Customer Reviews

Son of the Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir

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This book is over 400 pages long and I finished it in two days. It is without a doubt one of the very best books I have read in some time. Karl Fleming describes in great, interesting detail how his mother had to give him and his sister up to live in an orphanage because she wasn't able to provide for them. His experiences during this time period are many. He tells us of the unwritten rules the boys followed, the adults (Mable "Muh" Brown, in particular) who befriended him, the bully "Fatty" Clark, who gave him such a hard time, and the church sermons he had to listen to that portrayed God in such an angry way that, as an adult, unfortunately, turned Karl Fleming against attending church. Karl was without a college education, but he educated himself with his love of reading several of the classics from American literature. Hired by newsweek as a reporter Karl Fleming brings the reader to Oxford, Mississippi, where James Meredith enrolled as the first black student. The bombing of the black church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls, the death of three civil rights' workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and other unfortunate incidents in the civil rights movement of the 1960's are dealt with in vivid detail. Portraits of southern bigots such as Bull Connor, Ross Barnett, and others who resented their black citizens from having the equal rights they so richly deserved are also provided. Fleming, despite his growing up in North Carolina, sided with the underdog blacks because he, himself, had grown up in the orphanage being bullied. I feel God placed "Fatty" Clark in Karl's life as a young boy as a way of preparing him for what he would encounter in his job as an adult. I would suggest you have adequate time when you sit down to read this book because you're not going to want to put it down.

My partner met Karl Flemming when Mr. Fleming visited the National Civil Rights Museum her in Memphis. We bought the book immediately, but it took a while for me to read it. I am really glad that I did though. Mr. Fleming's upbringing in the very depressed south was fascinating and opened my eyes to a life that was very foreign to me. However, the most powerful part came close to the end, and I quote from page 416: "In a fancy new Jackson mall, two young black women having lunch at Primo's Restaurant lectured me at passionate length on how nothing was better. A decade earlier they might have been beaten or killed but here they were, eating stuffed flounder surrounded by white patrons not paying any attention, with a white waitress asking, 'Can I get you ladies anything else?'"

These changes and our acceptance of the status quo make this book essential reading. We cannot forget history and its lessons, no matter how unpleasant those lessons might be. Karl Fleming gives us an inside view of a most important part of human history. Lest we forget...

Thank you, Mr. Fleming for sharing your story with us.

I knew of Karl Fleming as the journalist who was there for vitually every important event of the Southern Civil Rights movement. What I hadn't known was how he got there, what made him able to see the changes sweeping throught the South and the country before most other reporters in the country. His growing up years in the white underclass might have prepared him to be as resistant to change as any good old boy. But he grew up in relative innocence, in a white Methodist orphanage, and emerged with a naive curiosity that made him a great reporter. This is a book about a life that simply could not be lived in any other era in this country.

Growing up in the deep south during the civil rights era, I can remember school being closed because the KKK had called a big rally. Even at the time I can remember watching the television news the night Brown vs. Board of Education (separate but equal education was not equal at all) and realizing that the world was about to change.

It's good to read this book and review what happened through the eyes of a professional reporter who was actually there for most of the action.

The title talks about the 'Rough South.' And indeed it was. In looking back on it with fifty years of perspective, it was an amazing transition. And all in all, it was not nearly as rough as it could have been. There were a lot of people there who really hated each other and on both sides. Today there is still some racial friction in the south, but not even a shadow of what it was then.

This is a remerberance of a time of great fundamental change in out culture very well told.

Originally from California but having grown up mostly in the South, as a 52 year old male I looked forward to this summary of the civil rights movement. This book is MUCH better than I expected and would put it in my Top 10 of all time. First of all, as the premier writer of the civil rights movement mainly in Mississippi and Alabama this first hand account sheds new light not only the events that have been reported but also the emotional mentality of the crowds, the offended race AND the reporters caught up in the story. I live in Memphis and have seen racism and to this day, subtle racism. But the description in this book of the open disregard for the law and willingness to kill, maim or intimidate with no fear of retribution is eye-opening.

But this book is much more than civil rights. Growing up at the end of the depression Karl Fleming gives an account of a different family life in a less affluent time. Reading of he and his sister being sent to an orphanage is heart wrenching. This event obviously has long lasting effects on his relationship with his mother. This section and his initial jobs in the Navy during the war and upon return as a cub reporter gives great insight to a mystical life growing up in the charming South that so many Southerners would prefer to revisit. If I have one complaint it is that he later only mentions his sister in passing. How did she emotionally survive this ordeal. I'd really like to know.

The third act of this book is of a mature reporter whose family is dissolving as he enters a relationship with a new woman to whom he is still married to this day. But it also touches on the cultures of the 60s with his interest in booze and later drugs. While he does not spend as much time here, there obviously is a bigger story as he enters a difficult time financially, professionally and emotionally as he confronts his divorce, his demons and his past.

I strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in what life was like living in the South in the middle of the century as well as life during the depression and the following war. If you have any interest in the civil rights struggle read this account to truly feel the emotion that movies such as Mississippi Burning poorly convey. As a companion book I recommend "The Glass Castle" which tells of another unique survival in a poor family. I bought this book and couldn't get motivated to read it immediately but am very glad I did. Read this book for enjoyment and to learn. It is a master piece!

I picked up this book after hearing the author interviewed on Fresh Air. What initially attracted me was the opportunity to get a clear, honest, first person perspective of what really happened down south during the civil rights struggle.

Karl Fleming, as an author, with a long career as a journalist, has a rich, pithy writing style and absolutely uncompromising honesty. As a genuine bookworm, I can say with all honesty that this is one of the most well-written books I have ever read.

We follow the author carefully and deliberately through a difficult, destitute childhood--growing up in an orphanage in North Carolina--and seamlessly merge into the beginnings of his career as a reporter. From there the author finds himself, a born-son of the deep south, repeated witness to the full force of the ugliness of white violence, repeatedly and with shameless impunity.

To the white establishment and the rude and coarse elements that they empowered, Karl Fleming was a traitor and his life was threatened on several occasions. But what stands out most is the brazen impunity of the elected officials as they dealt violently with their "impudent niggers." I can't do the author's prose nor the story justice, but like at least one other reviewer, I found this book almost impossible to put down.

Honesty and objectivity are in especially short supply these days, and it is the author's unflinching clarity about the ugly events in his own life that convinces me that the author is clean and honest throughout.

In a time of superheated media and partisan press, it is mightily good to be reminded what excellent, honest reporting truly is.

I was motivated to buy this after hearing the author interviewed on NPR. A native of Mississippi, I was interested in his accounts of the Neshoba County murders of three civil rights workers, and of the riot which occurred on the Ole Miss campus when National Guardsmen arrived to help James Meredith enroll there. The author has been present to record, and sometimes participate in, history, but the most interesting part was his recollection of his impoverished Depression-era childhood. The writing style is conversational and easy to read. You can definitely tell he's a journalist by trade. Well worth any price you pay.

Son of the Rough South is a journey back into a meaner time and a gentler time, a time of grace, and a time hardness, a time of brutality, and a time of courage, and above all, a time of dignity and nobility, the best stuff of humankind. It is the true story of Karl Fleming, a hardworking reporter for Newsweek magazine, who in his role as southern district correspondent covered the civil rights movement from 1961 to 1968 and had a front row seat for such tumultuous events as the desegregation of Ol' Miss University by James Meredith, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which galvanized Martin Luther King and his followers, the shooting of Medger Evers, the murders of the three young civil rights workers Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.

These were heady days for liberalism, when the very word resonated with connotations of courage, compassion and determination. When reaching out to your fellow citizens to support them in their struggle against injustice was the only morality worth discussing, and when boorishness, narrow-mindedness and insensitivity were seen as just that, and not qualities that would get you a good slot on AM radio. The willingness of liberals, both black and white, to run the gauntlet of laughing, tobacco-chewing rednecks, many of whom spent their evenings in white robes and peeked hoods, and who were only too willing to murder and torture anyone who offended them, reminds us of what it takes to stand up to a philosophy that says that the only way to enjoy your freedom is to deprive others of theirs. Ah, how times have changed. Or have they?

Today, many Americans are as frightened of incipient terrorism as Southern whites were of blacks winning their freedom. As a result, the Patriot Act has arrived to curtail our freedoms and loud mouth Conservatives have popped up to question our patriotism.. A similar thing happened in the South in 1959. As Fleming points out, racism in the South had a lot to do with Southern whites' feelings of inadequacy and shame at their own ignorance and poverty. If blacks were allowed to prosper and advance, than who would be the lowest man on the totem pole? It was unacceptable, and fear of such a possibility drove them to trample on the rights of others while bullying and browbeating anyone who disagreed with them, all the while justifying their actions as a natural, moral and right.

Fleming lost his devotion to religion during this time as he watched right-wing churches in the South turn a blind eye to the horrors and misery inflicted on blacks, while they continued preaching the glory of "Jay-sus Christ!" and asking for contributions. His Christian feelings were revived when he watched black preachers raising the spirits of their congregations and inspiring non-violent resistance. He learned a great deal from his experiences.

Not the least of which was that racism cuts both ways. In all the time he was in the eye of the storm in Dixie, Fleming was never badly hurt. As he points out, this probably had much to do with the fact that he himself was a good ol' boy from North Carolina who could walk the walk. But when he was covering the Watts riot in Los Angeles in 1966, an old acquaintance, Stokely Carmichael, turned on him, raising the ire of the crowd against him by saying, "We need to stop these honky reporters from coming down here." Fleming was beaten unconscious and left for dead.

Through all this, and upon reflection, Fleming sees his abiding sympathy for the civil rights movement as stemming from a profound distaste for bullying of which he had been the victim as a child, particularly during his years in the orphanage where his mother left him when she could no longer afford to raise him. His relation of his time spent in the orphanage is both moving and whimsical and a wonderful glimpse back into the mindset of late 1940's America. Taken as a whole, the book is worth every moment spent with it. It unfolds and grows as America unfolds and grows in the post-war years from 1945 to 1970. It tells us a lot about ourselves, both then and now.

For one thing, it reminds us of how far authority will go to maintain order and impose their will, and the courage and fortitude it takes to overcome such oppression. In fact, reading this narrative, and reacquainting myself with these events, I was struck by how far the pendulum has swung the other way now. It would have been inconceivable to the courageous people of the civil rights movement, who were willing to risk their lives to insure that ordinary citizens were granted their constitutional liberties, that a single horrific event - no matter how shocking - should be accepted by most Americans as a sound rationalization for rolling back civil liberties and granting the government the power to spy on, search through and keep tabs on ordinary people, as well as imprison them without trial, and hold them without counsel. But they only do that to suspected terrorists! you cry. Maybe, but who gets to decide who is a terrorist?

White southerners routinely accused civil rights leaders of being Communists, before beating, shooting and lynching them.

Let us hope that our cowardice has not made it so that some future generation has to risk their lives in order to regain the freedoms we have so cavalierly tossed away.

This book is worth every minute you spend with it.

This writer brought to life again what life was like living as an orphan
at Methodist Orphanage, Raleigh, NC. I've given this book as gifts to
several who were reared, along with the writer, at MO during the depression. They laughed, they cried as they recognized their names and recalled incidents and experiences in his book.
For all their labors in those laundry rooms and work on dairy farm, along
with the strictiest of discipline applied when a 'rule' was broken in that
institution....majority of those 'graduates'learned and kept in practice
exemplorary character traits throughout life. They were well prepared.

This is very strong but unfortunately realistic look at the south during
the late 1920's into the 60's. There are several parts that have disturbing
sexual references. I only got the book because it had references to some
people on my family tree.