Tuskegee Target
Norrell, Robert J.
Tuskegee Target REAPING THE WHIRLWIND: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee by Robert J. Norrell Alfred A. Knopf. 254 pp. $19.95. In his introduction to Reaping the Whirlwind, Robert J....
...For Norrell, the final verdict on Tuskegee is favorable but bittersweet...
...In his conclusion, Norrell may be guilty of wishful thinking, but he is never so im-perceptive as to conclude that Jim Crow voting booths and public accommodations are preferable to an occasionally inept all-black city government...
...Additionally, while the focus of the movement in the 1950s was largely on Jim Crow public accommodations, the main target of black Tuskegeeans was voting rights...
...He skillfully places the voting rights struggle in the context of those forces while losing sight of neither...
...The Institute was founded with the complete cooperation of the community's white conservatives and existed in a symbiotic relationship with them...
...As Norrell makes clear in the book's opening chapters, the Institute was a paternalistic tool used by conservatives to take the potentially enraging sting out of the return to status quo ante that followed Reconstruction...
...Robert Norrell is neither...
...The irony, of course, is that the whites never expected the Institute to provide a base for black political agitation...
...Tuskegee and Macon County are an anomaly in the history of the civil-rights movement...
...Rather than the black-white power-sharing envisioned by Gomillion and TCA's moderates, the government of the city and county has become almost completely black...
...Were it not for the onerous tenant system, would poor blacks have supported the black middle class...
...It had a different experience in each place, and no place was the same after it left...
...He succeeds admirably...
...In his introduction to Reaping the Whirlwind, Robert J. Norrell writes: "The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s made its way to every community in the South...
...Each community now has a story to tell about the movement, and only when many of those stories are told will the South's great social upheaval be well understood...
...Would black Tuskegeeans have succeeded so completely if not for the sociopolitical effects of World War II...
...Obviously, the unique conditions that made the victory of Macon County activists possible were almost impossible to recreate elsewhere...
...Norrell has chosen to tell the story of the civil-rights movement as it occurred in his home town of Tuskegee, Alabama...
...Divisions on political and economic questions tore at the black community as much as the white...
...As a result of this demographic oddity, civil-rights ferment in Tuskegee started earlier than almost anywhere else in the Deep South...
...Although he tells the story of the TCA eloquently, one of the greatest strengths of Reaping the Whirlwind is that Norrell never loses sight of the effects of larger social and historical forces on the movement in Tuskegee...
...First, the county is almost 80 per cent black...
...It provided Washington with an opportunity to test his ideas about black economic and educational advancement as a prerequisite to social and political progress, while offering white Southerners a way to sugar-coat the pill of segregation...
...More important, the presence of Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute and, later, of a black veterans' hospital gave the city a concentration of highly educated black professionals, more than a thousand by 1940...
...The outcome of Tuskegee's political struggles has been mixed...
...Black elected officials have been corrupt and honest, effective and ineffective, just like white officials...
...The dream of Gomillion and the TCA of a community living in genuine racial harmony (as distinct from the illusion of racial harmony fostered by white conservatives) has been, to some extent, lost...
...That it did is due, in no small part, to the work of a dedicated group of black people, led by Charles G. Gomillion, a sociologist from the Institute...
...One question of this sort that the book answers only indirectly is the impact of the Tuskegee experience as a potential model elsewhere in the South...
...It was Gomillion who organized the Tuskegee Civic Association (TCA) as a vehicle for black political intentions, engineered a remarkably successful economic boycott of unsympathetic white businessmen, and walked a narrow path between white conservatives and more militant elements in the black community as the voting-rights battle drew to a close...
...George Robinson (George Robinson, a member of the National Writers Union, writes on film, sports, and civil liberties for Newsday and United Feature Syndicate...
...But as Norrell admits, the future is unforeseeable, and the outcome of elections that occurred long after Gomillion and others is less important than the fact of their struggle and victory...
...To suggest otherwise would be purblind, obtuse...
...There is an irony underlying this historical development, one that provides Norrell with his title...
Vol. 50 • July 1986 • No. 7
