24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great read, but not entirely honest, February 4, 2007
This review is from: There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (Hardcover)
As a Southerner who started first grade in a segregated classroom in 1966, attended a "token" integrated classroom in 1967, and attended an all-white private school thereafter, I found this book interesting and hard to put down. I agree with the praise given by other posters, although I do have some criticisms.
The author relies on research and publications of the past, which is understandable. There is no other way the book could be written today. The book deals mostly with the period 1955 to 1975, but the failure to update a few facts could almost be taken as an intentional effort to mislead the reader.
For example, we are told that the business leadership of Yazoo City, Miss., strongly supported the public schools, and as a result after integration the schools remained 40 percent white. This is true, but today, the Yazoo City school system is 97 percent black. I discovered this fact after 30 seconds on the Internet, so why couldn't the author provide this information.
Likewise, the author suggests that white life goes on as always in places like Eutaw, Ala., where everyone happily attends the "safety-valve" Warrior Academy. Again, a web search quickly reveals that Warrior Academy has only 118 students, K-12. An October 22, 2002 story in the Birmingham News, "Private white academies struggle in changing world," describes how most Alabama Black Belt academies are providing a sub-standard education and barely keeping their doors open. These facts contradict the author's conclusions, so he just leaves them out.
The author correctly notes that the poor whites shouldered the burden of integration, although I do wonder how the author could suggest it was a burden, since he also suggests it provided them with their "freedom." Most poor and working class whites exercised their new freedom by moving. The result is that is many Southern communities there literally are no or few working class or poor white people left.
I would suggest to any scholar wishing to study integration in the South that he start by finding the full-page newspaper advertisements by prominent white parents declaring their support of public schools (i.e. Yazoo City, Rolling Fork, among others), and then follow up where their children actually graduated high school. In short, find out why those who wanted to support public education and integration left the public schools, despite their public proclamations of support. Doing so might provide the best guide for the education of Southern children.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Should have stopped in the 60's., October 17, 2006
This review is from: There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (Hardcover)
This is an interesting book well worth reading. It wasn't quite as eye-opening for me, being a Southern of a certain age. The only complaint I might have is that the book is an overview and as such it starts to bog down toward the end. As it covers the more familiar ground of the late 60's and early 70's, it's a bit like studying a synopsis for a course. In the earlier phase of the book, 1945 - 1955, it is original and engaging. At one point the author cites source material briefly, noting that no one has ever made a full study of the papers he's using. I feel a richer book would have been achieved if he had stopped his timeline a decade sooner and gone into more depth in the early years, when the South was just waking up to the changes. by the late 60's it's a juggernaut of facts instead of a slow awakening of justifications and assumptions. The author maintains a fair point of view without being condescending or apologetic. If you're not Southern, it may help you understand some of the ripple effect experienced in conversations about race today. After all, most of the people in this book are still living, working, and assuming.
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19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Whites 'n' rights, August 23, 2007
This review is from: There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (Hardcover)
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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