The House I Live In: Race in the American Century.

The House I Live In: Race in the American Century. By Robert J. Norrell. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xx, 379. $35.00, ISBN 0-19-507345-2.)

In a season when Huey Newton's widow and former Black Panther associates are peddling a hot sauce called "Burn Baby Burn" and advertising that the only thing they want to burn nowadays is our taste buds, we might well conclude that today's race relations are not our fathers' race relations. If there is one constant in Robert J. Norrell's new book The House I Live In: Race in the American Century, it is the theme of change. In his splendid narrative of nearly 150 years of race relations, nothing remains static for very long. This may be one of the most important insights general readers will gain: African Americans' efforts to alter the racial status quo persisted in the face of relentless white supremacy, even when conditions seemed bleakest.

Norrell, who holds the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Chair of Excellence in History at the University of Tennessee, has done a valuable service for all college history instructors by providing a one-volume survey of race relations in the United States, from emancipation to the present. This is emphatically not a book about the South alone; to read it is to be reminded that the question of race has truly been the American dilemma. The author makes skillful use of early polling data to reveal national racial attitudes, and he mines American popular culture to good effect to illustrate Americans' thinking about race relations for the past century and more. It is a pleasure to read a book that so successfully blends comment on legislation, policy, and leaders such as Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr. and George Wallace, with pertinent observations about coon songs, Frank Sinatra, jazz, Jackie Robinson, rap lyrics, and Alex Haley.

Norrell rejects the conventional are of the civil rights movement, that brief but exciting period from 1955 to 1966. In the traditional telling, during those years the nation experienced the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King Jr.'s emergence as the eloquent voice of black America, the inspired rise of mass protest, which, with assistance from a committed federal government, brought thrilling victories, and then the seemingly sudden loss of unity, loss of momentum, loss of moral high ground, and the concomitant rise of black anger, separatism, and violence that ignited white backlash and signaled the end of the movement's glory days. While an analysis of these events forms the longest of the three sections of his book, Norrell also directs our attention to crucial but frequently neglected developments in the 1930s and 1940s. He insists, rightly, that the Roosevelt administration "helped to change the course of race relations in the United States" and reminds us that a medley of ingredients--such as the Marian Anderson incident, the "Double V" campaign, Joe Louis's right hook, the Smith v. Allwright decision, the zoot suit riots, Mrs. Roosevelt's "My Day" columns, and the discovery of death camps in Europe--served to concoct a new mood about race relations in America (p. 104).

The last hundred pages of Norrell's book offer a snarling, sprawling, complex tale of recent history, featuring Black Panthers, neoconservatives, Ronald Reagan, Louis Farrakhan, affirmative action, school busing, smoldering resentments, and mountains of litigation. Norrell is particularly adept at discussing the economic backdrop against which all the drama of the late twentieth century was played, highlighting the eternal quest for security and status that underlies so much of human behavior. We are left with the realization that the dismantling of legal discrimination at mid-century was relatively easy after all, while today's intense disagreement over the meaning of equality leaves the nation faltering.

Norrell, a distinguished southern historian, displays masterful familiarity with the vast scholarly literature that deals with the topic of race in America. Much that is here will be familiar to other historians of the South, but to have such a lucid, readable, insightful synthesis is a treat. Beyond that, there are nuggets of new information sprinkled throughout, enough to enliven lectures and stimulate discussion. To read this book is to realize how far we have come as a nation, but it is also certain to stimulate vigorous debates over the difficult choices that still lie ahead of us.

PAMELA TYLER

Deep South Humanities Center, Tulane University