Indispensible but Frustrating
In order to understand a thing, you must understand what came before it. The 22 years before the *Brown v. Board of Education* were a period of rapid transition in the American Southeast that made the regime of segregation unsustainable, and much of that transition was as drastic as the Civil Rights Movement itself. This book does furnish an invaluable introduction to the historical figures of the pre-MLK South. It also supplies a brisk summary of many of the most sensational or consequential events; and it also describes many of the critical social indicators of the region, in comparison with the rest of the USA.
Unfortunately, the effect is like a catalogue rather than an historical narrative. There are interludes where he does do a wonderful job of storytelling, as with the climax of the Brown versus Board of Education deliberations, or various hideous incidents of white supremacist violence against African Americans. He cites these often, as indeed is fitting since there was a constant drumbeat of these violent acts in the public consciousness of everyone. He alludes to the "sulfurous" rhetoric of figures like Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo (D-MS), a supporter of the New Deal in FDR's first term; but he seldom furnishes examples. Since there are supposedly many degrees of "badness," this omission is unfortunate.
To his credit, Egerton also reminds us that all of the Southern legislators acted in unison to squelch civil rights measures, such as anti-lynching laws.
Because of the great number of personalities that Egerton introduces again and again, there is seldom a vivid mental hook. The effect is rather like reading a very long collection of 3-sentence obituaries, sorted by ideological affinities or jobs. Again and again we are assured that everything in the South was very complex and very nuanced, and that it is important to draw deep distinctions among the various flavors of the elites, whether in politics, journalism, civil society, or education. But either Egerton is not interested in an analytical exposition of how these differences work, or he lacked the space to supply them. Surprising as it might perhaps seem, 627 pages is not a lot of distance to cover the separate threads of New Deal disintegration, regional polarization, education, scores of prominent Southern politicians, dozens of writers or editors, a smattering of obscure radicals, and an endless array of anguished white liberals. In his effort to find some redemption in the courage of white liberals, Egerton devotes an ocean of ink to the utterly inconsequential bickering and resolutions of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare (SCHW) and its rival, the Southern Regional Council (SRC).
It's possible to recognize that the men and women of these two middle class white liberal organizations faced a fearsome uphill battle against the racism and smugness of their reactionary neighbors, and at the same time, see that their excruciating struggle to chip atoms away from the mountain of Southern racism was not even a sideshow. Even the feeblest efforts to criticize segregation provoked shrieks of quarrelling among the genteel "liberals," who were strangely indifferent to the complete indifference their region held them in. Their divisions led each hairline fracture to accuse the membership to its immediate left of being "red." This monopolizes Egerton's, so that anything that might lend memorability or analysis to the narrative is tightly squeezed into the remainder; the major developments that actually did lead to the demise of segregation remain, for the most part, a mystery.
