There Goes My Everything White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights: 1945-1975
by Jason Sokol
Knopf, 448 pp., $27.95
"I loved Negroes," recalled Sarah Patton Boyle in The Desegregated Heart, her 1962 memoir of conversion to civil rights activism in Charlottesville, Virginia. "I believed that our relationship was complementary and mutually satisfying." But when a Negro did not "keep his place," she confessed, "I felt outraged."
If a confirmed liberal had to overcome such deeply ingrained attitudes, no wonder those white southerners dedicated to segregation, a clear majority well into the 1960s, might react with even greater apprehension and bewilderment to the downfall of Jim Crow. No wonder they might elect as their governor a fried chicken restaurateur who, in defiance of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that forced him to integrate or shut down, recited the Ten Commandments, railed at "Communists" such as Robert Kennedy, and hawked autographed ax handles--chicken "drumsticks," he called them--symbolizing his rebellion against federal despotism.
Having risen from humble beginnings to modest prosperity, Lester Maddox awoke one day to find his dream of serving whom he pleased in his popular restaurant shattered. But his declaration that "America will triumph. . . . Freedom will prevail"--by which he meant a nation respectful of states' rights and his own freedom of association--was anachronistic almost as soon as it was uttered. Propelled by an electoral fluke into the governorship of Georgia in 1966, Maddox embodied the tumult faced by southern whites grappling with, and finally submitting to, desegregation. He personally attempted to raise state capitol flags that had been lowered to half-mast following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., whom he considered an enemy of the United States, yet he was also the first governor in the Deep South to appoint blacks to state boards.
Maddox never experienced the transformative spiritual rebirth that returned George Wallace to the Alabama governorship as an integrationist two decades after his infamous "Segregation forever" inaugural, but in baffling his "liberal doubters just as surely as he surprised his Klan supporters," suggests Jason Sokol, he evinced the contradictions felt by many a southern white in the age of civil rights.
Well-known exponents of segregation such as Maddox and Wallace, along with recognized champions of integration such as Ralph McGill and Robert Penn Warren, play a part in Sokol's account of the liberation from racial strictures achieved by whites during the civil rights movement. But in focusing largely on the perspectives of common men and women across the states of the former Confederacy--businessmen, teachers, ministers, housewives, small-town politicians, officers of the law--he makes visceral the convulsions produced when most everything white southerners believed about blacks proved mistaken. (Sokol's title, evocative but inadequately explained, is borrowed from a tune by country songwriter Dallas Frazier.)
Collecting views from small towns as well as large, from those with Ku Klux Klan or White Citizens Council affiliations as well as those inclined, openly or secretly, to buck segregation, Sokol offers a compelling, if somewhat repetitive, portrait of the social revolution that redeemed the nation's soul and reshaped its political landscape.
For every crusading liberal and every bomb-throwing white supremacist, as Sokol demonstrates, there were thousands of average folks caught in between, struggling not just to accept blacks as equals but also to square their belief in law and order with their resentment of federal coercion.
Some, like Maddox, felt that they were the victims, that their rights were being trampled and their livelihoods threatened. "Who says the nigger is on the bottom?" complained one Alabama police officer. "He's calling the tune, and we run to hear it." Others adjusted to the new order in name only--"we break every glass they drink out of," said a bar owner forced to serve blacks, "there ain't no law against that"--or adopted what Sokol refers to as the "vernacular of invisibility," paying blacks no attention and pretending nothing had changed.
Year by year, however, a larger number had their illusions about "our Negroes" exposed, and, slowly, their hearts and minds desegregated. Surprised by the evidence of black abuse, discrimination, and poverty chronicled in Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi, one white teenager asked a black acquaintance, "Is this book true?!"
Insofar as popular memory of the era tends to be dominated by the words and deeds of radical reactionaries, whether in the statehouse or in the street, Sokol's more nuanced account provides an important corrective. Not only was the nation at large sickened by images of dogs, fire hoses, tear gas, and truncheons wielded against non violent demonstrators or by the rabble jeering at innocent schoolchildren, so, too, were many white southerners.
Integration in public education posed especially hard choices for whites accustomed to a time-honored racial hierarchy, choices that proved traumatic not simply because of black protest or federal decree. When officials closed schools or threatened to do so in response to court-ordered desegregation, white parents faced a sharp dilemma. They may have preferred segregated schools to integrated schools, but most preferred compliance with the law and access to education to the grandstanding of state and local politicians. A new attempt to secede from the Union because of Brown v. Board of Education, remarked a New Orleans truck driver, would be a greater disaster than losing our "segregation virginity."
The man in question was among those whites swept up in the contentious 1960 desegregation battle in the city's 9th Ward--a neighborhood made newly notorious by Hurricane Katrina--where a majority of white parents initially did prefer closed schools, and launched a massive boycott in protest of a federal judge's order to desegregate. Sokol's case study of the 9th Ward, in particular his portrayal of those parents who braved ranting mobs to enroll their white children in integrated schools, vividly captures the turmoil of a community divided against itself, as well as the courage of families who resented their neighbors' strong-arm tactics more than they endorsed black equality.
Given the whipsaw emotions set loose by the black freedom movement, doing the right thing, even under duress, was no easy matter. One of Sokol's most striking vignettes concerns James Brock, proprietor of the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida. Early in 1964, Martin Luther King engaged in a much-publicized dialogue with Brock, King explaining the humiliation faced by blacks when they were denied service, Brock explaining why serving blacks violated his rights and would destroy his business. Subsequent protests in St. Augustine led to several hundred arrests, but after passage of the Civil Rights Act, local business leaders voted overwhelmingly to comply.
Soon thereafter, Andrew Young, then one of King's lieutenants, was served at the motel's restaurant--the waitress who once poured coffee on him now greeted him with a smile--but Brock and others who began to serve blacks were promptly stopped by white supremacist counterattacks. Within the span of a month, as Sokol reports, Brock both doused black protestors with muriatic acid when they staged a "swim-in" at his motel pool and had his property firebombed by the Klan.
In St. Augustine and elsewhere, resegregation thus played leapfrog with reintegration, law vying with custom until, at last, law won.
The surprise, however, is how quickly things changed. Although it would take a generation or more to root out the most stubborn racism--only after 30 years, for example, was Byron de la Beckwith, the murderer of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, brought to justice--it is remarkable that, by 1965, according to one government estimate, 75 percent of those businesses affected by Title II of the Civil Rights Act were already in compliance. And only one year after the Voting Rights Act, passed that same year, almost half of blacks in the Deep South had registered, leading soon to reversals of fortune once unimaginable: black city council and school board members, black sheriffs, black mayors.
Moreover, despite white flight to the suburbs and the subterfuge of segregation academies, the South by 1973 had a higher public school desegregation index than any other part of the country, with 46 percent of black children instructed in integrated classrooms.
By the same token, in a much-studied phenomenon that Sokol's work helps to explain at a grassroots level, the advent of biracial rule in the South was accompanied by a political realignment that, starting in 1968, helped propel Republicans to victory in seven of the next 10 presidential elections (southern Democrats, of course, won the remaining contests). Backlash against court-ordered busing, a key instrument of integration, was by no means exclusively a white issue in the South. But along with reaction to the rioting and anarchy attributed to Black Power and the New Left in the urban North and West, it typified a retrenchment among centrist whites that became national in scope.
"I just couldn't vote like all the hippies," exclaimed one lifelong Democrat of his ballot for Richard Nixon in 1972.
From today's vantage point, the pre-civil rights South seems a bizarre relic--until, that is, some ghost from the Jim Crow past abruptly looms up, a painful lesson learned by Mississippi's senator Trent Lott, unseated as majority leader in 2002 after his ill-advised birthday tribute to Strom Thurmond's 1948 Dixiecrat campaign. Still, whatever lingering allure the Lost Cause may hold for the region and the nation, no one can reasonably doubt the triumph, in law and in shared belief, of the civil rights movement. Thanks to Jason Sokol, we now have a richer understanding of the hard, soul-searching journey undertaken by southern whites to get on the right side of black freedom.
Eric J. Sundquist, UCLA Foundation professor of literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author, most recently, of Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America.