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There Goes My Everything |
| White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights,
1945-1975 |
by Jason Sokol
ISBN: 0307263568
Pub. Date: August 2006
ISBN-13: 9780307263568
Format: Hardcover, pp. 448
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Sales Rank: 9,760
List Price: $27.95
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While the landmarks of the civil rights movement have become indelible parts of
our collective memory, few have written about what life was like for white
southerners who lived through that historic time. Now, in his brilliant debut
book, historian Jason Sokol explores the untold stories of ordinary people
experiencing the tumultuous decades that forever altered the American
landscape. So often historical accounts of the era have focused on the
movement's most dramatic moments and figures, and paid greatest attention to
the brave steps taken by blacks to effect long-awaited change. In this riveting
book, Sokol goes beyond the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the 1960 student
sit-ins, and the soul-stirring speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., and into
the lives of middle- and working-class whites whose world was becoming
unrecognizable to them. He takes us to New Orleans's Ninth Ward, where, in
1960, a painful episode of school integration brought out the fiercest
prejudices in some and made accidental radicals of others; to Ollie's Barbecue
in Birmingham and Pickrick Fried Chicken in Atlanta, and thousands of lunch
counters in between, where "some white employees greeted black customers as
though they had been patrons for years; others slammed doors in their faces;
still more served them hesitantly and reluctantly."
There Goes My Everything traces the origins of the civil rights struggle from
World War II, when some black and white American soldiers lived and fought side
by side overseas (leading them to question Jim Crow at home), to the beginnings
of change in the 1950s and the flared tensions of the 1960s, into the 1970s,
when strongholds of white rule suddenly foundthemselves overtaken by rising
black political power. Through it all, Sokol resists the easy categorization of
whites caught in the torrent of change; rather, he gives us nuanced portraits
of people resisting, embracing, and questioning the social revolution taking
place around them. Drawing on recorded interviews, magazine bureau dispatches,
and newspaper editorials, Sokol seamlessly weaves together historical analysis
with firsthand accounts. Here are the stories of white southerners in their own
words, presented without condescension or moral judgment.
An unprecedented picture of one of the historic periods in twentieth-century
America.
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