The Southern Elite and Social Change: Essays in Honor of Willard B. Gatewood Jr.

Edited by Randy Finley and Thomas A. DeBlack. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002. Pp. [xxii], 221. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-55728-720-1.)

This collection of ten essays honors the career of Willard B. Gatewood, a teacher and scholar of the South who wrote on subjects as varied as the evolution controversy, the Arkansas Delta, and Theodore Roosevelt, but who is perhaps best known for Aristocrats of Color (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), his 1990 study of the African American elite. The topical scope of the essays included in this volume is equally diverse, ranging from the mulatto elite and carpet-industry barons to women's political behavior and civil fights agitation; chronologically, they span the early republic period through the 1960s. Their geographic breadth is far more limited. Fully half of the essays deal with Arkansas subjects, a nod to both Gatewood's research interests and his affiliation with the University of Arkansas. For readers interested in that state's history, the emphasis is a plus, but it does not fulfill the promise of the book's title, which implies a broader treatment of elites throughout the South.

In an attempt to counterbalance what editors Randy Finley and Thomas A. DeBlack describe as "the recent historiographical trend of studying history only from the perspective of the masses" (p. x), the volume sets out to examine how southern elites, white and black, confronted change and forged the region's distinctive political, economic, social, and intellectual culture for all southerners. Of course, it comes as no surprise that elites, armed with political and economic influence as well as access to education, would have a large impact on the contours of southern society over time. Given that premise, however, it is disappointing that many of these essays, while well researched, generally fail to move beyond mere description in addressing the volume's central theme; instead, they tend toward largely biographical treatments that suffer from too much localism and personalism. Taken together, the contributions provide a mostly superficial sense of how the individual lives they examine might further our understanding of the nature of southern elites and southern society. Because the majority of the essays do not significantly advance the worthwhile analytical framework of the collection, the final product is therefore uneven.

There are a few notable exceptions, however, in which an individual's elite status is persuasively situated within its wider social context. Essays by Bernard E. Powers Jr. and Bobby L. Lovett, for example, illustrate dramatically how well-positioned African Americans negotiated the boundaries of their circumscribed freedom and the racist culture in which they lived to construct a powerful institutional legacy of churches and schools for their communities--and how these institutions, in turn, played a role in the larger civil rights struggle. Likewise, Paula C. Barnes uses compelling oral testimony to demonstrate how some white women brokered their elite status to agitate for a cause outside their own narrowly defined interests: the desegregation of Little Rock's school system. In cases like these, southern elites are shown working collectively, not just individually, to mold their responses to social change.

This collection's commitment to provide equal space to black and white southerners is admirable, but it also points to one of the volume's shortcomings: the unilateral application of the term elite fails to provide readers with a sufficient sense of how its content and meaning shifted according to locale, race, or historical moment. Perhaps it would have been helpful for the essays to analyze the ways that elites were defined differently over time, as well as the larger regional consequences of those changing definitions. A fuller treatment of this topic will need to attend to such important issues.

STEFHANIE E. YUHL

College of the Holy Cross