
          Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets,
1929-1959. Edited by Anthony P. Dunbar, Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1981.
          
            
              Tullos, AllenAllen Tullos
            
          
          Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 14-15
          
          The past remains as unpredictable as ever. As proof, we have Tony
Dunbar's fine book, Against the Grain. From scattered,
vagrant and half-forgotten sources, he has fashioned a story which is
not only important in its own right, but also is suggestive of what
remains uncollected and as yet, untold.
          Dunbar himself acknowledges that his narrative is only "a piece of
the history" of Southern radicalism and protest in the 1930's. "No
single work," he writes, "could record all that happened in the mines
and factories, all that was attempted by women's organizations, or all
that resulted from the dissatisfaction of blacks and the poor in
little towns without number." In its fashion Against the
Grain now joins several recent books already on the shelf:
Donald Grubbs' Cry from the Cotton, Thomas Krueger's
exploration of The Southern Conference for Human Welfare,
H.L. Mitchell's autobiography, Ted Rosengarten's All God's
Dangers, Nell Painter's edition of Hosea Hudson's
recollections and essays and oral histories in numerous issues of
Southern Exposure. Additionally, these volumes of
printed word have appeared concurrently with a rediscovery and
reissuance of the 1930s music of Southern working folk. Record labels
such as Folkways, Rounder, County, Flyright and Clanka [unclear] have tracked down the scratchy old
seventy-eight rpm recordings and made them available, with extensive
annotation, on shiny new albums. (This is a story for another
occasion, however; readers interested in surveying the range of these
musical materials should write Roundup Records, P.O. Box 147,
E. Cambridge, MA 02141 and ask for a catalog or the current issue of
The Record Roundup.)
          All this energy betokens several genuine cravings. First in mind
are the empowering effects which come through the rediscovery of
indigenous traditions of Southern protest and activism. Each
generation needs to know the persistent themes of its predecessors,
the context of their temperaments, the campaigns waged, the findings
and keepings. Awareness of kinship with the critical past, Dunbar
knows, can help clarify insights and shore up our courage. A rock in a
weary land.
          Against the Grain traces the origins, emergence and
transformation of the South's "radical gospel" 

uprising. This was a
movement which shook not so much the established church as the lives
of many farmers and millworkers. For a time it restored grass-root
meaning to the word Protestant. Ultimately, of
course, it had its failures. The redress of class power and racial
prejudice are no modest goals. The movement's ommission from or
slighting by standard history books testifies to Lillian_Smith's
understanding that history's winners name their age and to the
selective orientation of historians interpreting backwards from these
winners.
          But as the swift ages roll, new possibilities appear and old
alternatives revive, provided there's someone like Tony Dunbar around
to prod us with the memories. His interpretation first establishes the
influence of teachers, people such as Alva Taylor of the Vanderbilt
School of Religion, Reinhold Niebuhr and Harry Ward at New_York's
Union Theological Seminary. These teachers themselves carry the spirit
of a generation older than Dunbar's central characters: Claude and
Joyce Williams, Don and Constance West, Miles and Zilphia Horton, Ward
Rogers, Alice and Howard Kester, James Dombrowski, Elizabeth Hawes,
and others. Dunbar then follows these "students," their ideas,
institutions and influences primarily through the 1930s, but also, in
more summary fashion, right down to now.
          Yet, Dunbar is far from suggesting that the orders went out from an
old line of graybeards to a young cadre of ideologues. Perhaps the
most important notion in Against the Grain in is that
Southern farmers and working people carry, within their own cultural
resources, the seeds of populist revolt. And that organizers and
teachers who can speak the language of the culture, who can, for
instance, bring home a radical gospel, can help these seeds to
flower. Such was clearly the case in the mid-1930s with the Southern
Tenant Farmers Union. Thousands of black and white Mississippi and
Arkansas tenants risked their lives in several strikes. This rising,
before it was broken by state and vigilante violence and by the
political clout of certain Southern Democrats within the New_Deal
coalition, "marked the high point of agricultural unionism in the
South and provided an example of the races working together which
would not be repeated until the civil_rights movement emerged two
decades later."
          Finally, a note on the book itself as object and artifact. From the
dust jacket to the photographs which bind it's beginning and end, the
University of Virginia Press has done an excellent bit of
handiwork. Photographs of the participants are interspersed
throughout, along with occasional copies of period handbills, posters,
poems and song texts. The type is large and easily readable and the
overall design speaks of that rarest of modern productions, a work of
thought and care.
        
