THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 15, 1995 TAG: 9501110427
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BROWN H. CARPENTER
LENGTH: Long : 101 lines
SPEAK NOW AGAINST THE DAY
The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South
JOHN EGERTON
Alfred A. Knopf. 704 pp. $35.
JOHN EGERTON tells a tragic and sweeping story, capturing in a vast panorama the last decades of the stubborn, pernicious attitude that kept the Jim Crow South mired in poverty, ignorance and bigotry between Reconstruction and the middle of the 20th century.
Speak Now Against the Day is the heartbreaking account of the handful of home-grown visionaries who spoke out so futilely against the region's white supremacy and racial segregation during the 21 years that spanned from the first 100 days of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring public-school segregation unconstitutional.
It is also a brilliant, epic portrait of a region and its people, trapped by racist dogmas that were fueled by exaggerated memories of an idyllic antebellum South.
The time between 1933 and 1954 was particularly auspicious for the South to correct its own course. Voters in the old Confederacy largely supported FDR. World War II was fought to annihilate racism of a most vicious variety, and the sons and daughters of Dixie - black and white - served in the military in great numbers.
That era, Egerton writes, ``appears to have been the last and best time - perhaps the only time - when the South might have moved boldly and decisively to heal itself, to fix its own social wagon voluntarily. But it didn't act, and the moment passed. . . ''
Before the New Deal, the South in effect was a giant plantation, with laborers both white and black scrambling for the crumbs offered by the lord of the manor.
The power structure kept this caste system in place by stamping out union activity, minimizing the voter rolls, offering virtually no legal protection for blacks and establishing what was at best a perfunctory education system from first grade through college, with whites getting the lion's share of that.
The native Southerners who tried to effect change during these times were a varied lot. They included moderate-minded white newspaper editors; aggressive black editors, such as Frank Marshall Davis of the Atlanta Daily World; insightful writers such as Richard Wright, V.O. Key, Lillian Smith and W.J. Cash; black civil rights activists; H.L. Mitchell and Howard Kester, who attempted to organize a tenant farmers union; educator Frank Porter Graham; South Carolina Judge J. Waties Waring, and CIO union organizer Lucy Randolph Mason, of blue-blood Virginia stock.
These heroes and scores of others are part of a huge cast whose members slip in and out of Egerton's saga with determined, quixotic regularity. Most of the whites refrained from attacking segregation directly. But they pushed for a more equitable situation for blacks, whose leaders were increasingly calling for dismantling the Jim Crow laws, and fought hard against the violence - from beatings to lynchings - that whites inflicted on blacks with impunity.
The narrative is keen and moving. A native of Kentucky, Egerton (The Americanization of Dixie, Generations) has a feel for the South that comes through easily, whether he is writing about a gory lynching or pondering the positive contributions his region has made: its fine writers, its food and the innovative music - jazz, blues, bluegrass and country - produced by blacks and whites.
He writes from the viewpoint of an unabashed political liberal, one who occasionally invokes the old adage that those in power deliberately promoted racial animosity to divide any opposition from the masses. But his own story belies that bit of sociology. Nowhere does he record any significant agitation for change by any poor white Southerners. Instead, too many were quickly willing to don the robes of the Ku Klux Klan.
But no question, the South's leaders were an atrociously malignant lot - ``the political equivalent of a plague of locusts,'' according to Egerton. Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo and Georgia's Herman Talmadge are historically infamous, but how many know North Carolina Sen. Robert R. Reynolds was, according to Egerton, ``an early defender and proponent of Hitler''?
Mississippi Rep. John E. Rankin fought a move to simplify the vote for fighting servicemen for fear that blacks would take advantage of it. After the war, he blocked passage of the GI Bill of Rights because it might encourage Negro veterans to better themselves.
Egerton's portrait of this time and place is so Tolstoy-like, it's tough to keep up with it all. He helps considerably by reintroducing the assemblage of people who repeatedly enter and leave the flow. He also leaves a few gaps.
Huey Long of Louisiana was a major player during that time and an exception to the racist rule, although even more of a demagogue, but the book barely touches on him, other than to quip that he ``made politics and criminality almost indistinguishable. . . . '' And Egerton mentions Virginia only infrequently.
Overall, Speak Now Against the Day is a triumph. For those who lived through those years, the story will point out how far the South (and the rest of the nation) really has come. For younger people reared in a more tolerate climate, Egerton's account may be scarcely believable. MEMO: Brown H. Carpenter is a staff editor.
by CNB