Two Kinds of History

...Before the decade was over, the United States underwent some of the most profound changes it has ever experienced...

...In part, this is because it deals primarily with whites, but mostly it is because the author has detailed the more traditional historical progression—slow and gradual...

...To a question about whether Selma blacks had any legitimate grievance at the time, Tepper replies, "I'm tryin' to think of one...

...But he found there was no escaping the struggle...

...He and Bob Moses (another regrettable omission in the book—although he has been hard to find since the '60s) planned the Council of Federated Organizations' summer that brought hundreds of black and white students to work in projects aimed at quickly ending segregation...

...Slower going than My Soul Is Rested—thanks largely to the torrent of names flooding many of the pages—In Search nevertheless provides interesting parallels...

...If you can name one, I'll be glad to give my opinion...

...Those who went along were ultimately disappointed...

...Several of Raines' most revealing conversations concern the psychological price of participation in the Movement...

...After Mississippi wore him out, Dennis went north to study law at the University of Michigan...

...Sosna, a staff member of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a former fellow at the Institute of Southern History at Johns Hopkins University, traces the development of white liberal thought—a liberal being defined by his stance on the race issue—from the late 1800s to the election of Jimmy Carter...

...In addition, a shift in the social climate has prompted policymakers and people of influence who were once allied with civil-rights forces to abandon them—and in some instances, like the Bakke case, to openly oppose them...

...their existence is perhaps the biggest reason for retaining any optimism about the future of race relations in this country...

...She's still in a mental institution...

...At the checkout desk in the law library," Raines reports, "was a young woman he recognized as a veteran of Mississippi, too, a white girl he remembered as having survived an ugly incident with the Natchez police...

...That's around 11 years now...

...All the force, all the demonstrations of force, and intimidation then were on the side of the local authorities who wore badges and suits, and they had the ostensible perquisites of the state...

...A logical extension of this philosophy was support for Federal efforts to assist Southern blacks...

...To label the '60s an aberration is not to diminish their importance...

...It took 80 years for this group to bring itself to openly challenge segregation—and even that first required what the author describes as "the growing influence of black protest, the growing importance of the black vote, the movement of blacks into the Democratic party, and the willingness of Northern Democrats to abandon their Southern colleagues on race-related issues...

...The close affinity of the FBI agents for the Southern police people was something that the FBI and Justice never faced...

...Raines asks him, "What would you say to this observation...

...For a very brief span of time, the slow pace of history was drastically speeded up...

...11.95...

...They haven't accepted integration...

...for segregation and all it represented had finally become the race issue in the South...

...Why have the white people in Washington, D.C., moved out of Washington and left it virtually an all-black city...

...I mean, people were just doing strange things...

...Reviewed by Charlayne Hunter-Gault Correspondent, "MacNeil/Lehrer Report" My Soul Is Rested is an unusual book about an unusual phenomenon—the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s...

...This brings him to Sol Tepper, a "prominent businessman" in Selma, Alabama, who helped organize the Dallas County Citizens Council and later, according to Raines, joined the sheriffs posse that battled civil rights marchers during the 1965 demonstrations...

...Until then, the liberals had concentrated instead on symptoms like "Negro education, lynching, poverty, and the poll tax...

...We didn't die...

...Consequently, many blacks are comparing the '70s to the years following the Reconstruction, when the substantial advances made by blacks were also quickly eroded...

...I guess," says Timothy Jenkins, "the most terrible thing we had to do—and we had to do it—was to tell people who believed in us that there was all of this Federal support, when we knew how shallow that support really was...

...See the philosophy of the average American: Integration is a wonderful thing as long as no Negroes are involved or just a few Negroes are involved...

...Although Southern liberals traditionally had been wary of Federal intervention in racial matters—memories of Reconstruction lingered—those who became committed New Dealers were an exception...

...One boy was beating his head up against the wall...

...Even in the foreign country, they want to start off with December the fifth...

...This probably arose from her much-quoted remark that she refused to stand in the back of the bus because "my feet hurt...

...We's doing things in this town here...

...The War years are seen as a further stimulus...

...Parks herself told Raines, "1 had almost a life history of being rebellious against being mistreated because of my color...

...Our part of the state was invisible—the Federal state...

...They try it and they get out of it just as quick as they can...

...rather, it is to suggest that in the current regressive atmosphere they demand close scrutiny...

...Nixon puts other misconceptions to rest as well, seemingly without bitterness...

...At the same time, he argues that we should not minimize their role—creating a climate in which a Federally enforced revolution could actually be achieved...

...One of these is with Dave Dennis, a recruiter who in the summer of 1961 became core's Mississippi field director...

...Sosna finally concludes that the South's liberals "possessed neither the power nor the desire to force social change...

...The process began in 1960, at the Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where four black college freshmen staged the first sit-in...

...Patterson answers: "I don't believe that...

...And why do they manipulate and move to go out to an area that doesn't have many Negroes in it so they can send their children to a virtually all-white school...

...The Movement didn't spring up overnight...

...One girl in particular just started screaming...

...Nothing happened, and there was the cold shock...

...Raines' subjects initiated events and generated significant change...

...As one of the footnotes in the chronicles of the era, I agree...

...whatever their good intentions, they could never really break out of the Southern tradition...

...And Howell Raines' volume of interviews is important because it instructs us about the days when events were flowing in a positive direction, and because it confronts the question of whether the minimal amount of progress remaining after the reversal is all that can ever be hoped for...

...They held a pistol to her head and played Russian roulette.' It was some time before he learned that her library job was part of her therapy at the hospital she had entered immediately after the Natchez incident...

...Especially after reading My Soul Is Rested, though, I was not convinced that they really mattered...

...But they don't integrate with Negroes any more than they need to for political purposes...

...On the whole, however, Raines uses the techniques of oral history to excellent advantage, allowing the protagonists and antagonists themselves to convey the tension, drama, excitement, pain, internal conflicts, jealousies, and accomplishments of the era...

...Dennis, at present a New Orleans lawyer, recalls his comrades' fatalism in describing a Freedom Ride: "When the group left Montgomery, the first busload to go into Jackson, Mississippi, everyone on the bus was prepared to die...

...That instinctively, at least, some Southern whites would disagree with Patterson is clear from Morton Sos-na's In Search of the Silent South...

...Missing, for example, are Jesse Jackson, a chief aid to Martin Luther King Jr., and M. Carl Holman, who played a key role in the South through his contacts with students and adult leaders...

...The Kennedys don't integrate...

...If they do, why do they all live in the suburbs, and why do they move out of the neighborhood when Negroes move in...

...288 pp...

...But when you really have to integrate, they don't do it...

...It was just that right then and there everybody wanted to die...

...Young men and women from all over the country soon joined the quietly disenchanted black Southerners, often prodding reluctant elders...

...Among the previously little-heard veterans introduced here is E. D. Nixon, who not only selected Rosa Parks for the now famous test case that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but also persuaded an initially reluctant Martin Luther King Jr...

...In other words, if you're going to be a segregationist, you got to do so in secret, just like the Kennedys...

...in front of the right cameras...

...Sosna's liberals, by contrast, merely reacted...

...But I know what I saw...

...Their purpose was to devise a plan for channeling foundation money to civil rights groups in a way that would benefit both Kennedy and the Movement...

...I betcha I've had a thousand people interview me...

...A veteran civil rights professional I know calls that period "an aberration...

...Yet if segregation was then seen as the major barrier to full participation in this democracy, other forces have since emerged that have proved more unrelenting...

...A sensitive white Southern reporter now with the St...

...They've sent all their children to private schools, and they're seen with the right Negroes...

...In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race Issue By Morton Sosna Columbia...

...This focuses on the dilemma faced by Southern "liberals" trying to reconcile a genuine desire to bring about "just treatment for blacks" with the "Negrophobic voices" of a majority whose foremost concern was stopping social integration...

...Now what that means and what it meant then and what does it mean to the individuals now, I don't know...

...Nixon dispels the notion that Parks was, in Raines' words, a "simple drudge who, though temporarily emboldened by the bus driver's abuse, had no concept of the larger struggle for racial justice...

...And why do they send their children to private schools...

...I don't know right offhand of any...

...The Movement produced the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and a year later the Voting Rights Act...

...A significant portion of the gains made during the '60s are being eroded by the continuing effects of recession...

...Everybody, they'll set and listen at me talk, then they go away and write...

...They marched, sat in, rode buses, desegregated universities...

...Fear and frustration of a different kind emerge from an account of meetings arranged by the Kennedy Administration between representatives of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Northern liberal foundations...

...They "made it difficult for Southern liberals to sidestep segregation...

...Now I've seen peoples interviewed me...

...They never did deliver...

...They've run from it...

...to head it...

...I haven't seen anybody yet that wanted to believe anything about the movement except something what the Reverend King said...

...The tale is too long to repeat, but some activist leaders, including Lonnie King of Atlanta, were suspicious of Kennedy's motives and pulled out of the Movement altogether...

...I ain't seen nobody yet...

...A more intelligent member of the opposition is Robert Patterson of Sunflower County, Mississippi, a founder of the Citizens Council...

...We told them many times that the FBI was helping the police keep track of us...

...You couldn't find those bastards...

...Thus, asked how he thought history books should view him, he responds: "I certainly think history books ought to, if you're gonna talk about the boycott, they ought to start from the day Rosa Parks was arrested and not just December the fifth when Reverend King was elected president [of the Montgomery Improvement Association...

...Well, we was doing things before Reverend King had ever finished school, come out of school...

...It came up that particular night because we found the right person...

...But there was some progress along the way, says Sosna, citing the impact of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration: "In general, New Dealers at the national level believed that the powers of government should be expanded in order to promote the general welfare, with special attention given to those citizens who were worse off...

...That the great majority of Southern white people no longer care as deeply as you do about [social integration...

...Petersburg Times, Raines has not tapped all the major Movement figures...

...Raines briefly attempts to balance his book with a section devoted to the other side...

...Occasionally, too, a statement is permitted to pass that begs to be pursued...