Lessons of Rage
DOLMAN, JOSEPH
Lessons of Rage Son of the Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir By Karl Fleming Public Affairs. 432 pp. $26.95. Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Editorial writer and columnist, "Newsday" Karl Fleming...
...Consequently, there was no move to prosecute Ray's supposed attackers, nor did Ray move against them...
...I came to understand," he explains, "what a role anger played in all this and that these white racists were angry about a lot of things that didn't have to do with black people at all...
...I found myself wanting to know what brought about his transformation...
...In 1963, after Byron De La Beckwith was arraigned in the murder of black civil rights worker Medgar Evers, the author took a stroll from the courthouse to the Mississippi Capitol in downtown Jackson, where he stood in the rotunda: "In the middle was a statue of the state's favorite segregationist, Senator Theodore Bilbo, flanked by two huge photographs, framed with varicolored light bulbs, of Mississippi's two Miss Americas...
...Yet so far no political party has figured out how to address this issue successfully without driving wedges between the two races...
...How did he learn to write so well...
...Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Editorial writer and columnist, "Newsday" Karl Fleming does not preach or pontificate...
...It remains the poorest region in the country...
...Fleming shows Wallace to be more of a slick opportunist than a driven racist...
...But it is not the whole reason...
...The South was the poorest region in the country back when Fleming was trailing Reverend Martin Luther King Jr...
...Folks do their shopping in local malls...
...Yet by the time he is in his 30s, he is working for Newsweek, he is flying airplanes for the fun of it, and his views are far broader than his background would suggest...
...Its residents are "nearly Americans," as a friend of mine from South Carolina is fond of saying...
...When I was a journalist in the South in the 1980s, I asked a successful U.S...
...He made sure the crazies stayed away from Tuscaloosa that day...
...But once he was there, a woman the kids called Muh Brown, matron of the first building he was assigned to, rose to the occasion...
...From my own visits there in the '90s,Irecall a place where kudzu covers the hulks of old tobacco barns in fields not far from the city limits...
...Equally striking is the portrait of Govemor George Wallace during the University of Alabama's forced integration...
...Senate candidate, an urban fellow, what had surprised him the most as he campaigned in every little town and rural hollow from the Appalachians to the sea...
...Some Southern cities and states are still trying to recover from the damage they did...
...Fleming met Hartis when he was covering cops for the Wilson Daily Times in the late 1940s...
...Unlike too many memoirists, Fleming is not a former policy maker with secrets to reveal or scores to settle...
...I doubt that its daily life is what King envisioned when he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech...
...We're talking about white poverty as well as black poverty...
...He not only frightened blacks with threats of violence, he scared wealthy whites with his knowledge of their peccadilloes...
...As for contemporary Wilson, its African-American community has long since been liberated from the likes of Ray Harris...
...He works himself into such a rage that his behavior leaves him-and the traineeshaken...
...I had carried that always, it was down there, and when presented with even a play victim, I had been able to personify the kind of person I hated...
...He harbors a strong ambivalence about his mother, who sent him off to the orphanage in Raleigh...
...He went off the record...
...Nevertheless, the civic culture of Wilson and the rest of the rough South has changed drastically since Fleming roamed their precincts as a reporter...
...But his hard honesty and astute observations make his narrative distinctive and compelling...
...But as Fleming discovered on a recent visit, the terror is gone and people talk of a pragmatic detente among the races...
...He did not want bloody distractions from the Klan and rioting redneck mobs...
...Such voices as theirs, and those of all the decent people of Mississippi, had been silenced or drowned out by the extremists like Bilbo...
...from crisis to crisis...
...In fact, if a husband caught another man 'on the nest,' it was more or less OK to kill him, and it was common law practice not to prosecute such killings...
...This is a crucial point that is often overlooked even now, as the former segregated South becomes the bulwark of a new Red State Republican majority: It's not just about race...
...He wanted to have his televised moment standing against blacks and the Feds "in the schoolhouse door...
...The officer's main duty was to keep blacks scared and docile...
...And that is no small miracle...
...One night he was attacked by assailants who left him grossly mutilated...
...Here was my own anger so easily exposed, the long-ago bullied kid turned into a bully himself...
...There is not much Fleming blinks at, whether the topic is Southern sexual mores, his own insecurities as a poor boy who made good, or the rigid system that once enabled wealthy Southern oligarchs to issue badges and guns to redneck sadists and send them out with implicit instructions to keep the black community in line...
...The vignettes of Southern life from the 1930s through the civil rights era are a major strength of Fleming's book...
...Ironically, for all the danger the author faced as a newsman in the angry white South, his own moment of truth came during the 1965 Watts riots in California when a black mob nearly killed him...
...People had their suspicions, but no one ever proved exactly who did it...
...Fleming agrees...
...Ultimately, however, it made little difference whether the politicians were dumb, opportunistic or pathologically racist...
...Fleming sums up the Southern code Hartis violated: "You might covet another man's wife, but you had to take the consequences if you got caught acting on it...
...Neither is he a household name (although his work as a civil rights reporter for Newsweek brought him a fine reputation...
...It is hard to know what to make of this catastrophe until we recall what Fleming says about poverty, anger, fear, and shame...
...They were angry about "poverty, ignorance, impotence, fear, shame," says Fleming...
...I'm sure some Wilsonians still lug around awful baggage from the past...
...And what of Fleming's South today...
...True, race is part of the reason America remains split along two different ideologies 40 years after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act...
...Wilson is conservative and is religious in an overt way that can startle a New Yorker...
...There are other mysteries...
...Cities such as Birmingham-where some of the worst racial violence took place in the 1960s-have worked ceaselessly to repair their shattered national images and to atone...
...Nor is the heart of his reminiscence-an eyewitness description of defining moments in the civil rights movement-exactly new...
...To this day, despite all the institutional rigidity of orphanage life, Fleming seems far more comfortable with those memories than with the memories of his mother 50 miles to the east in Wilson...
...He simply tells us about his life and times as a white Southern male-about the father he never knew, the mother who lived in poverty, his Depression-era youth in a Methodist orphanage, his career as a reporter covering the fight for civil rights, and his struggle for self-respect amid a love affair with whiskey...
...It was the inferiority complex out there...
...But he carried out his assignment a little too well...
...On the ugly side there is Ray Hartis, an officer on the Wilson, North Carolina police force...
...As he starts to curse out a young volunteer, though, he suddenly feels a big surge of genuine hatred wellingup within him...
...But there are questions he never fully addresses...
...The surprising strength of this book lies in the writing...
...he blurted...
...One memorable moment in 1964, James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee asks him to role-play a Mississippi sheriff in a training exercise for civil rights workers about to head south...
...Always lurking just below the surface are the classic themes of race, sex, violence, general human stupidity-and occasionally generosity and love...
...Also involved are lingering Southern resentments-the kind of anger that poor people feel against the rich, that folks with little education feel against urban professionals...
...Interstate 95, the great East Coast artery, runs a few miles west of town now...
...I'm certain the town still has its share of hypocrites, sadists and philanderers...
...But then the story gets complicated...
...He may be a son of the rough South, as he says, but he sounds more like an intellectual than a good old boy...
...Fleming never got a great education...
...Standing there, in this absurd setting, I thought of Faulkner and Eudora Welty and the way their humane voices had not been much heard in their native state...
...Then he let his power go to his head and foolishly strutted around town with a married woman...
...It's almost American now...
...Still, the story Fleming tells is essentially upbeat...
...The dysfunctions he speaks of create poisons that don't die easily in anyone...
...The result was pretty much the same: Their actions left countless communities without real leadership...
...She made him feel loved and wanted...
...In the end, race or political orientation do not really matter...
...That is rather sketchy in his memoir...
...The author says repeatedly that he hates bullies and he hates racism...
Vol. 88 • May 2005 • No. 3
