There goes my everything : white Southerners in the age of civil rights, 1945-1975 /

White resistance to the Civil Rights Movement has usually been portrayed strictly in terms of political action. Certainly, the "Southern strategy" and the movement launched by Alabama Governor George Wallace have been highlighted by historians of the period. Sokol (Cornell Univ.), however, offers the best social history of white southerners in the civil rights era in this splendidly researched and written account in which he skillfully shares the reaction of whites toward the revolution in their midst. The story Sokol tells, although sometimes sympathetically, is of whites resisting even the most basic changes for blacks. Accustomed to regarding African Americans in terms of "our Negroes," whites had a peculiar way of regarding human equality. In other words, blacks were not considered equal unless whites said they were. Indeed, whites in large numbers saw the most rudimentary changes as threats to their own liberties. Although Sokol shows some examples of reconciliation between the races, he leaves no doubt that whites were dragged kicking and screaming to the idea that blacks were, even at the most basic level, deserving of rights. It was with great reluctance rather than genuine acceptance that whites acquiesced to the "second reconstruction." Superb. ^BSumming Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. D. R. Turner Davis and Elkins College

Historian Sokol examines how the civil rights movement challenged long-held notions among southern whites about the character and circumstances of their black neighbors and workers and their own place in society. The movement for racial equality changed race relations and altered attitudes, transformed institutions and towns, and upended tradition. It also caused profound changes in whites as individuals. Drawing on recorded interviews and published and unpublished articles chronicling the turbulent times between 1945 and 1975, Sokol presents a portrait of white people in the frontline southern towns, from Little Rock and Atlanta to Birmingham and rural North Carolina. Sokol illustrates the complexity of the human drama behind the civil rights movement from the perspective of those whose cherished way of life was gone forever, those who felt liberated, and those who found new, subtler ways to practice their hate. This is a fascinating look at a side of the civil rights movement that has not been a widely explored aspect of one of the greatest social transformations in U.S. history. --Vanessa Bush Copyright 2006 Booklist

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 individualssuch as Ollie McClung, whose opposition to integration stemmed, at least in part, from a belief in personal libertyas 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. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This debut by Sokol, a doctoral candidate in American history at the University of California, Berkeley, is an insightful, incisive analysis of a critical period of change in American history. Examining the American Civil Rights Movement in the South from the conclusion of World War II to the mid-1970s, Sokol offers an original and penetrating perspective on what all too often is assumed to be one singular progression. He focuses on the experiences, reactions, and in some instances radical transformations of whites of the South during this most tumultuous time. Sokol's narrative challenges the reader to reexamine this era from the various and often competing perspectives of mostly ordinary men and women encountering a societal earthquake beneath their feet. Particularly effective is Sokol's focus on the "micro" level, as he considers the "intrusion" of black lives in "white only" establishments such as schools, restaurants, movie theaters, and public accommodations, as per the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Making sense of social transformation is seldom easy and invariably fraught with temptations to oversimplify. Sokol works carefully, compassionately, and creatively and avoids the pitfall of simplistic assessment. This chronicle of the destruction of the white Southern hierarchy belongs in all libraries, public and academic. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/06.] Stephen K. Shaw, Northwest Nazarene Coll., Nampa, ID (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A well-conceived study of the changes in thought and being that swept the white South as its privileged position came under challenge in the Civil Rights era. There is no single white southern culture, and in this debut book, historian Sokol notes that the simpleminded designation of white southerners simply as racist obscures the fact that their "racial attitudes and behavior frequently revealed a confused and conflicted people, at times divided within and against themselves." They had much to be confused about, for many whites prided themselves on knowing what black people thought and, what is more, knowing what was best for them. They found out otherwise. The advent of WWII, racially mixed military units and integrated combat situations in which soldiers of whatever ethnic group were afraid and brave in equal measure, all helped alter the temper of the South; in particular, educated southerners began to publicly endorse the notion that vanquishing fascism abroad should be extended to vanquishing Jim Crow at home. Even so, change "was a partial and messy process" in which entrenched southerners such as Georgia restaurateur and politician Lester Maddox fought integration every step of the way, even as others accepted--some very reluctantly--the reality that the old way of life was gone forever. Sokol examines several agents of change, one of them old-fashioned peer pressure: In the case of Memphis restaurants, for instance, black protestors and the federal government faced less contempt than did "proprietors who stubbornly clung to white supremacy while others integrated." White southerners, in other words, pushed white southerners along. But they have not yet arrived: drawing on wide-ranging interviews, Sokol shows that the process of integration and accommodation is ongoing, yet still "agonizingly slow . . . in deference to the rhythms and preferences of whites' lives." A valuable complement to Taylor Branch's At Canaan's Edge (2006) and Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home (2001). Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.