by Jason Sokol
This was a slog of a book for me even though it was very interesting. Nancy picked it up for me at the Edwardsville Library thinking I would like it. It was a foregone conclusion I would especially growing up where I did and also spending time living in Mississippi. When my family moved to Caruthersville in 1971, I had no clue that the town was only a couple of years removed from integration. In fact, the school where my father was a principal was the old black high school Booker T. Washington. I look back on it now in amazement that I actually lived through that piece of history. I was completely oblivious to it growing up though. Well, not completely oblivious. I noticed right away that the blacks lived on one side of town and the whites on the other. I noticed that the golf course and swimming pools did not allow blacks. At the time I just blindly accepted that it was the way of life. How could you possibly know when you are a kid and you grow up in the middle of it? I also found out that you were ostracized if you did say something about it. That's kind of the point of this book. When segregation is woven into the fabric of society as deep as it was, it's a shock to the system to think that that way of life is wrong. Most caricatures of white people from the South are of the fat, racist, cracker variety. While that stereotype certainly holds true in some instances, Sokol points out that it is the exception rather than the rule. This book tries to pinpoint the effect of integration on this majority of white people.
Jason Sokol received his doctorate from the University of California-Berkeley under the tutelage of Pulitzer Prize winning American historian Leon Litwack. This book, to me, reads a lot like a doctoral thesis. Not the boring scientific kind of doctoral thesis, but the kind still reeking of academia. Not that academia is bad; its just that it is sometimes tough to read those types of things for me. This one, while tough, was palatable.
Basically Sokol, since he is covering 30 years, tries to attack the high points of integration. He does this from the white perspective based on tons of writings. These writings are mainly newspapers and editorials, but they also include some personal writings as well as scholarly articles. Everything is documented albeit with annoying end notes instead of footnotes. The high points start with some post World War II background. (The impetus of integration came about because of black soldiers who fought alongside white soldiers). It continues on spanning events in the South such as the March from Selma, New Orleans school system integration, and University integration in both Georgia and Mississippi. Throughout all of this, the central theme is repeated: the majority of whites were not complete bigots. As it turns out, a lot of white southerners wanted integration to happen because they realized the unfairness that they were perpetuating. Others knew integration was going to happen and begrudgingly conceded that there was nothing they could do about it except accept it and move on. Still others were not conceding that integration was a good thing, but they were appalled at the violence of some whites and knew they did not agree with them. This pushed them to accept integration; once again begrudgingly. One person in the book referred to integration as jumping in a pool of cold water. Once you were in for awhile you kind of got used to it.
After reading this book I have a much better understanding of things I encountered in my youth; things that I had taken at face value. No one taught the Civil Rights Movement when I was in high school. Granted when I was in high school the civil rights movement was barely 10 years implemented in many places in the South. In my hometown it was still not completely implemented; at least not in the my mind. The year after I graduated (1984), Jerrianne Malone who was white, asked Calvin Willett who was black, to be her homecoming escort. It was the first time that had ever happened in Caruthersville and that's 20 years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed. I would point out that no one made a big deal of it publicly. Privately, people talked, but mostly the talk was of disbelief that a white girl would want to do that. Civil Rights was still not completely implemented when I lived in Mississippi either. I remember meeting people who attended and graduated from Academy schools. I knew they were all white private schools, but I didn't know how they got started. I assumed they had always been there. Turns out from reading this book they were started as a reaction to integration in Mississippi. When I went to college, these Academy schools were barely 15 years in the making. Most of the people I went to college with were the first kids to spend their entire youth going to all white schools. These schools still exist today in Mississippi and Alabama.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in civil rights and/or race relations. While white southerners are not a sympathetic crowd to write about, Sokol does a good job of showing the majority white middle ground. If you want to read about the age of civil rights and you don't want the story told from either the Martin Luther King side nor the George Wallace, Ross Barnett, Bull Connor side, this book is for you.
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