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David Chappell's new study provides fresh insight into the Civil Rights movement by shifting the analytical focus from the strivings of African-Americans to the crucial and little-understood role of white Southerners. Chappell explodes the convenient myth of the monolithic and homogeneous white South to reveal a society deeply divided over segregation.
This well-written and fascinating account shows how important white moderates were to the success of the civil rights movement and how black leaders consciously made winning them over to their cause an integral part of their strategy.
Chappell is at his best in describing the dynamics which took place in various southern communities. He also examines the struggles between similar forces on the national scene, as carried on by various southern players within the Democratic Party, the executive office, and the Justice Department.
Chappell's is a major piece of historical writing that will be of interest to general readers as well as to more specialized students of the Civil Rights movement in the American South.
Chappell's argument is insightful and worth serious attention. It makes particularly fascinating reading from the perspective of the 1990s.
In this engaging work on Southern whites who sympathized with the Civil Rights Movement, Chappell argues that moderate whites, though lacking a moral commitment to civil rights, played a key role in the movement's success at both the local and national levels.
Chappell is to be commended for struggling with hard questions about historical causation.
With keen insight, Chappell argues that not only were white southerners far from solid in their commitment to segregation during the civil rights era, but that the movement actively exploited and widened their divisions to achieve both local victories and federal intervention.
In the movement, we always said that, like in a washing machine, it was the agitator that got the dirt out. David Chappell's book shows how the inside agitators helped cleanse the society of an extreme injustice. It is an enlightening and important look at a less publicized part of this history.
A superb study done with subtlety and keen insight, it is absolutely essential for understanding the vital role white Southerners played in the civil rights movement.
One of the many virtues of David Chappell's fascinating study is that he does not romanticize white southerners who were sympathetic toward the civil rights movement. Rather than depicting them simply as courageous dissenters, he shows that their motives for supporting civil rights reform were varied and complex—a mixture of altruism, pragmatism, paternalism, guilt, and numerous other idiosyncratic sentiments.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x 9
Pages
336
ISBN
9780801852343
Table of Contents
Foreword, by Clayborne Carson
Preface
Introduction
Part I. The Strange Career of Racial Dissent in the South
Chapter 1. The "Silent South": The Founding Fathers of Sour=thern White Dissent
Chapter 2. From
Foreword, by Clayborne Carson
Preface
Introduction
Part I. The Strange Career of Racial Dissent in the South
Chapter 1. The "Silent South": The Founding Fathers of Sour=thern White Dissent
Chapter 2. From Silence to Futility: Southern White Dissent Gets Organized
Part II. The Strategy of Nonviolence and the Role of White Southerners in the Movement
Chapter 3. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1556
Chapter 4. Tallahassee, 1956-1957
Chapter 5. Little Rock, 1957-1959
Chapter 6. Albany, Georgia, 1961-1962
Part III. The Art of the Possible: The White Southerner in the National State
Chapter 7. The Late 1950s: Saving the Party from Civil RIghts
Chapter 8. Lyndon Johnson Takes Center Stage-and Then an Intermission
Chapter 9. Policy in High Gear: From the Justice Department to the Acts of 1964 and 1965
Epilogue: Interpreting the Movement
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliographical Essay
Index
