The Newer South

...But when a Negro did not "keep his place," she confessed, "I felt outraged...

...Soon thereafter, Andrew Young, then one of King's lieutenants, was served at the motel's restaurant—the waitress who once poured coffee on him now greeted him with a smile— but Brock and others who began to serve blacks were promptly stopped by white supremacist counterattacks...

...Communists" such as Robert Kennedy, and hawked autographed ax handles—chicken "drumsticks," he called them—symbolizing his rebellion against federal despotism...

...Thanks to Jason Sokol, we now have a richer understanding of the hard, soul-searching journey undertaken by southern whites to get on the right side of black freedom...

...But in focusing largely on the perspectives of common men and women across the states of the former Confederacy—businessmen, teachers, ministers, housewives, small-town politicians, officers of the law—he makes visceral the convulsions produced when most everything white southerners believed about blacks proved mistaken...

...Given the whipsaw emotions set loose by the black freedom movement, doing the right thing, even under duress, was no easy matter...

...There Goes My Everything White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights: 1945-1975 byJason Sokol Knopf, 448 pp., $27.95 Maddox never experienced the transformative spiritual rebirth that returned George Wallace to the Alabama governorship as an integrationist two decades after his infamous "Segregation forever" inaugural, but in baffling his "liberal doubters just as surely as he surprised his Klan supporters," suggests Jason Sokol, he evinced the contradictions felt by many a southern white in the age of civil rights...

...Freedom will prevail"—by which he meant a nation respectful of states' rights and his own freedom of association—was anachronistic almost as soon as it was uttered...

...But along with reaction to the rioting and anarchy attributed to Black Power and the New Left in the urban North and West, it typified a retrenchment among centrist whites that became national in scope...

...Augustine, Florida...

...Having risen from humble beginnings to modest prosperity, Lester Maddox awoke one day to find his dream of serving whom he pleased in his popular restaurant shattered...

...Early in 1964, Martin Luther King engaged in a much-publicized dialogue with Brock, King explaining the humiliation faced by blacks when they were denied service, Brock explaining why serving blacks violated his rights and would destroy his business...

...by Eric J. Sundquist U-w- loved Negroes," recalled Sarah Patton Boyle in The I Desegregated Heart, her 1962 memoir of conversion to civil rights activism in Charlottesville, Virginia...

...He personally attempted to raise state capitol flags that had been lowered to half-mast following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., whom he considered an enemy of the United States, yet he was also the first governor in the Deep South to appoint blacks to state boards...

...One of Sokol's most striking vignettes concerns James Brock, proprietor of the Monson Motor Lodge in St...

...Who says the nigger is on the bottom...

...I believed that our relationship was complementary and mutually satisfying...

...They may have preferred segregated schools to integrated schools, but most preferred compliance with the law and access to education to the grandstanding of state and local politicians...

...The surprise, however, is how quickly things changed...

...Within the span of a month, as Sokol reports, Brock both doused black protestors with muriatic acid when they staged a "swim-in" at his motel pool and had his property firebombed by the Klan...

...From today's vantage point, the pre-civil rights South seems a bizarre rel-ic—until, that is, some ghost from the Jim Crow past abruptly looms up, a painful lesson learned by Mississippi's senator Trent Lott, unseated as majority leader in 2002 after his ill-advised birthday tribute to Strom Thurmond's 1948 Dixiecrat campaign...

...I just couldn't vote like all the hippies," exclaimed one lifelong Democrat of his ballot for Richard Nixon in 1972...

...Sokol's case study of the 9th Ward, in particular his portrayal of those parents who braved ranting mobs to enroll their white children in integrated schools, vividly captures the turmoil of a community divided against itself, as well as the courage of families who resented their neighbors' strong-arm tactics more than they endorsed black equality...

...Some, like Maddox, felt that they were the victims, that their rights were being trampled and their livelihoods threatened...

...Well-known exponents of segregation such as Mad-dox and Wallace, along with recognized champions of integration such as Ralph McGill and Robert Penn Warren, play a part in Sokol's account of the liberation from racial strictures achieved by whites during the civil rights movement...

...Integration in public education posed especially hard choices for whites accustomed to a time-honored racial hierarchy, choices that proved traumatic not simply because of black protest or federal decree...

...Subsequent protests in St...

...Backlash against court-ordered busing, a key instrument of integration, was by no means exclusively a white issue in the South...

...Collecting views from small towns as well as large, from those with Ku Klux Klan or White Citizens Council affiliations as well as those inclined, openly or secretly, to buck segregation, Sokol offers a compelling, if somewhat repetitive, portrait of the social revolution that redeemed the nation's soul and reshaped its political landscape...

...In St...

...No wonder they might elect as their governor a fried chicken restaurateur who, in defiance of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that forced him to integrate or shut down, recited the Ten Commandments, railed at Eric J. Sundquist, UCLA Foundation professor of literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author, most recently, of Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America...

...Moreover, despite white flight to the suburbs and the subterfuge of segregation academies, the South by 1973 had a higher public school desegregation index than any other part of the country, with 46 percent of black children instructed in integrated classrooms...

...Sokol's title, evocative but inadequately explained, is borrowed from a tune by country songwriter Dallas Frazier...

...Year by year, however, a larger number had their illusions about "our Negroes" exposed, and, slowly, their hearts and minds desegregated...

...Although it would take a generation or more to root out the most stubborn racism— only after 30 years, for example, was Byron de la Beckwith, the murderer of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, brought to justice—it is remarkable that, by 1965, according to one government estimate, 75 percent of those businesses affected by Title II of the Civil Rights Act were already in compliance...

...Propelled by an electoral fluke into the governorship of Georgia in 1966, Maddox embodied the tumult faced by southern whites grappling with, and finally submitting to, desegregation...

...Augustine led to several hundred arrests, but after passage of the Civil Rights Act, local business leaders voted overwhelmingly to comply...

...Surprised by the evidence of black abuse, discrimination, and poverty chronicled in Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi, one white teenager asked a black acquaintance, "Is this book true...

...Insofar as popular memory of the era tends to be dominated by the words and deeds of radical reactionaries, whether in the statehouse or in the street, Sokol's more nuanced account provides an important corrective...

...He's calling the tune, and we run to hear it...

...A new attempt to secede from the Union because of Brown v. Board of Education, remarked a New Orleans truck driver, would be a greater disaster than losing our "segregation virginity...

...Still, whatever lingering allure the Lost Cause may hold for the region and the nation, no one can reasonably doubt the triumph, in law and in shared belief, of the civil rights movement...

...Augustine and elsewhere, resegregation thus played leapfrog with reintegration, law vying with custom until, at last, law won...

...By the same token, in a much-studied phenomenon that Sokol's work helps to explain at a grassroots level, the advent of biracial rule in the South was accompanied by a political realignment that, starting in 1968, helped propel Republicans to victory in seven of the next 10 presidential elections (southern Democrats, of course, won the remaining contests...

...Others adjusted to the new order in name only—"we break every glass they drink out of," said a bar owner forced to serve blacks, "there ain't no law against that"—or adopted what Sokol refers to as the "vernacular of invisibility," paying blacks no attention and pretending nothing had changed...

...If a confirmed liberal had to overcome such deeply ingrained attitudes, no wonder those white southerners dedicated to segregation, a clear majority well into the 1960s, might react with even greater apprehension and bewilderment to the downfall of Jim Crow...

...And only one year after the Voting Rights Act, passed that same year, almost half of blacks in the Deep South had registered, leading soon to reversals of fortune once unimaginable: black city council and school board members, black sheriffs, black mayors...

...For every crusading liberal and every bomb-throwing white supremacist, as Sokol demonstrates, there were thousands of average folks caught in between, struggling not just to accept blacks as equals but also to square their belief in law and order with their resentment of federal coercion...

...complained one Alabama police officer...

...The man in question was among those whites swept up in the contentious 1960 desegregation battle in the city's 9th Ward—a neighborhood made newly notorious by Hurricane Katrina—where a majority of white parents initially did prefer closed schools, and launched a massive boycott in protest of a federal judge's order to desegregate...

...Not only was the nation at large sickened by images of dogs, fire hoses, tear gas, and truncheons wielded against nonviolent demonstrators or by the rabble jeering at innocent schoolchildren, so, too, were many white southerners...

...But his declaration that "America will triumph...

...When officials closed schools or threatened to do so in response to court-ordered desegregation, white parents faced a sharp dilemma...