There Goes My Everything
White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
During the civil rights movement, epic battles for justice were fought in the streets, at lunch counters, and in the classrooms of the American South. Just as many battles were waged, however, in the hearts and minds of ordinary white southerners whose world became unrecognizable to them. Jason Sokol’s vivid and unprecedented account of white southerners’ attitudes and actions, related in their own words, reveals in a new light the contradictory mixture of stubborn resistance and pragmatic acceptance–as well as the startling and unexpected personal transformations–with which they greeted the enforcement of legal equality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The experiences of white Southerners during the period of the Civil Rights movement have, until now, gone largely unexplored. Sokol, a doctoral candidate in history at UC-Berkeley, traces the process of desegregation by drawing on public records and interviews conducted with white Southerners as they faced the tide of change brought by Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Sokol actively resists easy generalizations or stereotypes of the men and women whose rejection of equal rights created the central tension of the Civil Rights movement. Instead of stock characters, Sokol presents individuals such as Ollie McClung, whose opposition to integration stemmed, at least in part, from a belief in personal liberty as well as hundreds of voices for whom change meant "their world would never be the same." Sokol never apologizes or attempts to mitigate the often brutal and violent consequences of Southern racism. His eloquent presentation, with all of its complications, provides an invaluable and much-needed addition to our understanding of how the Civil Rights movement was actually lived. Photos.
