Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement.

David L. Chappell. Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 303 pp. $42.00

This book, the author declares in the introduction, is about the relationship between morality and politics. Examining the effect on the development of the Civil Rights Movement, David Chappell concludes that it is, at best, a contentious one, a relationship that often distorts the view of those directly affected by it as well as those who treat it as an abstraction.

Judged in terms of social justice, there can be no moral defense for the treatment of the nation's African American minority under a Constitution that condoned slavery and, after its abolition by force of arms, continued to provide the sanction of law for forms of racial segregation that reduced blacks to second-class citizenship.

Judged in terms of political reality, the justification, or at least the explanation, is that the Constitution also required majority rule, and in the United States most voters, with varying degrees of fervor, have been devoted to a concept of white supremacy that still roils the political process.

This is the "American Dilemma" Gunnar Myrdal defined fifty years ago--brought about by the intrusion of an intractable moral issue upon a political system designed to effect compromise. The unresolved conflict produced the myths and stereotypes David Chappell examined in the course of the extensive research that distinguishes his work.

"This study began," he writes, "with a simple, and to me at the time, startling, observation: there were white Southerners who supported the civil rights movement.... Growing up in the 1960s in what must have been a typical northern white liberal family, I had an image of the white South as one big lynch mob waiting to happen."

Chappell was quickly disabused of the notion that the only exceptions were the few white Southerners identified in the media as active participants in street demonstrations and sit-ins. When he sought them out he found that, while he admired their conviction and courage, most had not suffered anything worse than the opprobrium and economic disadvantage that is the lot of anyone who defies the social conventions of his own kind. This had made them "outside agitators," and rendered them as ineffectual as the ideological interlopers who could claim no roots in the region.

The "inside agitators" the author cites in the title were pointed out by the black veterans of the Movement. Without exception, the leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who marched with Martin Luther King credited their success to the support of indigenous whites who could hardly be described as agitators, but were certainly insiders--well-placed members of the Southern establishment who helped rally majority political support for the institutional desegregation the Civil Rights Movement demanded.

Most would have preferred to see the segregated society they grew up in maintained, but recognized that this was no longer possible. They did not publicly enlist in the black cause, but their passive support was assured when King recognized non-violence as a tactical as well as a moral imperative. "His realism," Chappell writes, "far more than his idealism, accounts for the long-term devotion of his huge following in the Southern black community." It also brought around influential whites who recognized the futility of the "massive resistance" to court-ordered school desegregation urged by racist demagogues who aroused a populist counter-protest.

Despite their traditional identification as Democrats, most members of the Southern establishment did not differ ideologically from those elsewhere whose status allowed them to dominate the political process. Their well-being depended on the maintenance of law and order, and in the South the threat of disruption came not from non-violent street demonstrations, but from militant segregationists who called for, and often employed, brute force against the freedom marchers.

Once violence, rather than segregation, was recognized as the prime issue to be dealt with, it became possible to mobilize political support in Washington to implement the desegregation the federal courts had decreed. With few exceptions, Southern Democrats in Congress would continue to vote against civil rights bills, but they also began acceding to off-the-record maneuvers that ultimately permitted the passage of increasingly stringent legislation.

Although there would still be flares of violence in the DeepSouth, massive resistance as a political force effectively came to an end in 1957 when Governor Orval Faubus used his state militia to bar the entry of nine black children to Little Rock's Central High School. The result was to force an extremely reluctant President Eisenhower to send in federal troops to enforce court orders he personally deplored.

Reacting to similar defiance by state and local authorities in Mississippi and Alabama, the Republican president's Democratic successors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, faced down dissenters in their own party. The end result was enactment by Congress of measures that required affirmative federal action to protect the rights and broaden the opportunities of the black minority wherever and however those rights might be denied.

It can be, and often has been, argued that the black Civil Rights Movement was coopted by the white establishment as the price of ending Jim Crow segregation in the South. It was, I think, more a case of mutual cooptation that resulted in a new Democratic coalition that for the first time gave blacks access to public office and an effective voice in determining public policy.

Inside Agitators is deliberately limited in scope, dealing only with the Southern phase of the Civil Rights Movement. Chappell makes only passing reference to developments outside the South, where King was unable to establish non-violence as a governing principle. But he does note that the relative success of the Movement within the region, and the relative failure elsewhere, resulted from the contrast between the Southern experience and the more stringent de facto racial separation that greeted the mass of poor blacks who migrated to the great cities in the years following World War I.

In the South the master-servant relationship of the slavery era survived in diluted form until mid-century, providing the basis for a social order which, in important respects, protected blacks from white predators inflamed by racist rhetoric. The dispensation did not preclude, but in the ordinary course of the working day required, personal relationships. For all but the most benighted whites the shared history that left psychic scars on both races produced a concern for the well-being of what amounted to extended families.

The paternal role assumed by the whites carried with it a patronizing implication of inferiority resented by many blacks when they had no choice but to accept it. Once the leaders of the black community were free to speak out, there was an all but unanimous condemnation of paternalism as an intolerable manifestation of white supremacy. This has taken on an aura of militance among those who grew up in isolated black ghettoes without experiencing the interracial relationships that led the previous generation to accept Martin Luther King vision of a beloved community to be made possible by the promise of redemption he held forth to whites.

Chappell acknowledges the division in the black community that has developed around the separatist doctrine advocated by a dissident hero of the Movement, Malcolm X. This is a prime example of the conflict between morality and the expediency inherent in politics. In an epilogue, "Interpreting the Movement," Chappell contends that dealing with the issue in simple terms of black versus white represents a flight from reality: "... the civil rights movement was not a complete escape from the human relationship inherited from the pas or a repudiation of it, but a development of it."

But this does not apply to the outbreak of gunfire, arson, and looting that characterized the "long hot summers" of the late 1960s. These race dots could t seen as a spontaneous reaction to the dehumanizing conditions suffered by pot blacks. Then came the organized gangs that surfaced in their wake to recruit youthful dealers and armed enforcers for the drug trade. The level of violence they have visited upon the inner cities cannot be condoned under the broadest concept of minority rights or Judeo-Christian tolerance.

A point of special import for black intellectuals, who must deal with the strictures of the essentially defensive canon of political correctness, is emphasized in a foreword to Inside Agitators by Clayborne Carson, the Stanford historian who is editing the Martin Luther King papers. "Many African American young people have adopted attitudes that express their anger and frustration," he writes, "but they have been unable to transform their resentments into an effective political strategy...." For what the testimony of an unreconstructed white Southern liberal is worth, I can offer concurrence with Professor Carson's, conclusion:

A revival of Gandhian/Kingian nonviolence offers the best alternative we

have to an acceptance of racial divisions and racial injustice as

inevitable. Against the claim that the present world order constitutes

an end point of social progress, the tradition of nonviolent

social struggle offers a trenchant social critique and a feasible

political strategy for those at the bottom of the social order.