Extraordinary | There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (Vintage)...

Interesting perspective | There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (Vintage) | Jason Sokol

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	• There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (Vintage) Jason Sokol Vintage, 2007 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Whites 'n' rights

There's a lot to admire in Jason Sokol's "There Goes My Everything," but also a good deal to regret.

The idea was excellent. Why should history always be written by the victors? The civil rights movement in the South threw up many fascinating personalities and served up many dramatic incidents. Since, as Sokol says, it was done by black people, with whites almost helpless observers, the retellings naturally concentrate on the main actors.

There are many more and thicker biographies of Martin Luther King Jr. than of Ross Barnett.

But although southern whites may have been helpless against a tide of history -- Sokol's view, not mine -- they were not only passive actors. Even when they were, they went through mental changes -- conniption fits, many times -- that have an interest all their own.

Sokol set out to interview surviving actors, both converts to integration and diehard segregationists; and to ransack the archives for contemporary journalism, essays, reports by do-gooders etc. This is a dissertation for a degree in history, and it reads like it. Not much verve but plenty of detail.

To sum 400 pages in a sentence, Sokol found that the South was never of one mind about civil rights. No kiddin'!

Sokol's approach is somewhat loose-jointed, although chapters embrace themes. The best is the one on schools, but it also raises the most troubling conceptual problem for Sokol's thesis, which is that racism was both widespread and deep in the South.

Most people, most Southerners accept that it was deep, but events, including many compiled here, bring that into question. Racism was in the South's face because it was enacted into law -- rather late, too. Jim Crow took a long time to grow up. So, why did the racial system crumble so quickly?

Sokol does not give much background, but he does note that in 1948, Henry A. Wallace's run for the presidency comprised a biracial strategy in the South. "Wallace's efforts failed in the end, although his campaign showed that some southerners might oppose segregation if given a viable forum in which to do so."

For historical reasons, the South was a one-party region. Sokol never really takes on the issue of how much racism was at the service of politics, rather than the other way around, although in a remark or two he does indicate that he is aware of the question.

So, can a structure that is built on deep foundations be brought down by a moderate storm? As Sokol himself says, many -- in fact, the majority -- of southern places adopted and adapted to civil rights without storm and stress. A few incidents gave the lead to the many. Can indifference to skin color be racism? Can racists be indifferent to skin color?

It would not be hard to pick up a daily newspaper in 2007 and find examples of far more enduring racism elsewhere. When a memorial to those who gave their lives for civil rights in the South was proposed, only about three dozen names were collected; and the collectors could hardly be charged with trepidation. Why did the South resist so mildly?

Sokol doesn't ask the question, but he answers it in a way. Most whites were at bottom indifferent to race, as compared with, say, keeping schools open. They may have said they were segregationists, and as long as they didn't have to choose between segregation and something else, they were. But when blacks (and their white accomplices, of whom I was one back in the '60s) made them choose, segregation usually fell behind.

It certainly makes it difficult for a historian when his target will not hold still, but Sokol is good at switching back and forth.

The switching also contributes to the book's irritating repetitiveness. If Sokol wrote, "Of those white southerners who came to accept integration, more were repulsed by segregationist violence than attracted to civil rights demonstrations," he wrote it 20 times. And, again, why were they not attracted to violence in the `50s and `60s? They had lived with lynchings for a long time.

The chapter on "The Contours of Political and Economic Change" is Sokol's weakest. The economic argument would have benefited from some numbers. Also, it is more than questionable whether the decline of tenant farming had much to do with black assertiveness. The decline arrived in many places long before civil rights agitation did. See, for example, my review of a rare book by an actual white tenant farmer, "Throwed Away" by Linda Flowers.

I have other knocks against this otherwise interesting book, but I will mention just one more.

There is not a word about music, other than references to "We Shall Overcome." Sokol mentions, briefly, how sports led to interracial commonality. But submitting to an organization that has been integrated by somebody else is a far different thing from going up to the window as a private individual and buying a ticket to the James Brown review. I knew quite a number of southern white boys (but few girls) who got integrated that way.

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Extraordinary

One of the best written, most thought provoking books I have ever read. It covers a vast amount of material in an extraordinarily well organized manner. And the writing style can only be described as riveting. Recommednded without reservation.

Interesting perspective

I enjoyed this book. It came from a different perspective as most civil rights books. I still do not feel sorry for white people that the world finally caught on that African Americans are human, but I better understand their mindset at the time. Just for the record, I am white, but I like to think of all humanity as people, not colors, races, ethnicities, etc....

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Absolutely Incredible - a must read!

Jason Sokol, in his first book, has given us a picture that most academic historians of the Civil Rights have not evaluated - the response of the people that had been the oppressors for hundreds of years in the Southern United States.

So many traditional histories of the Civil Rights Struggle focus on dynamic personalities like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, or Malcolm X. Many others look strictly at the legal aspects of key Supreme Court decisions such as Brown vs. the Board of Education. Yet others study the growth of "Black Power".

Sokol has taken all of these and evaluated them from a different perspective - how the oppressors became equal to the oppressed. It is a lively and original study based largely on primary materials including oral interviews of participants, legal documents, and contemporary newspapers.

I found such tidbits as the white-on-white violence and the comparison of those whites acquiescing to or supporting full integration to Communists to be fascinating stories in and of themselves. When combined with the legal fights waged by people such as Ollie McClung and the inadvertent radicals such as the Garielle family in New Orleans, Sokol provides us with a history of the Civil Rights Era that is necessary and long overdue.

There should be many studies devoted to the topics that Sokol has introduced in this work, and it should foster the flourishment of the historiography of the Civil Rights Era for years to come.

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The Second Invasion

This book is a disappointment; it is an academician's view of things. This subject cries out for a Studs Terkel-type, average-man-of-the-times interview series. We should get it in their own words, a retrospective look back by Southerners who lived through that period, one interview after another. Furthermore, the book should be without Northern commentary. Having lived through it myself in Mobile, I can tell you that feelings among white Mobilians ranged the gamut from quiet desperation and nervous hand-wringing to bitter resentment, though the resentment was aimed not so much at black people as at the Federal government and what was widely perceived as white Northern agitators, especially those who came down from the North for the sole purpose of what was seen as "meddling in business that was not their own": In other words, the natural hostility towards outsiders who interfere in the affairs of locals. In the late '50s the most deeply resented man by Southerners was President Eisenhower, because his sending troops into Little Rock felt like a second Federal invasion of the South. Most white Southerners were, however, embarrassed by the brute tactics of Bull Conner and his ilk, and were appalled by physical violence of any sort against anyone, black or white.
The enforced integration of schools and public places was, for the most part, well tolerated; it was the forced busing and more extreme components of the Civil Rights Acts of the '60s that were more resented, particularly those which infringed on the rights of private property and private ownership. These things are still (quietly) resented today, as is a certain self-righteousness among some Northerners regarding those times.
It is worth noting that many people in the South felt a grim satisfaction in observing the great difficulties encountered later in many Northern cities when it became their turn to integrate the schools (Boston comes immediately to mind), not to mention the riot-torn cities of Detroit, Newark, and so many others. Furthermore, white Southerners historically have hardly had a monopoly on racial oppression. The Federal government executed and maintained one of the most sweeping and successful racial extermination policies of any government on the face of the Earth. I believe it was a Yankee general, General Sheridan, who spoke most eloquently for his government when he said, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

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During the civil rights movement, epic battles for justice were fought in the streets, at lunch counters, and in the classrooms of the American South. Just as many battles were waged, however, in the hearts and minds of ordinary white southerners whose world became unrecognizable to them. Jason Sokol?s vivid and unprecedented account of white southerners? attitudes and actions, related in their own words, reveals in a new light the contradictory mixture of stubborn resistance and pragmatic acceptance?as well as the startling and unexpected personal transformations?with which they greeted the enforcement of legal equality.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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