just people: revolution—resolution
Jason Sokol There
Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)
Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle,
and the Awakening of a Nation (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)
Most of the works on the often earth-shattering events of the American civil rights struggle have been, understandably, from the viewpoint of US blacks, who, after all, led the civil rights actions that ultimately resulted in changes of law and the economic and cultural conditions in the South and the USA in general, but also had, obviously, the most to gain from those changes. In Sokol’s new study of that period, There Goes My Everything, the author takes us through those well-known historical events, while focusing on their effects from the viewpoint of Southern whites.
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Sokol
effectively argues that there was no one Southern white viewpoint on these
issues, and that the changes won through the civil rights struggles affected
white individuals and social-economic groupings differently. By book’s end,
readers may well appreciate, as I did, Sokol’s numerous approaches and their
resulting perspectives, but in his sensitive portrayal of white Southerners, he
sometimes is also forced to tread a dangerous path where sympathetic explanations
of the positions of the vast majority of white Southerners overlaps with the
self-justifications and expedient myths created by white racists.
Despite
Sokol’s attempt to understand the white Southern mindset, moreover, the
sensitive reader might also be shocked all over again by the bigotry and
outright stupidity of the dominant Southern white views of their fellow man
(views, one must recognize, shared by plenty of Northerners as well).
Taking us
from the subtle changes that occurred in the South after World War II, a time
in which many white soldiers had been forced to experience some aspects of
racial equality through their military service, Sokol traces the minute shifts
of thought in the country of Jim Crow (for younger readers, it might have
served Sokol simply to reiterate that the Jim Crow laws were state and local
laws enacted in the Southern and border states of the US, in force between 1876
and 1967, that required racial segregation) up until the landmark Supreme Court
decision of 1954, Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down
state-sponsored school segregation. Sokol goes out of his way to quote
returning military men who had changed their perceptions of blacks on account
of their war-time experience; yet as one former air force major—a
“reconstructed Southerner”—observed, although he had “learned that a Negro was
a human being,” his personal experiences “did not suggest a region-wide
transformation.” In fact, one is tempted—even after Sokol’s numerous examples
of personal reflection and transformation—to perceive that the failures of
national leadership recounted in Nicholas Lemann’s Redemption resulted in
attitudes and laws that held the Southern whites in their thrall until the
early 1960s and beyond.
Indeed,
a great part of this book consists of a simple reiteration and explanation of
the continuation of the post-Civil War, white mindset. Ole Miss student Jan
Robertson sums up hundreds of such statements: “There was little questioning of
the way things were. It was an all-white world.” In one sentence Sokol points
up the fallacious logic that inevitably resulted from this lack of questioning:
“Like the lakes or the trees, racial separation came to possess the feel of
something natural.” As journalist Fred Powledge described white Southerners’
attitudes towards segregation: “If they did notice it, it was in the way they
noticed water flowing from a tap or hot weather in summertime—it was
unremarkable.”
The
paternalistic attitudes of most white Southerners, their continual insistence
that they related to and loved “their blacks,” are reiterated time and again
through Sokol’s study. More than any other stumbling block to logic for the
white Southerners, their belief somehow that their fellow black countrymen
accepted and even applauded the racial discrimination, and that their
acceptance, in turn, proved the black lack of initiative and, ultimately, their
racial inferiority, made it nearly impossible to understand African-Americans
as human beings with needs and demands. The marches of the late 1950s and
throughout the 1960s forced whites, beyond anything else, to comprehend that
blacks were no longer a group of beings not to be reckoned with, but were
individuals whom they had never really come to know.
Sokol
takes his reader through the many different battlegrounds of the civil rights
struggle, from early attempts to sit in front of Southern busses to
African-American visitations to white only eating establishments, from the
battles fought at the door of school houses to the covert battles within
company board rooms and on the floors of Southern industries, from the general
marches such as the infamous trip from Selma to Montgomery to the local street
skirmishes with authorities—events which, whether they admitted it or not,
changed nearly every Southern, white and black. The author also brilliantly
recaptures the various political attitudes—the Southern white connecting of
Communism with civil rights, his self-destructive linking of conservative values
with anti-unionism—that might remind some readers of the false connections
asserted by George W. Bush and members of his administration between terrorism
and Iraq, between various different kinds of terrorist motivations, and between
the need to protect US citizens from terrorism and—once more—the need to
delimit their (our) civil rights.
Despite
the preponderance of notorious Southern white bigots, violent leaders, and even
murderers—Sokol takes us again through the machinations of white Southerners
such as George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Bull Connor, Jim Clark, and shadowy KKK
members—There Goes My Everything is also filled with heroic figures, not only
great African-American leaders such as Martin Luther King, but white
individuals who stood up in the South against what they perceived as wrong.
Sokol describes the brave acts of the few parents, such as Daisy Gabrielle, who
fought their way through the gangs of outraged and heckling women to take their
children to school during the long New Orleans boycott; and he reminds us of
prominent figures such as Frances Pauley, head of the Georgia Council on Human
Relations, who braved white abuse for urging Southern whites to keep an open
mind, and the brilliant journalists—the focus of Gene Roberts and Hank
Klibanoff’s The Race Beat—like Newsweek’s Joseph Cumming,
individuals without whom the events in the South might have gone unrecorded
and, accordingly, might have resulted in little response. Some of the most
touching moments, in a book with many dramatic episodes, come from statements
of individuals who were gradually transformed from black-hating segregationists
to human beings forced to accept the changes occurring before them, individuals
who in simple observations captured profound cultural statements.
Watching
wave after wave of blacks marching through Montgomery in the famed 1965 event
from the strange vantage point of the Jefferson Davis Hotel, an unnamed man
observes to Assistant Attorney General John Doar, “The South is all gone. A
whole way of life is going right into memory,” even while nearby Alabama State
Senator Roland Copper, according to reporter Jimmy Breslin, denied those same
changes: “Don’t mean nothin’ at all. Jus’ take a look at them. They jus’ a pack
of coons.”
Many
white Southerners made these transformations by witnessing blacks demanding
their rights, while others changed in response to the virulent actions of
fellow whites. One of the most profound comments of the book comes from a North
Carolina farmer, Hugh Wilson, formerly an active racist, who gradually began
seeing things from a different perspective (as quoted in the Duke University
Oral Program) who prophesies that someday perhaps, despite the views of many of
his friends and neighbors, who “think about themselves as a white person rather
than as a person, who happens to be white,” “There will be people again”—people
who, in their simple acceptance of themselves as human beings— just folks also
likely to be fair and just people—will believe in truth, reason, and fairness.
Indeed,
Sokol’s restatement of Gunnar Myrdal’s prophetic 1944 argument that the issue
of race is not an African-American problem but a white one, and his concomitant
recognition, echoing figures such as James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, that
only the African-American can free the white from his blindness is the most
important lesson of the book. Subjugation of one people to another can only end
in both being slaves, slaves not only of the body but of the mind and heart. If
there is ever to be true social resolution in the battle for freedom, if there
will be a world of “just people,” we must all carry that lesson through our
lives, our children’s lives.
Los Angeles, December 3, 2006
Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (January 2007).
