Speak Now Against the Day.

A new book about the South between the thirties and the sixties makes the case in these anti-government times that without Washington, Jim Crow would still be king

From the Civil War through the civil rights movement, it took only one look at the South to make everyone else feel prosperous and virtuous by comparison. In the twenties, H.L. Mencken famously depicted the region as a "Holy Land for imbeciles," a place "almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally as the Sahara desert." What is less well known is that even natives poured on the invective from time to time. Witherspoon Dodge, a South Carolina clergyman, proclaimed in 1939 that the South is isolated from the rest of the United States "by mountains of pride and rivers of prejudice and valleys of ignorance and swamps of reactionary stupidity, and every now and then washed out with floods of lawlessness."

In this exhaustive and passionate examination of the years between Franklin Roosevelt's first election in 1932 and the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, John Egerton, like Dodge, hardly lets his native region off the hook. Egerton, however, tells this story from a point of view that is frequently overlooked. He chronicles the efforts of Southern progressives to deal constructively with race and the ways those efforts were routinely swatted aside like gnats by the Bilbos, Talmadges, Rankins, and Eastlands who were elected by Southern whites to uphold the old order.

It's a depressing story, powerfully told, and it shoots bullets through whatever case anyone could ever hope to make that the South might have dealt with its racial ills on its own had the meddlesome courts not thrown the region into turmoil in 1954. The federal intervention to force integration is one of the great accomplishments of the federal government in this century, a reminder in these reflexively anti-government days of the good that can be done from Washington.

Egerton, from his perch in Nashville, has spent most of his career writing about the two eternal verities of Southern life--race and home cooking--and is one of the great spirits of the doomed and dwindling tribe of Southern liberals. Like the best of his brethren, he simultaneously loves a place that has so often been morally repulsive and hates a place that has so often been a rich wellspring of faith, community, history, and grace. His book is animated by both emotions. On one level it is a belated homage to the generation of progressives, white and black, who tried to achieve some measure of racial justice in the Jim Crow South against impossible odds. There are black intellectuals like James Weldon Johnson, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Benjamin Mays; white political activists like Howard Kester, Don West, and Aubrey Williams; journalists like Ralph McGill, Barry Bingham, and Hodding Carter. There are organizations like the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and the Southern Regional Council. Given the Balkanized politics of the nineties, there is something instructive and inspiring about an era in which black and white progressives sought common ground to a greater degree than they do now.

To be sure, many, if not most, of the whites pursued agendas that fell far short of the whole-hearted condemnation of Jim Crow most of their black counterparts sought. Many evoked a genteel sort of white supremacy whose main goal was a system that truly delivered on the South's empty promise of separate but equal. Still, Egerton, who researched this book with the fervor of someone digging deeper and deeper into his own soul, tells some remarkable and heroic stories. There is Judge J. Waties Waring of Charleston, who became the most hated man in South Carolina in 1947 when he ruled South Carolina's white primary unconstitutional, foreshadowing the role federal judges would play in forcing the issue of race in the South. There is Frank Porter Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina and the most respected Southern liberal of his time. Graham was voted out of the U.S. Senate after being the target of a race-baiting campaign that marked the political debut of young Jesse Helms, then an aide to Graham's opponent, Willis Smith. In the end, there is J.A. DeLaine in Summerton, South Carolina, L. Francis Griffin in Farmville, Virginia, and the other black plaintiffs who took their lives in their hands to file the lawsuits that eventually led to the Brown decision.

Still, instead of vindicating the South, Egerton's heroes only underscore how dismal the public and political response was to their efforts. More telling than the lonely voices of moderation in the South is the almost unbroken parade of defenders of the old faith who led the charge against racial moderation and social reform. "The voters will always forget," the notorious Mississippi demagogue Theodore Bilbo used to say, but few Southern politicians ever forgot the historian Ulrich B. Phillips' adage that what bonded white Southerners together was the conviction that the South would always be "a white man's country."

The book is most affecting when it focuses on the period just after World War II when tens of thousands of white and black Southerners returned home from defeating racism and totalitarianism overseas only to confront it at home. The war against fascism, the gallant efforts of black troops, the rising prosperity, and the self-confident national mood created a perfect environment for addressing a racial situation most Southerners knew in their hearts could not stand. But it didn't take long to see that the forces of the past were much stronger than those who tried to defeat them. "White supremacy is going to the a hard death--almost as hard as slavery's," the writer Stetson Kennedy said. "It will take the South approximately as long to get over the death of Jim Crow as it is taking to get over the passing of Old Black Joe, the slave."

Of course, the lurid violence, racial apartheid, and bitter isolation of the Jim Crow South are largely gone. Now it's Southerners who look down on Yankees stuck in dying, racially divided cities. But particularly in the wake of the devastating Republican tide in this year's elections, there's a lot that's eerily contemporary about Egerton's narrative. A coalition of Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats had taken the steam out of the New Deal by the time World War II began, and the same coalition was there to thwart Harry Truman as well. Bill Clinton may be no Roosevelt or Truman, and his Southern tormentors are suburban Republicans, not rural Democrats, but then as now, it is the South that has been the biggest obstacle to Democratic reform. The difference now, of course, is that the New Deal coalition has collapsed and the conservative coalition is the dominant force in both houses of Congress.

But Egerton's book isn't just about the South after all. He makes it clear in one case after another that the North wasn't much more hospitable to blacks than was the South. Race riots were the North's answer to lynching. Laws and practices mandating racial separation in the North before the Civil War created the model for Jim Crow in the South after the war. Egerton never lets us forget that it was only the form, not the content, of racial division that separated the North from the South even during the South's most benighted days. "There was a common expression for this anomaly," he writes. "In the South it doesn't matter how close Negroes get as long as they don't get too high; in the North, it doesn't matter how high they get as long as they don't get too close. Segregation was not the law up North, but it was the fact." And as the 1994 election made crushingly clear, nearly all of the traditional Southern fixations on race, conservative values, and white resentment have now become those of the rest of the nation. Indeed, who could have imagined that the Helmses and Thurmonds, steeped in Old Southern ways, could possibly be congressional titans in 1995?

The effect of Egerton's book, therefore, should be far less comforting and simple than the missed opportunities of the South's bitter past. What happened in the South before the Brown decision is the story of race in America, of change made only under duress, of politicians who know racial polarization is a more effective tool than racial harmony, of opportunities lost and risks not taken, North and South. The self-defeating isolation and insularity so pervasive in black political thought these days makes an easy target. Much of the current African-American political agenda, like the racial gerrymandering that is electing blacks from largely black districts in the South and in the process creating a larger block of white Republican districts around them, may be deeply flawed.

But if Egerton's book tells us anything, it's how little blacks have been able to depend on whites to deliver racial justice. It would be nice if this were just a parable of the bad old days in the South. But Gunnar Myrdal got it right back in 1944 when he called his classic treatise on race "An American Dilemma," not "A Southern Dilemma," and presciently predicted it was only a matter of time before the North faced racial problems as severe as those in the South. A half century ago, black sociologist and author Gordon Blaine Hancock wrote: "Unless white leaders are willing to risk something... to live dangerously for noble ends, then we are hopelessly lost." In the era of The Bell Curve and Newt Gingrich, the words ring as true now as they did then.