Civil Rights - Movements & Figures, United States - Ethnic & Race Relations, 20th Century American History - Civil Rights, Civil Rights - United States, Civil Rights - African American History, African American Regional History - Southern States, Southern

Southern Journey

Name: Southern Journey
Author: Tom Dent
ISBN: 9780688140991

by Tom Dent

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Overview

More than twenty years after the civil rights movement, one question still lingers: What significant changes, if any, have resulted from its efforts? In search of the answer, author Tom Dent takes us on a unique journey through the contemporary South, revisiting the places where protesters and their supporters took a stand for equality. Dent interviews blacks, whites, civil rights workers, and just plain folks about the sit-ins, student demonstrations, and protests that shaped the Movement. In their own word, the participants discuss the impressions these events left on their communities. Dent's journey becomes a personal one as well, as he examines the role the Movement has played in his own life. Raised "a black youth in New Orleans one generation before the legal obstructions that delineated racial segregation in the South were dismantled piece by piece," he was encouraged by his family to seek his fortune outside the South but soon returned home. Using these smaller towns - "more interesting, more resistant to change, more reflective of the South as a region" than their larger counterparts - Dent demonstrates how the civil rights movement continues to make a positive impact on people's lives, today, but also learns that the goal of equality hasn't been fully achieved.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A black youth reared in segregated New Orleans, Dent went to Mississippi for the civil rights movement, and that experience stuck with him. So in 1991, he decided to work his way south from Greensboro, N.C., to Mississippi, skirting both large cities and important officials, to talk to (mostly) black folk and to assess the movement's legacy. At times, Dent's meandering approach lacks depth and is unwieldy, but his personal connection to his inquiry informs his story with commitment. In Greensboro, the unresolved gap between blacks and whites, exemplified in an anniversary celebration of the city's historic sit-ins, remind Dent "of the strained interracial meetings of the 1950s." In Orangeburg, S.C., a black academic tells him ruefully that many social-work students go into "criminal justice" lacking the broader awareness of the politics behind the new programs. In Albany, Ga., Dent discerns signs of material progress but deep divisions not only between the races but also within the black community. In Mississippi, where he sees black political victories as having had a relatively small payoff, he becomes convinced that a new black organization is needed to supplant the NAACP to address national political issues of special concern to blacks (education, unemployment) and to monitor cases of police and official abuse and discrimination. Though not quite a complete plan, it's a constructive response to Dent's conclusion that the civil rights movement opened up doors, but "once inside, well, there was hardly anything there." Photos not seen by PW. Author tour. (Jan.)

Library Journal

A poet (Blue Lights and River Songs, Lotus, 1982) and former executive director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, Dent seeks to discover "ordinary people who did extraordinary things in an extraordinary time in our history....they represent the soul of the southern movement, the spirit that made change possible." Dent interviewed 120 black and white Southerners, many former proponents and a few opponents of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He relates people's assessment of Southern life and race relations since the movement in Greensboro, North Carolina, St. Augustine, Florida, Charleston, South Carolina, Albany, Gorgia, Selma, Alabama, and elsewhere. He writes of the participants' optimism and despair, especially of African Americans who felt that the movement failed to address economic issues adequately. Dent compellingly reveals that ordinary Southerners fundamentally changed the region and are poised to make more substantive changes. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-Charles L. Lumpkins, Bloomsburg Univ. Lib., Pa.