Howard W. Odum's Folklore Odyssey: Transformation to Tolerance through African American Folk Studies.

Howard W. Odum's Folklore Odyssey: Transformation to Tolerance through African American Folk Studies. By Lynn Moss Sanders. (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2003. Pp. xviii, 184. $29.95, ISBN 0-8203-2549-X.)

In an essay initially published in 1958, just four years after Howard W. Odum's death, historian George Tindall identified four areas in which Odum made significant contributions. The second was in descriptive writings that depict the South's folk, white and black. Lynn Moss Sanders focuses on this area, specifically Odum's longtime involvement in the study of black folklore. Drawing heavily upon primary sources--including interviews she conducted in the mid-1980s with Guy B. Johnson, Odum's colleague, and with Mary Odum Schinhan, his daughter--Sanders traces the evolution of Odum's racial views. Growing up during the South's most intensely racist period, Odum absorbed the racial conventions of the time, as is evident in his first book, Social and Mental Traits of the Negro (New York, 1910). Sanders argues that developments occurring early in his tenure (which began in 1920 when Odum was thirty-five) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) propelled him on a journey toward racial tolerance.

In 1924 Odum met Guy Johnson, whom he persuaded to enroll in UNC's doctoral program in sociology. The two began a collaborative project that resulted in two books, The Negro and His Songs (Chapel Hill, 1925) and Negro Workaday Songs (Chapel Hill, 1926). Student influenced professor, and Odum began to embrace more liberal ideas on the subject of race. "The material in Negro Workaday Songs," Sanders writes, "is presented in a much less racially biased way than the songs in the first collection" (p. 49).

Even more important in the evolution of Odum's racial ideas than his association with Johnson was his relationship, at virtually the same time, with an itinerant black worker named John Wesley Gordon, who was known as "Left Wing" due to the loss of his left arm in an accident. Gordon was the model for Black Ulysses, the protagonist of Odum's fictional trilogy Rainbow Round My Shoulder (Indianapolis, 1928), Wings on My Feet (Indianapolis, 1929), and Cold Blue Moon (Indianapolis, 1931). The second of the three novels, which describes Gordon's experiences as a soldier in the Great War, is "a remarkable achievement.... Not only does Odum explicitly condemn the treatment of black soldiers by whites, he allows a black man to tell his own story in his own words" (p. 110). The white intellectual's friendship with the black workingman was liberating. As Odum observed, he got to know Gordon "as a human being rather than as the mere Negro" (p. 116).

Although solid, Sanders's study would be stronger if it were shorter. Chapter 5 deals largely with works by Guy Johnson and the playwright Paul Green. The connection with Odum is tenuous, and much of the material in the chapter could have been compressed or omitted. Even so, this book is a welcome addition to the study of a man who had many talents and who used those talents to do much good.

Augusta State University 

WAYNE MIXON