Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959 [Book Review]

Abstract

More than most Americans, white Southerners have been conscious of their history, and, much more than most, have tried, sometimes with open, sometimes with covert self-consciousness, or even, perhaps, unconsciously, to refashion that history into convenient, serviceable patterns. The dominant, familiar myth has been conservative, its characters the cavalier planter, the happy slave, the valiant and romantic Confederate cavalryman, the evil or just ignorant Yankee Reconstructionist, the paternalistic New South industrialist, the cosmopolitan, forward-looking Progressive politician or newspaper editor. The competing, less well-known tradition, crafted initially by Yankees, but since the 1920s, primarily by dissenting Southerners, black as well as white, serves different purposes and has different stock characters, more villains than heroes: the brutal slaveholder and postbellum bossman, the rebellious slave, the anti-aristocratic, populistic, hill-country small farmer, the exploitative capitalist and his brutal minions, the long-suffering but rebellious sharecropper or miner or lint-head, and the idealistic organizer who seeks to help in the liberation of the underclass. This book, a series of narratives about some of these organizers by the Southern Field Secretary for Amnesty International, Anthony Dunbar, falls into the second tradition. It is an attempt to create a usable past for Southern radicals.

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