The 1988 Southern 500 was the 21st stock car race of the 1988 NASCAR Winston Cup Series season and the 39th iteration of the event. The race was held on Sunday, September 4, 1988, before an audience of 50,000 in Darlington, South Carolina, at Darlington Raceway, a 1.366 miles (2.198 km) permanent egg-shaped oval racetrack. The race took the scheduled 367 laps to complete. In the final laps of the race, Melling Racing's Bill Elliott would manage to fend off Blue Max Racing's Rusty Wallace to the finish to take his 28th career NASCAR Winston Cup Series victory and his fifth victory of the season. To fill out the top three, the aforementioned Rusty Wallace and Richard Childress Racing's Dale Earnhardt would finish second and third, respectively.

Melling Racing was a Championship-winning NASCAR Winston Cup Series race team owned by Harry Melling and his son Mark Melling. Harry Melling ran the team from its inception in 1982, to mid-1999. When Harry died after a heart attack in mid-1999, his son Mark then took over Melling Racing until the team closed in 2003. The team was most notable for fielding cars for Bill Elliott in the 1980s, where he won the 1985 Southern 500 at Darlington to claim the first ever Winston Million bonus, claiming the fastest qualifying lap in NASCAR history at Talladega Superspeedway with a lap of 212.809 mph in 1987, and winning the 1988 Winston Cup championship. Melling won 34 career NASCAR Winston Cup races, all of them with Bill Elliott.