Customer Reviews

Southern Journey: A Return to the Civil Rights Movement

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This is considered a classic civil rights book. Dent quite literally gets into a car and starts driving, hitting many of the more famous signposts that mark the highway of American civil rights. He tracks down original players, walks the walk, talks the talk. For novices and younger people (who did not live during those times), this is a good introduction. I found his style to be a bit dry, so much so that it made it hard to keep up with the book. Some of the interviews just aren't that interesting and read more as reflections than first-person histories. A shame, really. I prefer -- and recommend -- "Eyes on the Prize," other works.

The late poet and journalist Tom Dent is, above everything else, a product of the American South. The son of a distinguished educator and president of Dillard University, Tom Dent received his education at Morehouse College and Syracuse University before pursuing a career as a writer with the NAACP and Freedomways before he became one of the founding members of the legendary Umbra movement in Lower Manhattan. As the group of writers disbursed, Dent returned to the South and his home in New Orleans, where he helped to create a model that fused the Civil Rights Movement and the arts in the form of the Free Southern Theater. Dent's firsthand experience as a writer and educator engaged him in many communities across the South, and Southern Journey is his opportunity to revisit many of the communities that figured prominently in the freedom movement in an attempt to answer a simple question, what has changed?

Throughout the volume, the reader finds histories, journalistic accounts, oral histories and remembrances woven together with skillful articulation and knowledge that could only come from someone with the temperament to recognize subtle change. This is observed especially "in the tiny villages of the Deep South, the very blood cells of the South as we knew it," where on his return Dent observed the then newness of black elected officials in communities once deeply segregated.
The volume also contributes to the spate of travel books, not only for Dent's observations of well-known place names in the lexicon of the Civil Rights Movement but in the juxtaposition in travel itself. Early in his book, Dent recalled the difficulties of negotiating segregation while living and traveling with his family as a child in post-World War II Southern states. "My father was not one who enjoyed being asked `why' when it came to race matters," Dent recalled. "You were supposed to become aware of the more subtle and unpleasant vagaries of race via osmosis. I eventually took to calling such undiscussed racial patterns `blues truths.'" Therein lies the essence of Southern Journey. Far from a narrative extolling dramatic change across the South, Dent tells the story of complexities found in race relations in its cities and towns. Much like what readers find in his collections of poetry, Dent was an important chronicler of the joys and contradictions in African American life and culture and his writings reflect his deepest love for the South.