Profiles in Change

By John Egerton

Vol. 1, No. 8, 1979, pp. 8-10, 26-28

(Editorial Note: This excerpt is taken from John Egerton’s School Desegregation: A Report Card from the South, published by Southern Regional Council in 1976. It provides a good overview of school desegregation in the South. The briefer city profiles which make up this section were authored by working newspersons who have written about the school desegregation process for their newspapers. Their by-lines follow their reports. The complete study is available from the Council at $4.00 a copy.)

Anniston, Alabama: Wounds To Heal

After eight years of backing away from desegregation and two years of living with it, Anniston school officials say they’re now getting back to their basic work: educating children.

Desegregation, when it finally came, was tense at first-but peaceful. Now the tension is gone, and educators seem to take pride in the way things have worked. “1 think people in Boston would gladly give their interest in hell to trade places with us,” says Anniston High School Principal Robert Whitehead.

The Reverend N.Q. Reynolds, a Black minister and civil rights leader who now serves as chairman of the Anniston Board of Education, says, “Once they decided it was something they would have to do, everyone buckled down and started working, and worked beautifully together.”

Anniston, with a population of 31,000 (34 percent Black), is located in Northeast Alabama, 60 miles from Birmingham. The city is surrounded by semi-rural Calhoun County, which has a population of more than 100,000, about 10 percent Black.

The city maintained a dual school system until the mid1960s. As a result of HEW enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, some “freedom of choice” desegegation began in 1965. In 1967, Anniston became one of the 99 Alabama school systems involved in Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, a statewide suit. Three years later, after many alternatives were proposed by the U.S. Department of Justice, the school system and the Black community, a plan to disestablish the dual schools was ordered into effect.

The Justice Department was not happy with the plan, because it left most of the schools either predominantly White or overwhelmingly Black. School officials, though, expressed public satisfaction. Superintendent John L. Fulmer told newspaper reporters he felt racial problems, as far as the schools were concerned, were “almost passe.” At the time, however, formerly allWhite Anniston High School was still about 80 percent White, and formerly all-Black Cobb High had 1,120 Blacks and only 13 Whites.

Further court action and out-of-court negotiation led in 1973 to yet another plan-the one that is now in force.

Under the plan, five of the 11 elementary schools (three of them originally for Whites) were closed, and Johnston Junior High School was converted to an elementary school to accommodate most of the students from the five closed schools. Anniston and Cobb high schools were paired, with senior high students going to Anniston. At Cobb, an older school located in a Black residential area, a special effort was made to strengthen the curriculum in mathematics, languages and the sciences.

The plan left several elementary schools racially identifiable. As a result, the Justice Department has kept the court case open, and has required changes in the plan from year to year. Two of the elementary schools were paired last fall. To others are still segregated. One is all

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White, and sits on the opposite side of a range of hills from the rest of the system; the other is nearly all Black, and is almost equally as isolated. The school system is under orders to look for a way to desegregate the two schools, but no specific plan has yet been suggested. Fulmer, the superintendent, says that, in view of present trends in the courts, he doesn’t believe anything will be done.

Rev. Reynolds, the board chairman, says he wishes the Justice Department would back off a little and let the school system have time to plan for the future. “Every year since 1967,” he says, “we have been monitored and required to make some additional changes in the desegregation pattern. That in itself is a hardship.”

Nonetheless, Reynolds sees nothing but progress ahead for the school system. He believes that integration has ceased to be a problem: “As we get some of the wounds healed-and they do heal more and more with time-and get some of the hangups out of our minds, we’ll have nothing but progress.”

A group of Anniston High juniors and seniors, in a discussion of the pros and cons of desegregation, concluded that it has been mostly beneficial to them. No tension remains, they said, although they are aware at times of a “them” and “us” attitude in themselves, and of what might be called-with some irony- de facto segregation. The school’s basketball team, for example, is all-Black; White youngsters who like basketball play at the YMCA.

At the elementary level, things are somewhat different. Mauvelene Phillips, the principal at Johnston Elementary, says children in the school are working well together: “We have seen improvement in the situation. Each group tends to accept the other more freely than they once did. They cooperate together.”

Today, in addition to having its first Black school board chairman, the system has a Black assistant superintendent and a Black principal at Cobb, as well as at two of the elementary schools. According to school officials, the faculty in the system-and in each school-is approximately two-thirds White and one-third Black.

The population of Anniston, while falling in recent years, has remained a steady two-thirds White. But the student body in the schools has gradually become more Black. Between 1961 and 1967, Black enrollment increased by about 600, while White enrollment fell by 800. Since 1967, both Black and White enrollment has fallenthe former by almost 500, the latter by almost 2,000. Over the entire period since 1961, total enrollment has dropped from 8,000 to 5,400, and the schools have shifted from 65 percent White to 55 percent Black.

Private and parochial schools in Anniston have absorbed some of the Whites who left the city’s schools, but Superintendent Fulmer believes most of the loss has been to surrounding Calhoun County, which has more than 11,000 students, less than 10 percent of whom are Black. Fulmer expresses some concern that continued White flight will lead to a “tipping” situation in which the system could become almost all-Black. Reynolds believes factors other than White flight are involved.

“It has become a whipping stone for the system,” he says. “I think a majority of them would have gone anyway, though, even without desegregation. It was a contributing factor, but not a major one.”

Reynolds believes the city of Anniston could help mat.ters by annexing parts of the county. Another possible move-merger of the city and county schools-has been discussed publicly on occasion, but no such change is now in prospect.

The school principals say there has been no increase in discipline problems attributable to desegregation. At Anniston High, Robert Whitehead says discipline there is related to social factors divorced from desegregation.

The system has added some remedial classes to the curriculum in recent years, particularly in reading and mathematics. Even so, many children-particularly Black children-did not do well in the first states of desegregation, according to Fulmer. He believes overall performance has improved since then, however, and he says younger students whose entire school experience has been in a desegregated setting are doing well, though “maybe not as well as they should.”

Standardized test scores have been dropping since 1969 in both city and county schools- a fact that cannot be explained by desegregation, since the county schools are overwhelmingly White. Fulmer says he has no racial breakdown of test scores to indicate how students have fared since desegregation and some school officials believe it is too early to make comparisons.

Fulmer says he gets few calls these days from parents concerned with desegregation-related problems. In coming months, however, one potential controversy does face the school system. It has to do with the need to replace Cobb Junior High with a modern facility. The school board owns ample land in a White residential area adjacent to Anniston High, and there is some sentiment for building there. Many Blacks are opposed to that; they say Whites always want to move important institutions out of the Black community. Some Whites also are opposed, on the ground that they don’t want so many children in their area of town. A satisfactory solution remains to be worked out.

-Judy Johnson

Anniston Star

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Austin, Texas: Waiting For The Court

Desegregation in Austin lurched to a rocky beginning in 1971 when the city’s all-Black junior and senior high schools were closed and their students were bused to allWhite schools across town.

The desegregation plan, approved in federal district court, did not affect the city’s elementary schools, or its sizable Mexican-American population, nor did it require Whites to be bused. Legal arguments on those and other questions were taken to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. The case has been resting there for nearly three years.

The initial change was accompanied by jeers, rockthrowing and boycotts. Now, things are quieter. The opening of schools last fall was uneventful, and a general calm prevails, marred only by occasional flare-ups between small gangs of Blacks and Whites at the district’s two or three most overcrowded schools.

“We have moved from the stage where our principal concerns were dealing with physical confrontation,” says Superintendent Jack L. Davidson. “Now there is greater concentration on the academic and extracurricular participation of all students in all phases of the school program.

Among the problems left to ponder are the high rate of dropouts and pushouts among minorities, the sparse sprinkling of minorities in extra-curricular activities, and low achievement test scores among all three racial groups.

Austin is a city of 300,000 people. Its school system enrolls 59,000 students-an increase of 4,000 since desegregation began-and the racial ratios have changed only slightly in recent years. Whites make up 63 percent of the total (a decrease of 2 percent since 1970), MexicanAmericans are 22 percent (an increase of 2 percent), and Blacks comprise 15 percent. White flight and private schools have had no significant effect on public school enrollment.

About 15,000 Austin students are bused to school, including some Black and Chicano students who participate in a minority-to-majority transfer program. Only 2,200 students are bused as part of the desegregation plan, and almost all of them are Black. At the elementary level there are five all-Black schools, and about a third of the 60 elementary schools either have a relative handful of Whites (5 percent or less) or a preponderance of them (95 percent or more).

At the secondary level, Blacks make up between 9 and 30 percent of the enrollment in formerly all-White schools. Most of the Mexican-American junior and senior high school students are concentrated in East Austin schools.

There is a high attrition rate among both Blacks and Chicanos, evidenced by two sets of figures. First, Mexican-Americans make up 25 percent of the elementary school enrollment, but only 17 percent of the high school student total. And second, Black students received 54 percent of the long-term suspensions last year. In short, there is a dropout problem among Chicanos and a pushout problem facing Blacks.

Student participation in extracurricular activities is another problem in the schools. Such programs as band, pep squad, student council and honor society attract plenty of Whites, but disproportionately small numbers of minority students.

Scores from standardized achievement tests indicate a slight drop by all three racial groups in the past three years. School officials see no connection between desegregation and test performance. Schools with high percentages of minority students tend to be clustered at the bottom of the achievement score rankings. Average scores from the predominantly White schools are higher, but still below the national average.

The percentage of Black and Mexican-American teachers in the system has inched upward since desegregation began, but the current totals do not please either group. Blacks comprise 14 percent of the total professional staff, and Chicanos only 7 percent; at the classroom level, the percentages are slightly higher. Representatives of both minority groups have accused the school district of discrimination in hiring; school officials say there is a lack of qualified applicants, and recruiting efforts have not been highly successful. In the top echelons of the school district administration, there is

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one Black and one Mexican-American among the five assistant superintendents, and one Black and two MexicanAmericans among 19 department directors.

The decrease in confrontations and racial incidents in the secondary schools, says Superintendent Davidson, is a result of two things: “People having the opportunity to adjust to the new situation, and new services provided by the district as a result of desegregation.” Tnethnic student human relations committees operate in each secondary school, coordinating activities designed to foster positive attitudes toward desegregation. There is also a schoolcommunity liaison program staffed by a tn-ethnic team of 10 persons who work to improve relations among the ethnic groups throughout the district. Several other programs, financed largely by federal funds, are focused on reading and mathematics problems, communication skills, extra-curricular activity participation, attendance problems and special learning problems of bilingual and migrant students.

“There seems to be a greater awareness on the part of most of our population of the desirability and the necessity to make desegregation work to everybody’s advantage,” Davidson says. He adds that although desegregation “hasn’t materially enhanced or hurt the cognitive achievement of Austin students, it has made school a more realistic representation of what the community is and should be.”

Still, it is generally acknowledged that only partial school desegregation has taken place in Austin, and school officials have been inclined to wait for directives from the courts, rather than to take the initiative on the issue. Bertha Means, a supervisor in the secondary schools and a respected civic leader in the Black community, believes the various programs and services the schools have started in recent years have promoted desegregation, but she thinks more needs to be done. So does M.G. Bowden the Anglo director of elementary education, who says “more integration needs to take place.”

The Rev. Marvin Griffin, the only Black on the seven-member board of school trustees, says Austin “has not fulfilled the mandate of the Supreme Court because we haven’t touched the elementary schools.” Gus Garcia, the only Mexican-American member of the board, also criticizes the current desegregation plan, saying it excludes grades on through five and requires one-way busing. Garcia would like to see the schools which have reached at least a 25 percent minority enrollment without busing be designated as integrated schools.

In New Orleans, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has been stymied for more than three years by the Austin case. Part of the conflict there concerns the legal status of Mexican-Americans, who have not been subjected to the statutory segregation as Blacks have.

Lynne Flocke

Austin American-Statesman

Bogalusa, Louisiana: Still Uncomfortable

Gradually since the mid-1960s, desegregated schools in Bogalusa have become an acceptable, if not robust, social institution. It is debatable whether they were ever destined to be anything more than a federally-enforced anomaly, bringing together the rough-edged Whites and Blacks of this milltown community in an uncomfortable atmosphere.

Bogalusa, on the toe of Louisiana’s boot-like configuration, touches the piney woods and sand loam of southern Mississippi. There is a hardtack mentality indigenous to the land, a kind of raw frontier atmosphere in which unskilled Whites have long battled with Blacks for livelihood in the same kinds of jobs. For the past two and a half decades, the town has been dominated by one industrial citizen, Crown Zellerbacn, which converts pine trees into Bogalusa brown kraft paper and the paper into grocery bags and corrugated boxes.

Initially, a court-ordered plan of “freedom of choice” desegregation came to Bogalusa in the fall of 1965. Fighting broke out between Whites and the dozen or so Blacks who transferred into the previously all-White schools. Several of the more militant White students were put under injunction by the federal court for harassing the Blacks, and for some the injunction was in force until they graduated.

Total desegregation of the city’s schools, based on a plan submitted by the all-White school board, was finally ordered by the federal court in the fall of 1969. Of the 5,157 students in the system that fall, 38 percent were Black. Enrollment has fallen by a total of about 500 since then, but the Black ratio has also fallen-by one percentage point.

School Superintendent Frank Mobley says the loss of students is not a result of desegregation or of White flight to private schools, but of a general decline in population involving Blacks as much as Whites. Private schools have not been a factor; American Academy, and all-White school, had a graduating class of 16 last year.

Mobley maintains that since he became superintendent in 1971, the desegregation plan has been fully implemented. “There are no more all-White or all-Black schools,” he says. “The percentages of Blacks range from 20 to 30 percent in some schools to as much as 45 percent in others.”

Under the initial plan, two relatively new all-Black schools in Black neighborhoods were closed. “The Black community went along with the idea of not having any totally Black schools,” says Andrew Moses, a Black radio station manager, “but we didn’t like having to lose the schools in the Black neighborhoods.”

Among more militant Blacks, there are some bitter critics of what Mobley calls “full integration.” Gayle Jenkins, a Black mother and secretary of the Bogalusa

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Voters League, is one. “We are supposed to be integrated,” she says, “but it is integrated on the outside and segregated on the inside. From an educational standpoint, we feel we have some of the best teachers among Blacks, but they are limited. There are, for instance, no Black males teaching in the elementary schools, and it was not until this past year that we had a Black named principal of an elementary school.”

Jenkins contends that there are discriminatory hiring practices affecting teachers and administrative personnel. “They are hiring Whites,” she says, “but they find some excuse-such as they can’t find Black specialists-not to hire Blacks.”

Mobley defends the hiring practices in the system. “We have three Black assistant principals, as well as one Black elementary principal,” he says. “We don’t have any Blacks in supervisory positions at this time because we were overstaffed and we’re not hiring any people.”

A.Z. Young, a long-time Black activist in Bogalusa, expresses views similar to those voiced by Jenkins. “We have physical integration,” he declares, “but not mental integration. I’m afraid that is still a long way off.”

Young says a pattern is developing in the school system: “When a Black is in charge of any activity, such as track coach, the Whites don’t participate.” Furthermore, he says, too many young Blacks who graduate from the schools “wind up in the ghettos up North, or on skid row, or have to go into service. We aren’t getting as many to go to college now as we did when we had Black schools.”

Young worries about Bogalusa being “boxed in,” culturally and economically: “We have no interstate highway, no airlines, no trains, and only two buses a day. The people who generally come here can’t make it anywhere else in the world.” From a Black standpoint, Crown Zellerbach has been a good employer and a positive force for racial justice-but it is gradually cutting back on employment.

Still, there is some optimism about the future of the school system. Two years ago, the voters passed a $4.5 million school bond issue to finance modernization and construction of school facilities. Superintendent Mobley says it is significant “that we had one of the few school bond issues to pass anywhere around this area in the past few years.”

Mobley also asserts that the school system does not have “any real discipline problems now,” as it has had in the past. “We have our share, but I don’t think it is much different than schools all over the nation. This year, we feel we are having our best year. Each year has gotten a little better.”

Shortly before last Christmas, there was an incident in which a White boy stabbed a Black boy. In the disturbance which followed, only a small number of students became involved. The federal judge in whose court the Bogalusa school desegregation case has been handled was brought into the controversy to assure fairness in the settling of the incident by school officials. Most observers appeared not to see the affair as being racially oriented.

Blacks are still concerned that they have no representation on the elected school hoard, even though they have offered capable candidates in the past two elections. “The feeling was that it was time for a Black to be on the school board,” says Al Hansen managing editor of the Bogalusa Dailr’ News.” But when Whites got to the polls, they just couldn’t do it.”

Moses, the Black radio station manager, got a very respectable vote last time, as did Murkel Sibley, a Black executive at Crown Zellerbach. But a majority of the registered voters are White, and Blacks see that as an insurmountable obstacle as long as school board members are elected at large. A lawsuit is now on file in federal court to require that single-member districts be created for each of the five board posts.

Inside the schools, the two problem areas academically are reading and mathematics. Some classes are almost all Black or all-White. In extra-curricular activities, the chorus is mostly Black, the band is mostly White, and the drama club is well mixed. Last year, a White boy and a Black girl had the leading roles in the school play. Whites and Blacks in the Bogalusa schools are still not entirely comfortable with one another, but the worst hostilities and inequalities of the past appear to have been reduced.

W.F. Minor

New Orleans Times-Picayune

Norfolk, Virginia: “For The Benefit of Everybody”

When U.S. District Court Judge John A. MacKenzie declared on February 14, 1974, that the Norfolk school system was unitary and that “racial discrimination through official action has been eliminated,” he shut the book on one of the longest school desegregation cases in the country.

For almost 19 years, the Norfolk School Board had been involved in litigation initiated by 101 Black parents and children who wanted an end to “separate but equal” education. The 1956 case bore the name of Leola Pearl Beckett, a Black seventh-grader who grew up without ever attending an undesegregated school.

Step by step over two decades, successive court orders forced the school board to desegregate its schools, to take positive steps to desegregate classrooms and faculties, to bus as a means of ending racial imbalance, to provide free transportation, and finally to pay legal fees to attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case.

In retrospect, many persons closely associated with the

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Norfolk public schools say desegregation has gone fairly smoothly.

“It was unusually smooth when you compare it to other cities of our size and racial makeup,” says John C. McLaulin, the assistant superintendent for research and planning. “Comparatively speaking, there were very few instances of violence and I can’t remember any community-instigated incidents.”

But the road the schools traveled between 1956 and 1974 was rocky at several points along the way. In September 1958, for instance, Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., used the state’s “massive resistance” laws to close six all-White junior and senior high schools and lock out 10,000 Norfolk students rather than allow 17 Blacks to enter the schools. After a federal judge ruled the anti-desegregation laws unconstitutional, the schools quietly desegregated in February of 1959, but half the members of the “Lost Class of ’59” never finished their senior year.

Another sharp turn of events came in 1970 when the school system-again under court orderbegan busing students in an effort to increase desegregation. Vocal but nonviolent civic groups protested and threatened to boycott the opening of school. In the 15 months that followed, the school system lost 7,000-almost one-fourthof its White students.

In the first year of busing for desegregation purposes, approximately 11,000 students were transported. Now, the total is about 24,000, with the increase being made necessary by changes in the desegregation plan.

The decline in public school enrollment which followed the initiation of cross-town busing was accompanied by a sharp enrollment increase in the area’s private schools, many of which sprang up as a direct result of desegregation. At the peak, an estimated 12,000 Norfolk children were attending the more than 50 private and parochial schools in Norfolk and the nearby cities of Virginia Beach, Portsmouth and Chesapeake, and the overwhelming majority of them were middle-class Whites.

But flight, sudden and severe when it began in the early 1970s, has now tapered off. In the fall of 1973, school officials reported the return of 850 students from private and parochial schools, and the following year, another 1,000 reportedly returned. No accounting of returning students waskept in 1975, but a school spokesman expressed the belief that enrollment is no longer seriously affected by White flight.

In the past 10 years, Norfolk’s public school population has declined from about 55,500 in 1965 to 54,700 in 1970 and to 47,400 in 1975. At the same time, the percentage of Black students has increased-but not to the 70 or 75 percent level some predicted as a result of total desegregation. Black percentages went from about 40 in 1965 to 45 in 1970, and to 52 last fall. Between 1974 and 1975, the number and percentage of both Blacks and Whites in the schools remained more or less unchanged. Between 40 and 45 percent of Norfolk’s 300,000 citizens are Black.

This year, Black-White ratios in the five senior high schools, 10 junior highs and 49 elementary schools are reasonably close to the 52-48 ratio for the system as a whole. Black percentages range from 22 to 69 in a few individual schools, but most are near the 50-60 mark. Some teachers, administrators and board members say, however, that the racial ratios don’t tell the whole story.

“We’ve desegregated the schools,” says the Rev. Joseph N. Green, Jr., one of two Blacks on the sevenmember school board, “but I do not feel we’ve integrated the schools. I think we’ve done a good job through busing of putting the races together physically. But integration means people are working together harmoniously and cooperatively. I don’t think this has really come about. That which separated us in the past to a great extent is still present.”

At the elementary level, children appear to work and play together without racial self-consciousness, but at the secondary level, social segregation is more apparent. “They sit in their little group and we sit in ours,” shrugged one high school student. “Integration, it doesn’t mean anything.” Some say this self-segregation simply mirrors a society in which racial divisions remain deep. The distinctly racial character of most neighborhoods in and around Norfolk would seem to support that view.

In the desegregation process, most of the formerly allBlack schools have survived, and most of the Black principals have retained their positions-contrary to what has happened in many other parts of Virginia. In 1974-75, 26 of the city’s 67 principals were Black-roughly the same as before desegregation. Only about one-third of the more than 900 secondary-school teachers were Black, however, and in the central administrative offices of the system, Blacks held only three of the top IS or so posi tions, including one of the five assistant superintendent posts.

Blacks and Whites both are concerned about the disproportionate involvement of Black students in school disciplinary matters. Almost 80 percent of the students who were suspended and subject to expulsion in 1971-72 were Black, and in the years since then, that pattern has remained essentially unchanged. There are no simple explanations for those statistics, and no quick remedy to the problem appears likely.

Busing has been seen as the source of several problems in the schools. Some parents worry about kindergarten and primary students who are bused as much as eight miles across town. Some students say school spirit has been weakened because most of those who ride buses can’t stay after school or come back at night for extracurricular activities. Busing is also said to be responsible for the decline of parental involvement in school activities and in parent-teacher associations.

In spite of the nagging problems, though, most of those who watch the schools closely appear to believe the advantages of desegregation outweigh the disadvantages.

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They say children can now learn about each other and from each other, that all children now have equal access to materials, facilities and educational opportunities, and that all have benefitted from a strengthening of school programs to accommodate a diverse student population.

There is also evidence of academic improvement. Assistant superintendent Robert M. Forster, in comparing standardized achievement test scores from 1971 and 1973, noted an increase in the average reading score of Black students (from 74.4 to 81.9, on a national norm of 100) and also of White students (from 92.3 to 96.7).

Vincent J. Thomas, who was chairman of Norfolk’s school board during much of the litigation and now is chairman of the State Board of Education, credits Norfolk and other public school systems with having “far outdistanced any other public or private institution in creating and maintaining a truly integrated environment.”

Lillian M. Brinkley, a Norfolk elementary school principal, acknowledges that the process has been painful at times, and that it isn’t finished. But she adds: “I think all of us someday-we may be n our graves-will realize it has been for the benefit of everybody.”

Kay McGraw

Norfolk Ledger-Star

Southern Progressivism

Reviewed by John Egerton

Vol. 6, No. 4, 1984, pp. 23-24

Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition by Dewey W. Grantham. University of Tennessee Press, 1983. 502 pp.$34.95 cloth, $16.95 paper. paper.

The Progressive movement that spawned a succession of far-reaching social reforms in the first quarter of this century is most directly identified with two maverick northern Republicans–Theodore Roosevelt, who went to the White House from New York, and Robert M. La Follette, who went to the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin.

As the twentieth century began, corrupt political machines and rapacious corporate giants were stealing the nation blind. In reaction against those intolerable excesses, many of which were dramatically exposed by muckraking writers, local and state reform efforts sprang up and eventually became national in scope.

The catalog of improvements resulting from these efforts was and is impressive: regulations of railroads and other corporations, more equitable tax structures (including a federal income tax), correction of child labor abuses, health and welfare legislation, wage and hour laws, food and drug standards, conservation of natural resources, women’s suffrage, and a number of election reforms, to name a few.

We remember Teddy Roosevelt, the raging “Bull Moose,” and “Fighting Bob” La Follette, and perhaps because of them we think of Progressivism as a northern phenomenon. The West entered the picture too, and the Midwest, but somehow the South seemed distant and uninvolved, like a foreign colony–which in truth it was. The South in the first two decades of this century generally is pictured as an agricultural backwater infested with poverty, ignorance, racism, and despair; that Progressivism might have taken root and flourished there seems as improbable as azaleas blooming in Buffalo, or magnolias in Madison.

And yet, as Dewey Grantham shows us in this painstakingly thorough and comprehensive study, the winds of change that swept from the East Coast to the West also reached into the farthest corners of the South. Grantham’s masterful synthesis of a voluminous and diverse record results in a portrait of the South–and of Progressivism–that is surprising, provocative, complex, and original.

In the last half of the nineteenth century, the South tried just about everything–slavery, war, reconstruction, white supremacy, “New South” myths, “Old South” memories, economic depression, agrarian populism, urban development. Nothing worked very well. By 1900, still traumatized and preoccupied by the indefensible evils in its racial history, the region was struggling desperately to create yet another “final solution”: legalized segregation of blacks under the guise of “separate but equal” development.

In the interest of maintaining firm control over the black population, southern whites looked first to politics and applied a series of “social reforms” that included poll taxes, literacy tests, white primaries, and other measures aimed at disfranchisement of blacks. This, they reasoned, would reduce “irresponsible” behavior by the former slave class and bring stability, peace, and progress for both races. A similar argument was sometimes used in the field of education: reformers contended that schooling for the white masses would make them more tolerant of blacks.

Thus did the South belatedly enter an era of social charge that resembled what was happening elsewhere in the country. A strange assortment of conservative reformers and Progressive–demagogues, racists, religious fundamentalists, moralists, social-gospel Protestants, gentle visionaries, social scientists, club women, feminists–found a variety of ways in the first twenty years of the new century to change institutions, laws, practices, beliefs. Some of what they did only worsened the racial cancer that had afflicted the South from the beginning of its history, but other reforms inched the region toward genuine progress and improvement.

States–and in some cases local governments–entered into the regulation of railroads (all northern-owned), banks, and insurance companies; the licensing of lawyers, doctors, teachers, and other professionals; the reform of prisons; the prohibition of alcoholic beverages; the passage of child labor laws; establishment of juvenile courts and reformatories; the spread and improvement of public school systems; the creation of institutions for mentally and physically handicapped people; the enfranchisement of women; the modernization of municipal services and administration; improvements in public health, occupational conditions, and agriculture; and even some timid and halting steps toward improving race relations.

After an absence of fifty years, the South returned with Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson to an influential role in national politics. The Wilson years and the First World War stimulated Progressivism and national unity in the South,

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and the more optimistic of the region’s reformers predicted continued improvement.

But by 1920, the South was still mired in poverty, trailing ever farther behind the rest of the rebounding nation. A post-war rash of violence against blacks–an ominous portent of the bitter decades to come–overshadowed continued improvement in schools, highways, health, and economic opportunity. The Great Depression was yet to arrive, but the South was long since a depressed region, a threadbare stepchild too poor to maintain a single society of even minimum quality, yet insanely committed to the myth of separate but equal development for its two races. And through those crucial years, few leaders outside the South–including the reformist Progressives–seriously challenged the region to change its segregational ways. Instead, the nation as a whole tended to accommodate itself to the South’s racism–and to deny its own de factor afflictions.

This sprawling, complex story is unfolded with great skill by Dewey Grantham, who in his thirty year career at Vanderbilt University has earned a national reputation as an eminent historian of twentieth-century America, particularly of the South. It would be a rare scholar who could absorb and blend such a vast body of recorded material as this book required; it is even rarer when the resulting synthesis flows smoothly and clearly.

The southern Progressives, Grantham concludes, “were able to function both as agents of modernization and as guardians of southern tradition.” They wanted a new order, not to replace the old but to fit snugly and comfortably around it. It took them another half-century to learn that such a dream was not only wrong but impossible.

John Egerton’s most recent book is Generations: An American Family (University of Kentucky Press, 1983).

In Country, a novel by Bobbie Ann Mason. Harper &Row 247 pp. $15.95

Reviewed by John Egerton

Vol. 8, No.1, 1986, pp. 20-22

The tumultuous decade of the 1960s still hovers over us like a great gray cloud, a mighty shadow of lingering hope and despair and wonder. We look back now with amazement bordering on disbelief at the exhilarating and traumatic ascensions and plunges that our society somehow survived in those years-black liberation and the movements it spawned for women and other minorities, the war in Southeast Asia, multiple assassinations, moon landings, urban and environmental crises, the drug culture, and much more. It may be emotional exhaustion as much as anything else that has slowed the runaway roller-coaster since then; in any case, the rumble of revolutionary thunder seems now to echo less frequently and more distantly.

Trying to make sense of those times, to tote up the gains

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and losses and chart new directions, is a complex and unending task. We look to participants and eyewitnesses, to politicians and commentators, to scholars and creative artists for a better understanding of what went on and what the consequences will be. The picture is not yet clear, though, and may not be for a long time to come. Most historians regard the period as still too recent for definitive interpretation and analysis (some would call it both literally and figuratively too close for comfort). Novelists, on the other hand, may feel no such constraints; armed with literary license, they can probe selectively, explore at will, blend reality with imagination, and finally give us sweeping or tightly focused visions of our former selves.

Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country, a novel, looks back to Vietnam from the vantage point of a small town in western Kentucky in 1984. Her characters are working-class white people living in the present. On the surface, hers is a simple tale briefly told. But in the spare and unadorned language we stumble upon some unexpected and disturbing images: of Vietnam’s continuing legacy, of mass culture seeping into the pores of the society, of an out-of-the-way country place that could be Anywhere USA, of ordinary people like us who seem harmless and even at times humorous but also aimless and immobilized.

An eighteen-year-old girl named Samantha Hughes–Sam to everyone–is the central figure. She lives with her thirty-five-year old uncle, Emmett Smith, a Vietnam veteran whose only regular activities are having breakfast at McDonald’s with some of his old army buddies and watching M*A*S*H reruns on TV. When his father asks him why he doesn’t get a job and “stop fooling around,” Emmett answers: “Ain’t nothing worth doing. Most jobs are stupid.”

Sam’s father was killed in Vietnam, and her mother has remarried and moved away. Her grandparents live nearby, but she seldom sees them. She has finished high school and is thinking about going to college-either that or going back to her counter job at Burger Boy. Her current boyfriend, Lonnie Malone, is a bag boy at Kroger, and her closest friend is a girl named Dawn who has just discovered she is pregnant.

Emmett has health problems that Sam believes are caused by residual poisoning from Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant we used so extensively in Vietnam. She wants to know what really happened in the war, to know how her father died and what Emmett and his companions experienced there, but no one seems able to tell her anything: “She knew very well that on TV, people always had the words to express their feelings, while in real life hardly anyone ever did. On TV, they had script writers.” In Hopewell, Kentucky, a.k.a. Anywhere USA, no one seems to grasp what is happening, let alone have the words to explain it.

Sam and Emmett and their friends seem utterly shackled by contemporary culture. Their reference points are in television and music videos, supermarkets and shopping malls, processed foods and packaged entertainment. History to them reaches only as far back as the sixties, “a much better time to be young than now.” Far from being dangerous or menacing, they are simply ineffectual, even impotent. If they have jobs, the work is routinized and low-paying and dead-end; if they have family ties, the connections are tenuous and habitual.

Emmett and the other veterans, physically or mentally scarred by their war experiences, seem destined never to recover; now in their mid-thirties, they have been old men

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since they came home fifteen years ago. But Sam and her friends also seem old before their time, though they are still teenagers, and when the two generations come together, they find common ground in stereo music and cable TV, in Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Carson, in HBO, MTV, Cinemax. Whatever can’t be captured in a half-hour sitcom or a seven-minute music video is not likely to be seen and heard, let alone remembered.

The Southeast Asian experience, whether terrifying of thrilling, is the only thing different in the lives of the older men. Those who were “in country”–in Vietnam–know it is all that sets them apart; some of them resent that, others take pride in it. Sam’s concern for Emmett’s health and her curiosity about her father’s death are the only compelling interests she seems able to sustain.

Set as it is in 1984 (the same year it apparently was written, since it was published in 1985), In Country is full of the most contemporary and immediate references–Reagan, Mondale, Ferraro, and so forth. Even so, the book portrays characters who are isolated and adrift, lost in inner space with no apparent hope of rescue–or even a clear sense that they are lost. The bleakness of their plight is all the more poignant because they seem so real, so believable, so familiar.

One of the marks of Bobbie Ann Mason’s skill as a writer is her ability to disguise intent. Is she telling us, like Jean Paul Sartre, that our destiny as human beings is to wander aimlessly in a meaningless universe? Is she describing reality as she sees it in one little corner of the globe? Has she simply invented a few fictional characters who can’t “express their feelings” because they don’t have TV script writers to give them a voice? Is she poking fun at lower-middle-class white people in the small-town South, or being critical of them, or showing sympathy for them, or celebrating them?

Who’s to say? You pay your $15.95 and you take your choice. Along the way, you may encounter some people you’ll think you’ve met before–friends, neighbors, relatives–or even catch a glimpse of yourself. Bobbie Ann Mason’s strength is in fashioning familiar characters out of plain, direct, straightforward language. I am moved by her power to do that. I only wish her people were sometimes able to rise above themselves and do something really wild -cancel the cable subscription, sell the stereo, boycott the shopping malls, or even, heaven help us, break the habit of dining daily under the golden arches.

John Egerton lives in Nashville. He is author of many essays and books, including Generations (Univ. Press of Kentucky) which won the Southern Regional Council’s Lillian Smith Award in 1984.

Myth, Media, and the Southern Mind By Stephen A. Smith (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986.)

By John Egerton

Vol. 9, No. 1, 1987, pp. 15-16

If anything is more prolific than kudzu in the South, it’s mythology. The collective imagination of Southerners–romantic, gothic, adventurous, heroic, humorous, instructive–has thrived in courtroom and classrooms, pulpits and porch swings, since the plantation South emerged as a self-conscious entity in the wake of the American Revolution.

Social psychologists and psychiatrists and philosophers have never come up with a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. We don’t know why Southerners thrive on stories, parables, imagination, rhetoric, exaggeration, legend, mythology–but they do, and they always have. Myth is embedded in the fiction and poetry, the newspaper and magazine writing, the song lyrics, the preaching, the language of lawyers and judges, the letters, the oral tradition, the ritual, ceremonies, the radio and television programming, the advertising.

It’s even in the history. “I may not have the facts just exactly right,” a keeper of useful myths of Southern history once explained to me at the end of a long and winding tale, “but what I’ve told you is the honest truth.” In a more negative vein, the South has also suffered from some historians whose myths and facts bore little resemblance to the truth.

Think of the descriptive names the South has gone by–how sweeping, how colorful, how misleading: Old South, New South, Deep South, Solid South, Populist, Progressive, Agrarian, Bourbon, Jim Crow South. Moonlight and magnolias, gentlemen of honor, ladies on pedestals, happy darkies singing in the cotton fields, belles and beaus glorifying the Confederacy, the Lost Cause, the pride of Dixieland. The intertwining tendrils of fantasy embrace and encompass reality in the South like wisteria on a backyard door.

All of which makes a book like Stephen A. Smith’s Myth, Media, and the Southern Mind so useful and welcome. Smith is a University of Arkansas professor of communications and rhetoric and a former staff aide to some Arkansas politicans. He has been immersed in rhetoric both as a scholar and as a specialist for skilled practictioners [sic] of the art; he is an ideal person to analyze and interpret the cultural myths that have dominated the historic and contemporary South.

To set the stage for his major points, Smith devotes the first three chapters of his book to a synthesis of Southern history and to his own careful and persuasive reinterpretation of it. At the risk of oversimplifying his own simplification of a complex story, let me compress his narrative into a few brief paragraphs:

The South didn’t emerge as a discrete, distinct region until after the Revolution. By the early 1800s–fully two centuries after Jamestown–the forces of slavery, agrarianism, economics, and geography were slowly beginning to shape the Southern social order. Institutions of politics, religion, education, and business reinforced the identity. As the century wore on and the South lost control of Congress, the White House, and public opinion, an oppression psychosis set in; the white aristocrat’s way of life was under attack, and his response was aggressively defensive. The planter-politician-businessman enforced a uniform white attitude based on loyalty and honor and fear, and though there were whites who did not agree, they were effectively intimidated into silent acquiescence.

Through the crucial middle decades of the nineteenth century, through the Civil War and Reconstruction and the resurgence of white supremacy, one petrifying and imprisoning myth after another kept the white South solid. Turning defeat and humiliation into pride and nostalgia for the “good old days,” the ruling planters turned-“colonels” learned to glorify defeat, to justify bigotry, and to purify their hearts with religious and literary mythology. “Separate but equal” was invented in this

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pre-twentieth-century period.

Henry Grady’s “New South” movement of the 1880s was a variation on this theme in that it tried to define the region’s future, not its past–but as Paul Gaston made abundantly clear in The New South Creed, the Grady Bunch managed to cling to white supremacy and the Southern status quo. The Populist movement of the same period did try to redefine the Southern past, and for a brief time its leaders sought to elevate democracy by uniting the powerless majority of whites and blacks But Jim Crow leaders fumed the movement around, and egalitarian yeomen became racist demogogues. Southern Progressives of the 1920s fared no better, and the literary Agrarians of the 1930s were unabashed reactionaries who yearned for antebellum white paternalism and privilege.

It was not until the 1940s that the white supremacy myth showed the first signs of weakness. The democratizing influences of the New Deal and World War II stirred Dixiecrat reaction, and when that failed, increasingly alarmed racists dusted off some antique myths–massive resistance, interposition, nullification–to hold the tide. But the solid South of the White supremacists began to lose its powerful grip as black resistance swelled, the courts compelled change, the nation and the world condemned racism, and more Southern whites joined the crusade against racism.

The old guard said it was the end of the South, but wiser Southerners observed that it was only the end of the myth–and out of that notion came the impulse to create new myths and symbols and rhetoric suitable for the modern South.

The second half of Stephen Smith’s provocative book identifies three new mythic themes in the contemporary South: equality, distinctiveness, and a sense of place and community. These ideas aren’t developed as thoroughly as they might have been, and that is perhaps the weakness of the book. But Smith’s modern themes, like his synthesis of Southern history, may serve the purpose he intended: not to present a definitive argument, but simply to introduce a new way of looking at things.

The theme of equality involves a revision of history, a redefinition: the rediscovery of libertarian documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights) advanced by Southern Presidents (Jefferson, Madison); the impulse of Jacksonian Democracy; the prophetic dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the “separate but equal” ruling of 1896. Smith cites historians such as C. Vann Woodward and George Tindall, journalists such as Ralph McGill and Harry Ashmore, politicians such as Terry Sanford and LeRoy Collins, and activists led by Martin Luther King Jr. and many others as the vanguard of a new Southern tradition of equality.

In support of his second new theme, distinctiveness, Smith argues that the South is still different from the rest of the country, as it always has been–but now often in positive ways, from its music, food, language to its literature and oral traditions. This and the final theme–the sense of place and community (by which he means such characteristics as family ties, attachment to land and nature, etc.)–are harder to sustain as examples of a new mythology. In fact, Smith acknowledges that growth and other manifestations of contemporary Southern life pose serious threats to the survival of a progressive new mythology in the heart of Dixie.

Understanding the cultural myths that thrive in a society is an important step in the direction of understanding reality–the true meaning of our past, present, and future. Thanks to Stephen Smith’s insightful book, we have more much-needed help in understanding the once and future South.

Preacher’s Parable.

By John Egerton

Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, p. 23

Forty Acres and A Goat. By Will D. Campbell. (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, Ltd., 1986. 336 pp. $14.95.)

An unusual combination of life experiences has shaped Will Campbell’s career as a preacher, farmer, social activist, and writer.

He was born and raised in a hardscrabble farm family in south Mississippi during the lean years between the two world wars. He was ordained in a country Baptist church when he was 17 years old. He was a medic in the Pacific in World War II. He graduated from Wake Forest University and the divinity school of Yale University. For six years in the 1950s, he was a race relations troubleshooter in the South for the National Council of Churches. And for the past 25 years, he has headed a Nashville-based “rag-tag bunch of bootleg preachers and drop-out parishioners” known as the Committee of Southern Churchmen.

Nine years ago, in a book called Brother to a Dragonfly, Campbell told the story of two boys become men–he and his brother Joe–in those years of poverty and turmoil that marked the South in the middle decades of this century. It was a remarkable book, lavishly praised by such literary giants as Walker Percy and Robert Penn Warren, and it was a finalist in the National Book Awards competition and a winner of several other non-fiction honors.

Before and after Brother to a Dragonfly, Campbell wrote a half-dozen other volumes on religion, race, and the human tragedy, including a novel, The Glad River, that linked 16th-century Anabaptists in the Netherlands and 20th-century Southern Baptists in Louisiana.

He is an unconventional man, an uncommon preacher and writer with a common touch that is incisive, inclusive, and often eloquent. His new book, Forty Acres and a Goat, is more in the style of Brother to a Dragonfly than his other works, and it is, like the man himself, hard to classify. His publisher calls it a memoir, but it is more nearly a parable or an allegory. Its characters include historical figures, ordinary people, multiple souls in singular bodies, animals that behave like humans (and vice versa), and several members of the Campbell clan.

The forty acres in question make up a rocky patch of hillsides and creeksides where Will and Brenda Campbell have lived for more than twenty years. The goat was a family pet named–like so many people and things in middle Tennessee–for Andrew Jackson, who once lived in the neighborhood. The story, in its most basic dimension, is about the little farm and its menagerie of animals and the people who have come and gone there.

But there is much more to it than that. It is about land and time, ancestry and kinship, civil rights and human wrongs, manifest destiny and original sin. The two protagonists, Will Campbell and a more symbolic but no less real character named T. J. Eaves, grapple throughout with the crucible of race, a white man and a black man striving to understand the single most complex and enduring test ever to face this country of immigrants and captives.

“Say good-bye to Jackson,” Eaves tells Campbell as the two men part company near the end of the story, and when his friend and brother is out of sight, Campbell hears his own voice saying, “Well, we almost made it.”

In real life–and in good books–things are never quite finished, never wrapped up in pretty little bundles that won’t come undone. So it is in Will Campbell’s parable. And so it is with Campbell himself, and with the people about whom he writes so compellingly, and with us all.

John Egerton’s most recent book is Southern Food. He lives and works in Nashville.

A brave voice in the wilderness

Reviewed by John Egerton

Vol. 14, No. 2, 1992, pp. 29-30

Simple Decency & Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938-1963, by Linda Reed. (Indiana University Press, 1991. 257 pp.).

In a half-century of painful fits and starts preceding Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott, a thin trickle of Southerners, white and black, opposed the angry tide of racial discrimination that flowed from region-wide passage of the segregation laws.

The efforts were meager, halting, ambivalent, and finally, woefully inadequate. On a few occasions, independent people and delegates from Southern organizations and institutions came together in hopes of finding comprehensive solutions to the region’s social problems.

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Such gatherings sometimes emboldened people to be more frankly and outspokenly critical, more courageous, than they dared to be alone.

Of all these collective quests for what historian Linda Reed calls simple decency and common sense, none was bigger or more ambitious–or initially more promising–than the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, an all-Southern network of progressives organized in Birmingham in November 1938.

Reed’s book is the first full-scale treatment of the SCHW and its education and research wing, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, since Thomas A. Krueger’s book, And Promises to Keep, was published 25 years ago. With the benefit of those additional years of hindsight, historians can now put these two groups in sharper perspective, and Reed does that well. Of particular value is her assessment of the increasing activism of SCEF after it split with the founding group and the latter folded in 1948 (Krueger’s study didn’t go beyond that date.)

Among the strengths of Reed’s study is her discourse on the realization among white liberals in the organizations that Jim Crow laws were at the root of the South’s social, cultural, political, and economic malaise (most blacks had long since figured that out). With insight and sensitivity, she shows how massive was the resistance to such outspoken whites as James Dombrowski, Clark Foreman, Aubrey Williams, and Virginia Durr, all of whom were branded as radicals and eventually as Communists by the reactionaries in power. It was red-baiting, in fact, as much as anything else, that finally sealed the doom of the two organizations.

The involvement of some prominent public figures of the time in SCHW and SCEF activities–Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Porter Graham, Mary McLeod Bethune–is well-handled here though not much is added to earlier accounts. Of more interest to me is the new and revealing material on some lesser-known activists, both white and black, whose contributions to the cause of racial justice deserve wider attention. In this group are such people as Carl and Anne Braden, Osceola McKaine, Witherspoon Dodge, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Lucy Randolph Mason, Paul Christopher, Maury Maverick, Homer P. Rainey, and John B. Thompson.

Well before Brown and Montgomery, a remnant of Southerners of both races tried to point the way to a season of social change that they saw as long overdue, ultimately inevitable, and in the best interests of the region and its people.

For their idealism and vision, says Linda Reed, they paid a high price. Her book brings a fascinating band of progressive Southerners into focus, some of them for the first time, and follows them from the late thirties into the sixties. They bear following, and remembering. So does this book.

John Egerton lives in Nashville and from there describes, comments on, and interprets the South with rare quality and distinction.

Odyssey of a Southern Radical

Reviewed by John Egerton

Vol. 14, No. 4, 1992, pp. 29-30

James A. Dombrowski: An American Heretic, 1897-1983, Frank T. Adams (University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1992, 377 pages).

It’s the American Dream in another of its infinite versions: a shy youngster from Tampa, Fla., son of a Lutheran merchant, grandson of Polish immigrants, strives in high school to prove that he is an excellent and altogether worthy student. He works hard to save for college, goes off to serve in France during World War I, and then enters Georgia’s prestigious Methodist university, Emory, at its new campus in Atlanta. A fraternity man and an honor student, he is so highly regarded that the university hires him as its alumni secretary right after he graduates in 1923. Then, within six years, he is ordained into the Methodist ministry and pursues graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley, at Harvard and Columbia, and at Union Theological Seminary in New York. By the time he is 32 years old in 1929, James Anderson Dombrowski has demonstrated impressively that all things are possible in this great land, even for Southern boys with strange-sounding foreign names.

But life seldom follows a storybook course, even in America. In June 1929, Jim Dombrowski was arrested and jailed during a workers’ strike near Elizabethton, Tenn. He was accused of being a “dangerous agitator,” a Communist, even an accessory to the murder of a police officer. The charges were dropped a few hours later, but the experience had more of a lasting impact on him than 10 years of formal higher education. In fact, you might say that it was at Elizabethton that Dombrowski’s education—not to mention the altered course of his fascinating life—really got its start

It is this little-known life—this odyssey of a Southern radical of the 1930s and beyond—that social critic and biographer Frank T. Adams captures so impressively in these pages. Dombrowski was a Christian Socialist who spent his entire professional career working for racial equality and other social goals in his native South. At the Highlander Folk School, the Southern Conference for

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Human Welfare, and the Southern Conference Education Fund—three of this region’s most radical and controversial institutions of the mid-20th century—the tall, soft-spoken reformer was one of the first of a handful of white Southerners to oppose racial segregation in the generation before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Montgomery bus boycott of the mid-1950s brought the long-smoldering civil rights issue to the surface.

Dombrowski was not your average Southerner, for obvious reasons, but the South had its hooks in him just the same. When he was young and impressionable—and still deep in Dixie—the American Dream beckoned to him like the Holy Grail.

His religious commitment was awakened in him here, and it never left him. His idealism, his understanding and empathy for the black minority, his belief in the promise of democracy—all these were a part of his Southern heritage.

The great value of books like this is that they rescue from obscurity heroic and courageous people who would otherwise be lost to us forever.

The record is full of demagogues, charlatans, knaves, and scoundrels who sold us down the river in the name of mother, God, and country. Far too little is known about the men and women, white and black, who tried to tell us, long before we were disposed to listen, that segregation was a bilbo (that’s a leg iron on a slave ship, and an infamous politician’s signature), and we could only free ourselves from it by speaking the truth about democracy, equality, and justice.

Only two things mystify me about this excellent biography. One is that it took more than 25 years after Dombrowski’s retirement to bring his story into print.

The other is that the publisher would find it necessary to charge a prohibitively high price for the hardcover edition—and a hardcover price for the paperback ($49.50 and $22.50).

Too many people who need to read this book will miss it for that reason. I hope the libraries, at least, won’t pass it up, and that those who can’t afford it will go there and check it out.

One way or the other, we need to spread the word about the Frank Adams rendition of Jim Dombrowski’s life.

John Egerton’s latest book is Shades of Gray. He works now on a study of Southern racial relations during the eve of the civil rights movement.

The Most Hated Man in Alabama

Reviewed by John Egerton

Vol. 15, No. 2, 1993, pp. 20-22

Taming the Storm: The Life and Times of Frank M. Johnson, Jr., and the South’s Fight over Civil Rights, by Jack Bass (Doubleday, New York, 1993, 512 pages).

The Judge: The Life & Opinions of Alabama’s Frank M. Johnson Jr., by Frank Sikora (Black Belt Press, Montgomery, 1992, 340 pages).

The scene was electrifying: More than 25,000 citizens, most of them black, were massed on Dexter Avenue in front of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery on a raw and rainy March morning in 1965. They had marched from Selma, fifty miles away, in a peaceful demonstration for the unhindered right vote, a right soon to be guaranteed them by a new federal law.

Their leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., once the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church nearby, stood at the very spot where Jefferson Davis had taken the oath of office as president of the Confederate States of America one hundred and four years before. “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” King shouted.

Inside the Capitol, Governor George C. Wallace parted the curtains at his office window and gazed on this amazing drama with scowling, sneering bitterness. He had used every legal weapon at his disposal to prevent it, and he had failed.

A few blocks down the street, at a window in the federal building, Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr., the man whose decision had assured King of victory and Wallace of defeat also watched as the marchers passed on the street below, singing and shouting joyfully. He felt a sense of assurance and satisfaction, even pride—not because he was pro-King or anti-Wallace, but because the rule of law had prevailed.

“From the moment I issued the order permitting that march,” he said later, “I had been certain that I had done what was right according to the laws of this nation.” And to that he added, on another occasion, this further concluding thought: “You can’t have a government like we have, a republic with a constitution like we have, and permit discrimination against people on the basis of race or color. You can’t have that. It runs contrary to the form of government we have.”

It is Frank Johnson’s understanding of “the form of government we have,” and his performance as an interpreter of its ambiguities, that provide the sum and substance of these two biographies. Jack Bass and Frank Sikora, veteran Southern journalists and court-watchers, have drawn on their long acquaintance with the judge, his opinions, and his times to craft portraits of impressive depth and clarity.

That they are essentially admiring portraits is hardly surprising, and altogether understandable. Johnson’s quiet courage in calling shots as he saw them brought down the wrath of the white multitude upon him—all manner of threats and even some attempts on his life—but he suffered the hostility without complaint, and stayed the course, and now he hears some of his harshest critics acknowledge that he was right.

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Even George Wallace, who in the 1960s had demanded Johnson’s impeachment, smeared him as a traitor and a mentally unbalanced tyrant and said he needed “a barbed-wire enema,” sent word through the judge’s wife, Ruth Johnson, that he was “sorry for all the heartache I’ve caused you and all the trouble I’ve given you for the things I’ve said. I was wrong.”

There is so much drama here: the Montgomery bus boycott school desegregation, the “Freedom Riders,” voter registration, reapportionment, the efficient court that brooked no disrespect for the law of for his authority as its interpreter. From the bench he was as intimidating as a Marine colonel. Only from a distance or in cowardly anonymity did his most venomous critics dare to threaten him, bombing his mother’s home in l968.

If Judge Johnson’s Lincolnesque qualities invite hero worship (he does come across as something of a twentieth-century emancipator, tall, quiet, brave, brooding), his down-to-earth qualities tend to balance the picture. The Bass book is especially useful in detailing Johnson’s family background and the elements of his character and personality.

The personal side of the man makes his performance as a judge seem all the more intriguing. He came up in a pocket of independent Republicans—Unionists who had spurned the Confederacy—north Alabama’s Winston County, where his father was a probate judge. Frank, Jr., oldest of seven children, married Ruth Jenkins in 1938, when he was twenty and she was eighteen.

They have been together ever since—through college and law school, World War II (he in the Army, she in the Navy), law practice in the little town of Jasper, a stint as U.S. attorney in Birmingham, and almost forty years on the federal bench. Personal tragedy has shadowed their lives; their only child, an adopted son, committed suicide in 1975, when he was twenty-six.

One of Johnson’s classmates and casual friends at the University of Alabama law school was George Wallace, who came across then as “a genuine Franklin Roosevelt socialist.” The more conservative Johnson was less drawn to politics than he was to the law, and he immersed himself in it so deeply that he graduated at the top of his class in 1943.

His support of Dwight Eisenhower for President in 1952 soon brought him an assignment as U.S. attorney, and in 1955, when Eisenhower named him to the bench serving the middle district of Alabama, Frank Johnson became the youngest federal judge in the country.

His first ten years in the Montgomery courtroom coincided with the most tumultuous period of Southern history since the Civil War. This tense and emotional time—the civil rights decade, 1955-65—is the primary focus of Frank Sikora’s book. Drawing extensively from interviews with the judge and from court transcripts, he recounts and dramatizes the cases that challenged and finally overturned the segregation laws. Sikora, an Alabama journalist since the mid-1960s, interviewed Judge Johnson on numerous occasions over a thirteen-year period. Roughly one-third of The Judge is in Johnson’s own words.

Jack Bass’s book is richer in the historical context surrounding his subject, and in legal analysis; like Sikora, he also makes extensive use of interviews and transcripts. Bass was a reporter in the Carolinas in the 1960s. Previous books on Southern politics and contemporary history include Unlikely Heroes, another story of Southern judges and the civil rights issue.

All in all, these two books complement each other nicely. Frank Johnson comes out of them as another of the South’s unlikely heroes, perhaps one of its greatest—a man of courage and integrity making tough, fair, wise decisions and delivering them in a calm, clear, firm voice while all about him the storms of controversy raged.

Martin Luther King once described Judge Johnson as “a man who gave true meaning to the word ‘justice.'” The two men met only once outside the courtroom. Bass recounts the occasion:

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After the hearings adjourned one day, Johnson stepped onto a crowded elevator in the court house and saw King. The judge nodded in recognition and said, “How are you, Dr. King?”

King nodded back and said, “Fine. How are you, Judge?”

That was all.

Johnson’s halo, like King’s—like every all-too-human saint’s—has sometimes slipped a little, and both Bass and Sikora wisely let some tiny warts show through. Thus we see Johnson the tobacco-chewer, the whiskey-sipper, the mild cusser, the religious skeptic. In other words, Johnson the ordinary fellow, the guy who grows roses and makes furniture and fishes, who is, when he is with his wife and his closest friends, a warm and caring and sometimes funny man.

The only inconsistency that I could find in these two accounts concerns the judge’s eyes—eyes that “can cut someone in two,” remembered one fearful litigant, or that “look at you like he’s aiming down a rifle barrel,” recalled another. So are they blue, as Jack Bass declares, or brown, as Frank Sikora maintains?

Judge Johnson may have to render his own opinion to settle the matter once and for all.

John Egerton is currently working on a book about the South during the period from Roosevelt to Brown with “lots of SRC history woven in.”

A Life in Letters

Reviewed by John Egerton

Vol. 15, No. 3, 1993, pp. 15-16

How Am I to be Heard? Letters of Lillian Smith, edited by Margaret Rose Gladney (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1993, 384 pages).

One of the most striking—and consequential—changes in the modern culture of the South and the Nation is the demise of letter-writing. Just fifty years ago, it was the principal means of long-distance communication; now the telephone, the fax, audio and video recorders—and, strangely, what appears to be a declining interest in communicating at all—have made lengthy and informative letters a curiosity, if not an artifact.

Too bad for us all, not only now but later. For one thing, it’s going to mean that when someone like Margaret Rose Gladney comes along to gather up the correspondence of a fascinating and influential figure long since departed, there’s not going to be much to go on—certainly nothing like the abundant wealth of letters written by Lillian Smith, who was without a doubt one of the most fascinating if not influential figures of the mid-century South.

The bare outline of Smith’s seven decades as a Southerner is intriguing enough in itself. Born and raised in an upper-class merchant-farmer family in Florida and the north Georgia mountains (their summer home), she aspired to a career as a pianist and received some conservatory training. But a more conventional life as a teacher pulled her away, and after a brief teaching experience at a Methodist mission school in China, she returned to the home near Clayton, Georgia, where her parents had moved permanently to operate their summer camp for girls. By 1930, after her father had died, Smith became the owner and manager of the camp—and she began, at about the same time, to express her thoughts and feelings on paper.

She also had entered by then into a personal relationship with Paula Snelling, a part-time counselor at the camp and a teacher the rest of the time at a school in Macon. For all of four decades, Smith and Snelling maintained a stable and intimate partnership that both they and their family and friends tacitly acknowledged as a de facto same-sex marriage. They founded a literary magazine in 1936 that changed names twice (the last being South Today), grew to a circulation of ten thousand, and lasted until the mid-1940s. They also ran Laurel Falls Camp, a substantial enterprise, until 1948. Smith in the meantime wrote two books that brought her a measure of both fame and notoriety: Strange Fruit, a 1944 novel about a love affair between a white man and a black woman in the South, and Killers of the Dream, a nonfiction work of Southern social criticism, largely autobiographical and confessional, published in 1949.

From the time of her emergence as an observer and essayist on the ills of Southern culture in the late 1930s until her death in 1966, Lillian Smith wrote about white-black and male-female relationships in the South with a depth of insight and candor that few others could equal, then or since. When I first encountered Killers of the Dream in the 1960s, at least fifteen years after its publication, it had an immediacy and a degree of revelation that struck me as powerfully as if it had just been written. I still think of it as one of the most meaningful books about the South that I have ever read.

At times, her books and articles betrayed a tone of preachiness, of lecturing if not scolding. That was probably inevitable and unavoidable; she was an idealist, an outspoken liberal activist, and she had deep feelings about the wrongs that privileged Southern whites had inflicted upon their brothers and sisters of another color or class. She yearned to “understand everybody,” to explain their behavior. Few people have ever studied the sickness of racism as deeply as she did. If she sometimes sounded a bit pedantic, perhaps it was because she knew what she was talking about

But her letters were also an integral part of her effort to influence others—to inform, to persuade, to incite—and reading them now is more engaging and stimulating to me than, say, re-reading Killers of the Dream or Strange Fruit. As she did in her personal encounters, which were numerous and varied, Smith showed in her letters another side of herself: informal, responsive, collegial, warm and witty. She clearly had a way with words—and when she focused her verbal energies on one listener, one reader, she was at her best as a writer.

Rose Gladney skillfully displays all of those Smithian attributes in these pages, not only in the letters she has chosen to use but in her own amplifying notes and commentaries that put the letters into context. Gladney, who teaches American Studies at the University of Alabama, began her work with the Smith correspondence fifteen years ago. More than mere compilation informs the finished product; Gladney shows an understanding of Lillian Smith and her times that is as thorough as it is open and

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honest.

These letters reinforce and expand the image of Smith that emerges from a reading of her books. She practiced, in race relations, precisely what she preached: a comprehensive sharing of life with others on the planet as equals, and an understanding of integration as the achievement of unity and wholeness, whether among individuals or within a community or a society. She didn’t retreat into silence or equivocate or mince words when she talked or wrote about the great ideas that energized her—race in particular. The anonymous threats and the real acts of violence aimed at her (arson most especially) did sometimes terrify her, but she gave no public hint of her fear.

What she dreaded more than men with torches was the feeling of being dismissed as “just a nice woman helping Negroes,” not a serious writer with creative talent. The “little humiliations” were the worst. In her never-ending battles with white moderates and liberals-men, usually—she seemed unable to get on equal footing. Ralph McGill and Hodding Carter in particular drove her to distraction with their cutting remarks. “Why can’t I be heard?” she demanded to know. No answer she ever got put her mind at ease.

But history has a way of evening things. Before World War II had ended, Lillian Smith had taken “a firm and public stand in opposition to segregation”—this in declining an invitation to join the board of the newly-formed Southern Regional Council, which would not take such a stand until 1951. McGill and Carter, on the other hand, would not come around to her point of view—and history’s—until after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954.

There can be little doubt that she got less recognition than she deserved while she was living. But as her letters and Rose Gladney’s supporting text make clear, Smith got the ultimate and decisive nod: She was right.

Nashville author and Lillian Smith Award winner John Egerton’s newest book about the South, to be published by Knopf in 1994, covers much of the period during which Lillian Smith wrote, the years from Roosevelt through Brown.

Delta Democrat

Reviewed by John Egerton

Vol. 15, No. 4, 1993, pp. 22-23

Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist, by Ann Waldron (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1993, 369 pages).

All through the late 1950s and early ’60s, as Mississippi led the white South into its second stinging lost-cause humiliation in less than a century, you could have collected the Magnolia State’s voices of sanity in the back room of Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville—and they would have rattled around like B-Bs in a boxcar.

There was the historian James Silver at Ole Miss, eventually to be run out of the state. (Will Campbell had already departed.) Silver’s Oxford neighbor William Faulkner sometimes wrote or spoke eloquently about the South’s afflictions. There were a few editors—Oliver Emmerich in McComb, Ira Harkey in Pascagoula, Hazel Brannon Smith in Lexington, George McLean in Tupelo, and the quixotic P.D. East in Pedal, down by Meridian. No doubt a few others were scattered here and there, risking life and limb by expressing the radical belief that federal laws and court rulings applied to the South, yea, even to Mississippi.

And there was Hodding Carter, editor and publisher of Greenville’s Delta Democrat-Times. He had been at it for much longer than the others—since the 1930s—and he was an inspiration to them: an aggressive and pugnacious journalist of the old school, a man more devoted to his craft than to his business, more committed to finding and publishing the truth than to the get along-go along boosterism so common among, small-city publishers.

The combination of his fearless attacks in the DD-T on racial intolerance and his national exposure through books, magazines articles, and a Pulitzer Prize made him the most prominent white Mississippi in the uncrowded field of social criticism. He never ducked a fight. After the Mississippi House of Representatives censured him by a vote of eighty-nine to nineteen in 1955, Carter put his angry response on page one: “I herewith resolve by a vote of one to zero that there are 89 liars in the state legisla-

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ture,” and “those 89 character mobbets can go to hell collectively or singly and wait there until I back down.”

By Mississippi standards, Hodding Carter was a flaming liberal, a prominent and prosperous white man who refused to defend the unequal and unjust patterns of white supremacy that the majority accepted uncritically as the Southern Way of Life. From a wider perspective—and with the aid of hindsight—he looks more like a flaming moderate, a man who insisted throughout his career that he favored segregation (as late as 1963, he threatened to sue his publisher for calling him “one of the South’s leading integrationists”).

In the context of his time and place, it seems a bit simplistic and misleading to call him a racist, as the title of Ann Waldron’s warts-and-all biography of Carter does. The tag certainly applied when he took his Louisiana Confederate sensitivities to college in Maine in the 1920s, but when he got to Greenville in 1936, he was instantly in conflict with the undisputed king of Southern racists, Senator Theodore Bilbo, and for the next eighty years Carter’s editorial dueling pistols were seldom holstered.

As a native Southerner herself (a University of Alabama graduate who has worked for papers in Atlanta, Tampa, St. Petersburg, And Houston), Ann Waldron is not at all uncomfortable with or perplexed by the ambiguities in the Carter chronicle; such seemingly contradictory twists and turns are so much in keeping with regional character that they hardly need explaining. With a good reporter’s unflinching detachment, she builds her fact-rich chronology brick by brick, without much interpretive mortar in the joints.

The emerging portrait captures the editor and author, his wife Betty Werlein Carter of New Orleans, their three sons, and to a lesser degree their friends and family, the river city of Greenville, the state of Mississippi, and the South. Betty Carter’s substantial contribution to her husband’s career (in quiet sacrifice of her own ambitions) is an integral part of the story, and so are the triumphs and tragedies of their sons.

Hodding Carter himself is the primary figure throughout, of course, and several things about him stick in the mind. One is his love of writing, his obsession with its unending challenge, and his prolific outpouring of work—editorials, magazine articles, books (about twenty in all) of contemporary fact and opinion, history, fiction, and even poetry. Another is his complex character: courtly and combative, soft-hearted and hot-tempered, pro-Roosevelt and anti-Truman (and an Eisenhower backer in 1952), puritanical, honor-driven, past-haunted, patriotic, hard-drinking, given to bouts of depression.

He was better at attacking than defending, as witness his blistering campaigns against Huey Long and other Southern demagogues, the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, the Communists, Joe McCarthy, the NAACP, the Dixiecrats, smugly self-righteous Northerners, the White Citizens’ Council, civil rights activists working in Mississippi, protesters against the war in Vietnam. On the other side, he stood up for Greenville, for civil liberties, for underdogs, for fairness and justice, for the Constitution, and for the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954 (the court could not have done otherwise, he said, “in light of democratic and Christian principles”).

There is much to reflect upon in Waldron’s telling of this extraordinary man’s productive but short life (he died at sixty-five in 1972, and his last decade was eclipsed by blindness and a multitude of other infirmities, physical and mental). Waldron has dug deep for the facts, and organized them well.

Too seldom, for my taste, does she venture to explain or interpret or analyze the facts, or to offer her opinion on their meaning. Once in a while, though, she lays it out there—as, for example, near the end of the book, when she concludes that “the persecution he suffered” was a factor in Carter’s deterioration:

“The people of Mississippi literally drove him crazy. It is a miracle that this proud and sensitive man endured for as long as he did the calumny, the slurs, the insults, the abuse, and the ridicule that his neighbors poured upon him. Perhaps the bitter segregationists did not drive him out of town … but their evil, malicious words helped break his spirit and his mind.”

Now there’s an informed judgment with some meat on it.

The thing I always liked about Hodding Carter was his willingness—his aggressive eagerness—to tell you what he thought. You didn’t have to agree with everything he said to admire his forthrightness and courage. He was probably as much of an integrationist as any white Mississippian of his time could be, and stay in the game. Ann Waldron presents him in such a way that his strengths and flaws seem altogether real and human and understandable. I think Carter the journalist, the reporter, the editor, would have admired very much the thorough job she did.

Nashville writer John Egerton’s latest book on Southern history, Speak Now Against The Day, will be published in the fall of 1994.