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You might think everything possible has already been written about the total
transformation that has overtaken the American South in the last 50 years, changing it
from the sleepy and backward-looking "Old Confederacy" into the fast-growing and
business-oriented modern region of today.
Curtis Wilkie, a sharp-eyed and sensitive journalist, covers that familiar terrain in his
new book, but he does so from a wonderfully vivid personal perspective tied to the
landmark events that he himself witnessed as both newspaperman and occasional participant.
A Mississippi native who somehow turned out to be a genuine northern-style liberal, Wilkie
gives the series of precedent-shattering events that began with the Supreme Court's
desegregation decision of 1954 a sense of you-are-there immediacy.
Wilkie was only 14 years old when that decision came down but he was a student at the
University of Mississippi eight years later when the campus erupted in shameful rioting
over the attempted enrollment of its first black student, James Meredith. His account of
that riot is one of the most vivid things in his book. Other events at which he had a
front-row seat included the "freedom rider" summer of 1964, the 1968 crusade
that ended with the assassination of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the battle of
"insurgents" against the regular party-line Mississippi delegation to the 1968
Democratic national convention, the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, and the trials of
high-profile racists like Byron de la Beckwith and Sam Bowers.
Wilkie weaves into this historical record his own autobiography; in fact the first third
or so of the book is mainly a rather charming and nostalgic look back at his own young
years.
What the reader gets from Wilkie's prose is the sense of a native southerner's personal
revulsion at what he calls "the politics of 'never'" --- his term for the
unyielding, ruthless and violent campaign to preserve racial segregation and to squash
anyone who opposed it in the slightest. He is unsparing in his condemnation of those who
pursued this policy --- politicians, media people, clergy, law enforcement personnel. Yet
he also admits to an abiding affection for his native region and a disdain for those in
the rest of the country who condemn it without having ever lived there themselves.
That affection led him actually to move back south even while he was still writing for a
bellwether northern newspaper, the Boston Globe. He persuaded his Yankee editors to let
him set up shop as their roving southern commentator and promptly moved to New Orleans. If
this book is any indication of the kind of thing he wrote for the Globe, he brought to his
assignment a detailed and even poignant eye for the southern mind, heart, and landscape.
The book is full of nicely observed character sketches of people on all sides of the
segregation battle. Some, like the racist former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, are
virtually destroyed by his pen. Jimmy Carter, while given grudging credit for his good
qualities, comes off in these pages as a rigid, stiff-necked and virtually humorless
political operator. There are also revealing glimpses of the jealousy and infighting that
afflicted the civil rights movement itself. It was by no means a united front.
The book has some minor faults. It loses some of its focus when Wilkie is assigned to
cover Arab-Israeli turmoil in the Middle East; he feels compelled to write a detailed
account of that assignment and makes rather awkward efforts to relate it to his southern
experience. Also, it seems there was hardly a politician or public figure anywhere in the
South who did not at some point earn from Wilkie the honorific "my
friend." Can that be a southern conversational gimmick that a northern
reader/reviewer takes too seriously?
No matter. Even those who may think this subject has been more than adequately covered by
scholars and historians over the years will find something new and insightful in this fine
book.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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