
          Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in
Tuskegee by Robert J. Norrell. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1985. $19.95
          Reviewed by Lamar, Howard R.Howard R. Lamar
          Vol. 8, No. 2, 1986, pp. 21-24
          
          In the preface to Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights
Movement in Tuskegee, Robert J. Norrell writes that: "It is
about power: whites trying to keep control of their society and blacks
seeking more autonomy. In a larger sense, it is the story of two
communities, one white and one black, in the painful process of
merging into a single if different community." On first impression
that sounds like a political scientist or a sociologist speaking of
revolutionary social and political change in abstract terms. Nothing
could be further from the truth, for Reaping the
Whirlwind may well be the most articulate, moving, personal
and compassionate scholarly case study of the impact of the Civil
Rights movement in the South to appear to date. It is both a tour de force of effective writing and a model of
fairminded reporting. The interplay between the parade of vivid
personalities in this book-judges, sheriffs, mayors, voter registrars,
academics from the Tuskegee Institute and administrators from the
local Veterans Hospital, is brillantly handled.
          Reaping the Whirlwind focuses mainly on the
thirty-

one years between 1941 and 1972 when blacks and whites fought
an intense battle as to who would control political offices in the
City of Tuskegee, Ala., and the surrounding County of Macon. It was in
1941 that the softspoken Tuskegee Institute sociologist, Dean Charles
Gomillion, organized the Tuskegee Civic Association, a group of black
men and women, to achieve "civic democracy" by pressuring the Macon
County Board of Registrars to enroll blacks as voters. That crusade
came to an end, as it were, in 1972 when newly registered blacks, now
the majority of voters in the County, elected blacks to nearly all the
city and county offices as well as representatives to the state
legislature. Best known among the winners were Lucius Amerson, a black
sheriff who had held that off ce since 1966, and Johnny L. Ford, a
former worker for Senator Robert Kennedy and Vice President Hubert
Humphrey in the presidential campaign of 1968, who became Tuskegee's
first black mayor.
          What distinguishes this study from many others, however, is that
Norrell is as determined to understand the white conservative
rationale for resisting black political power as he is in detailing
the story of the triumph of the black voter. Norrell feels that the
thoughts and actions of white conservatives were shaped by the
community's experiences during Reconstruction when recent ex-slaves
were elected to political office under a Reconstruction state
government. Believing that they had not only lost the Civil War but
would lose control of their community, they organized to intimidate
and drive out black political leaders between 1870 and 1874, when the
election of governor George Houston symbolized the end of
Reconstruction in Alabama. Norrell offers convincing evidence that
memories of Reconstruction provided whites with the example of what
would happen again if blacks ever gained political power.
          After the violence of Reconstruction came a detente of sorts when
whites, fearing that blacks might leave the county in such large
numbers that the labor force would be depleted, sought to achieve
"Perfect Quiet, Peace and Harmony"--a white conservative's phrase--in
race relations, in part by providing training schools. As has long
been known, Tuskegee town fathers cooperated with Booker T. Washington
in 1881 to found the Tuskegee Institute as a trade school, operating
on the model of Hampton Institute in Virginia. Norrell, having seen
Washington in the context of the actual situation in Tuskegee, comes
away with a renewed respect for Washington's realistic approach and
his generally beneficial efforts for his race. At the same time he
concludes that despite the presence of both Washington and George
Washington Carver, the Institute actually did little for agriculture
and the black farmer in Macon County.
          Beginning with Washington and continuing through the term of his
successor, Robert R. Moton, both Institute officials and Tuskegee
whites worked to create a harmonious "model community" based on the
separation of the races. Nevertheless Norrell contends that a black
civil rights movement of sorts never ceased between 1870 and
1972. During his lifetime Washington was continually protesting
anti-black state legislation, the poll tax, and in particular the
disfranchisement of voters, both black and white, in the conservative
State Constitution of 1901.
          The hidden conflict surfaced anew in 1923 when a Veterans
Administration Hospital for black soldiers was located in Tuskegee,
and whites sought to control the key administrative positions. When
they failed to do so, the long-term state senator from Tuskegee,
Richard Holmes Powell, lamented that "The Negroes are gradually taking
things away from us by contesting every inch of ground, refusing all
compromise, and fighting to a finish." Eventually the Veterans
Hospital employed 1500 blacks with high-paying jobs. "In that base of
economic independence," writes Norrell, "lay the potential for
challenging conservative control of Macon County." Ironically,
educated blacks with economic independence, two main themes of Booker
T. Washington's teaching, proved to be the key to success of the civil
rights movement in Tuskegee.
          The actual drive for voter registration started on an almost
innocent note when Charles Gomillion, vouched for by two whites,
registered to vote in 1939. He did so in part to secure paved roads
and better water and sewage facilities for the black residential areas
around the Institute. Norrell finds that Gomillion was a gradualist
who felt that by cooperation between black and whites some kind of
"civic democracy" could be achieved. The remainder of Reaping
the Whirlwind is, at one level, the progressive
disillusionment and political education of Gomillion, who, by the
1960s, had been replaced by a more militant black leadership which
sought full power and not shared power. But until the 1960s it was
Gomillion and the Tuskegee Civic Association who led the fight for
registration, who instituted a successful boycott of local merchants,
and who insisted on a gradual approach.
          In 1941 with the coming of World War II, a third major force of
potentially discontented blacks appeared in Macon County when Tuskegee
Institute President Frederick Patterson persuaded the federal
government to locate an Army Airforce Training Field in Tuskegee, a
move the NAACP denounced as continuing segregation in the armed
forces. Segregation between white officers and black trainees-many of
the latter from the North and the Midwest-and conflict between black
military police and white county police threatened major
disruptions. A sense of escalating crisis developed as blacks from the
Institute, the Hospital and the air base challenged the Board of
Registrars in federal court in the case of Mitchell
v. Wright. When the Board of Registrars resigned or registered
white voters clandestinely, Governor James Folsom managed to find a
religious farmer, W. H. Bentley, who believed all men equal in the
sight of God, to serve as Registrar. Bentley registered 449 blacks in
1949, but was soon removed, and voter 

registration slowed again.
          Norrell finds that paradoxically as white candidates came to depend
more and more on black votes to be elected, the two sides had actually
stopped talking to one another. Thus what Gomillion and the Tuskegee
Civic Association and the new spokesman for the white conservatives,
state Representative Samuel M. Engelhardt, Jr., had to say has to be
told like two separated narratives. There followed in the 1950's, in
dramatic sequence, moves and counter moves. When Engelhardt and Mayor
Richard Lightfoot got the state legislature to pass a law redefining
the city's boundaries so that most black voters would be excluded, the
Civic Association responded by imposing a successful boycott on white
merchants. Then in 1958 the newly formed United States Commission on
Civil Rights heard evidence on voter discrimination in Tuskegee and
ordered fuller registration. Meanwhile in Gomillion
v. Lightfoot, the Supreme Court struck down the law
gerrymandering the city's boundaries.
          At this point, cautious liberals in Tuskegee began to question the
wisdom of Representative Engelhardt's total denial of political rights
for blacks; an accomodationist Mayor and City Council were elected in
1960, and a deeply religious local banker, J. Allen Parker, began to
try to bridge the gap between the races through talk and action. Then
suddenly the issue of school integration came to Tuskegee when the
local school board was ordered to accept thirteen qualified black
students into the all-white high school. School integration rather
than voter registration, writes Norrell, "proved to be the first major
transformation in race relations in Macon County," for it split the
white community in scores of ways, setting friend against friend,
husband against wife, ministers against their congregations.
          Norrell traces these schisms as well as the public conflicts
between Governor George Wallace and the federal courts as represented
by Judge Frank M. Johnson of Montgomery. He also explains the rise and
success of the private school movement. In this recital he tries to be
fair to all parties, but he is understandably less patient with the
various Alabama governors who played politics with Tuskegee's dilemma
during the civil rights and school desegregation movements. In the
end, school segregation was maintained and with the exception of the
Church of Christ, the local churches did not integrate.
          Paralleling the agonizing dissensions on the white side, there was
a split between Gomillion and the more militant Non-Partisan League
led by Paul Puryear, a young faculty member at the Institute, and by
Detroit 

Lee of the Veterans Hospital, who sought to elect blacks to
all offices. Soon thereafter a new movement by Institute students
began, reflecting national black unrest during the 1960s and using the
popular techniques of marches, demands, and sit-ins to secure jobs for
blacks in white-run Tuskegee stores, to have the Confederate statue
removed from the town square, and to register voters. Their acts led
to conflict between the students and the Institute Board of Trustees
and to a tragic individual confrontation when a black student, Samuel
Young, was shot by a white gas station owner. Yet it was the students
who managed to enroll 1600 rural blacks as voters and thus tipped
future elections in favor of black candidates.
          Understandably Norrell cannot suppress his excitement that somehow
out of this painful saga, majority rule democracy had come to Tuskegee
and had affected all sectors of life except for the integration of
schools and churches. Yet while acknowledging that a major social and
political revolution had occurred in this small Alabama community, he
believes that there is continuity between Washington and Gomillion and
between the Confederate veterans of 1870 and their successors, Probate
Judge William Varner, the Board of Registrars, the mayors,
Representative Engelhardt and the White Citizens Councils.
          However, I think there is a third unstated continuity in
Reaping the Whirlwind which helps explain both the long
and tortured progress towards civil rights for blacks in Tuskegee and
the American South, and the behavior of nearly all the protagonists in
this troubled story. It is that tradition of deference found in all
class and settled societies, exacerbated in the South by racial
feelings. It is deference not merely of black for white, but black for
black, white for white, sons and daughters for parents,  men for women
and women for men in the American South. That deference helped
preserve segregation by stifling a dialogue between races; it
suppressed debate within the white community; on occasion it may have
forced violence to come before an honest exchange of views. Perhaps
the greatest revolution in Tuskegee since the 1960s has been that so
many contending groups have found their voice. The views of liberals
and conservatives, of blacks and whites can be found in the local
paper, and there--in hundreds more letters--can be found so many
ideas, suggestions and protests that they suggest a latter-day revival
of the reformers of the Jacksonian Period. Norrell is right in
concluding that democracy with all its virtues and faults has now come
to Tuskegee.
          Even so there is also a new tone of mutual deference discernible in
the Exchange Bank, in the Big Bear Supermarket, at the Veterans
Hospital and among the mixed faculty at the Tuskegee Institute. It is
this continuity, in a new context, that had led Norrell to speak with
deep respect for the career and ideals of Charles Gomillion who, as he
writes, "had been an emblem of interracial cooperation, a value which
appears to be in ascendance in the county again by the late
1970's."
          Based on many personal interviews, a careful attention to federal
state, local records, newspapers, and the works of other scholars,
Reaping the Whirlwind displays a thoroughness and a sensitivity to all
points of view that it is exemplary. It avoids stereotypical heroes
and villains, accepts no easy answers, and eschews moralizing. Reaping
the Whirlwind has set high standards for future case studies--which are
needed, for as Norrell himself has noted, "only when many of these
stories are told will the South's great social upheaval be well
understood."
          
            Howard R. Lamar is William R. Coe Professor of American
History, Yale University, and a native of Tuskegee.
          
        