Shared Dream for a Better South
Watters, Pat
Shared Dream for a Better South A Mind to Stay Here, by John Egerton. Photographs by Al Clayton. Macmillan. 190 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Pat Watters Tn his preface, John Egerton says he ¦** has...
...Sarah Patton Boyle, of the white Virginia aristocracy, who sought at first naively, and then maturely, to be a bridge between Negro and white during the civil rights struggle...
...out of context, perhaps they are not fully representative of the people of this book...
...U. W. Clemon, skilled and sophisticated young Negro lawyer in Birmingham, a star graduate of Miles and exemplar of Pitts's dream...
...Lucius H. Pitts, civil rights leader and president of struggling little Miles College in Birmingham, which he sees as the possible model for a real educational opportunity for impoverished black youth...
...Reviewed by Pat Watters Tn his preface, John Egerton says he ¦** has not attempted "to be an apologist for the worst of my native land but simply to say that the worst is not all there is to it...
...Billie and De De Pierce, Negro jazz artists of New Orleans whom Egerton, not altogether successfully, suggests have in their music overcome the evil of segregation...
...Egerton's selection from among the many people who might have been picked seems to me particularly apt, enhancing the intent of the book by diversity and, in some instances, unpredictability...
...Such views are not popular nor fashionable...
...No better way to tell about the good of the South could be found than this series of profiles (and eloquent photographic portraits by Al Clayton) of some of the Southerners who have dedicated much of their lives to an ideal of social justice and a wistful, paradoxical vision of the South as the place in America where the ideal might most fully be realized...
...America is sick and man is on the critical list...
...The continuity of the South before, during, and since the peak of the civil rights movement is suggested...
...Dabbs (whose recent death saddened and diminished the Southern community of such peopie as this book is about) and Griffin show the most sympathetic intellectual understanding of black separatism...
...Fannie Lou Hamer, whose determination to register to vote in Sunflower County, Mississippi, cost her a job in the plantation way of existence and catapulted her to national Negro leadership...
...Much of what they all stand for can be found in Dabbs' words: "Southern whites and Negroes are much more alike than they think...
...John Howard Griffin, the white man who dyed his skin black and lived as a Negro as long as he could stand it in the South of 1960, his present views deeply influenced by the experience...
...I really don't bother much about their liking one another—the more fundamental fact is that they are alike one another, and I think people who are alike just naturally come to like each other...
...Their shared dream of a better South includes, for black and white alike, and to varying degrees, a commitment to integration...
...For most, this involves a belief that despite its tragically mistaken history, the South still has a chance to avoid even worse mistakes that have been made in the rest of the country...
...In their diversity, these Southerners have in common a deep commitment to their work —and one other thing...
...This country produces separatists...
...A real sense of recent Southern his-, tory emerges from the lives of these people and what they say...
...The unexpected selections give the book a depth and scope beyond the immediacy of the 1960s: Howard (Buck) Kester, representative of a pre-1960s white radicalism, since the 1920s an uncompromising fighter for racial and economic justice and "Southerner, socialist, Christian, radical, democrat, anti-Communist...
...The sum of the book that is greater than its parts is the example it suggests for morally disturbed people in the rest of the country, and the inspiration that comes from reading that such people in the South continue to work and— against the most depressing of momentary events and moods—to believe...
...The good that has stubbornly stayed alive amid the evil of the South's racism and poverty has been one of humanity's greatest achievements, ever in need of being better told about, ever difficult, as Egerton so well states, to tell, and now more important than ever to tell...
...But the main thing about their views is that they have never been either popular or fashionable...
...They have "a mind to stay here," it becomes clear, because each in his own way loves the South...
...These Southerners have been sure and steadfast in their beliefs and—I think—right...
...Hamer: "I don't believe in separatism—a house divided against itself cannot stand, and neither can a nation...
...And this from Mrs...
...Some were naturals: Will Campbell, the colorful, country music singing, fundamentalist preacher and profound theologian from Nashville, trouble-shooter and needed friend in a thousand crises...
...In this, one more common characteristic emerges: they are not doctrinaire, and not easily fooled...
...John Lewis, chairman of the Student National Coordinating Council at its bravest and best, working on still in SNCC's old spirit of non-violent mil-it ance for SNCC's old integrationist goals...
...James Mc-Bride Dabbs, living on his ancestral plantation in South Carolina to direct and guide the Southern Regional Council and other important agencies during the years of civil rights struggle, and to write some of the wisest books ever about the South...
Vol. 35 • January 1971 • No. 1
