who rose from the state’s once-dominant textile culture were also on the ballot.

That doesn’t get “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman out of our history or off our Statehouse grounds. But it does give reason to hope that the state will find ways to cast off all the shadows of its past and spread the blanket of Middle American values from Hilton Head to Caesar’s Head and from Myrtle Beach on the Atlantic to Calhoun Falls on the Savannah.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson, S.C. 29621, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com.