White and black papers alike treated the movement, however, as a story about black people--an emphasis that historians have faithfully reproduced. The young historian Jason Sokol finds this emphasis ironic, after decades of disappointment with the unfulfilled promise of freedom and equality for black America. Sokol, a visiting professor and postdoctoral fellow at Cornell, suggests that the movement wrought its deepest historic changes on the other side of the South's racial divide. "As long as the spotlight remained solely on blacks," he writes in There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975, "Americans underestimated the full power of the civil rights movement." Sokol's critics have complained that he overemphasizes the ambiguities of white Southern experience. This is a bit unfair. Sokol likes to let his sources speak for themselves--giving them the freedom to get their meaning across and his readers the freedom to grasp it. And there's a profound historical insight hidden in the variety of voices: Ordinary white Southerners often disagreed with one another, even as their leaders claimed racial unity and worked harder than ever to enforce that unity.

The range of white responses to the movement that Sokol covers was bewilderingly vast--so vast that generalizations about white people cannot be sustained. At one extreme, Southern liberals celebrated the civil rights era for redeeming the white South from its once-blinding racial sins. At the other extreme--as liberals frequently complained--the movement's successes concealed ever more insidious forms of racism.

Sokol's book is most interesting when he finds white Southerners dancing back and forth between extremes. Ollie McClung Sr. fought against desegregation of his barbecue restaurant in Birmingham in 1964. He testified, "I would refuse to serve a Negro as well as a drunken man or a profane man or anyone else who would affect my business." McClung won in the Federal District Court. But while the case was being appealed, his growing celebrity annoyed him. Life Magazine reported, "Ollie takes no delight in the fact that he has become the champion of segregationists everywhere." A fervent convert to Christianity, McClung had recently taken time off to preach around the country. He said he found that "Many Negroes occupy a higher station in the eyes of God than whites do." He didn't serve black customers on the basis of their race, he said, but only because his white customers would refuse to sit among them. He went to court, he said, to fight "federal control of private property and dictation of private business." But when five black customers showed up two days later, there were "no problems," he said. "Everything was all right." A fascinating theme runs through many of these stories that Sokol and other historians do not identify as such: Many white Southerners insisted that they were not racist but avoided association with black people because other white people were racist, and they feared attack. Thus white Southerners shunted responsibility--and sounded exactly like Yankee liberals, who for different reasons focused their attention on other people's racism.

Sometimes white Southerners grasped racism's absurdity, as when an influential white citizen of Selma, quoted by Sokol, told a public meeting in 1952: "We want the Negro to keep in his place, but it must be hard for him to know just where his place is. In buses it's behind; on trains it's up front; in white churches it's up, and generally speaking, it's down." Eighteen years later, white students in Atlanta provided a jarring example of such absurdity--and of the civil rights movement's remarkable impact--when, protesting against busing, they carried placards reading "We Shall Overcome." (White students in Charlotte also sang that civil rights anthem in their protest against busing the same year.) More than a collector of such curiosities, Sokol makes a solid case that contradictory white motives opened up opportunities that black Southerners could exploit to their own advantage. When William Branch became the first black probate judge in Greene County, Alabama, in 1970, for example, he appointed as county attorney the racist Ralph Banks Jr., co-founder of a white supremacist organization that fought black candidates. Branch reasoned that his new black-dominated government needed experienced professionals and "more backing among local whites." Banks at first responded, "Are you out of your mind?" and then accepted. Sokol writes: "Banks realized--before many others did--that whites would have to adjust to retain political power."

Sokol lets Gunnar Myrdal make his overall point: As a poor, oppressed minority, the black American "had little other strategy open to him than to play on the conflicting values in the white majority group." White Southerners could often, despite themselves, serve the movement's purposes--if in no other way than by failing to unify behind various segregationist schemes.

Black Southerners didn't always unify behind the desegregation platform. In A Class of Their Own, Adam Fairclough--a professor at the University of Leiden and one of the most diligent and careful historians of civil rights--explores the often overlooked complexities of black Southerners, emphasizing teachers and education leaders.

The psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose expert testimony was crucial to Brown v. Board of Education, had argued that black segregated schools made black children feel inferior and that separate schools were bound to be unequal. Black teachers in these schools often strenuously disagreed. (The great novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston also fiercely rejected that idea, and segregationists did their best to publicize her view.) Exclusion from the white system inspired initiatives from within the black community. Teachers built schools with their own sweat and savings; they won what advantages they could by making deals with white officials, including white supremacists. While schools, like churches, could encourage quietism, Fairclough argues that "black teachers did far more than black ministers to breed dissatisfaction with and opposition to racial discrimination."

For all these reasons, black teachers (who joined the NAACP in high numbers), were reluctant to follow Thurgood Marshall's Legal Defense Fund when it changed its goal from school equalization to desegregation in 1950. It wasn't that they opposed desegregation in the abstract. But they feared that desegregation couldn't be achieved in the way that Marshall intended. With no assurance that any genuinely liberating system would soon replace the black schools that teachers had fought so hard to improve, they were in no rush to send their charges into the clutches of those who had shown such contempt for them. Civil rights lawyers accused the teachers of protecting their self-interest, arguing that they should sacrifice their jobs for the betterment of black children. But Fairclough establishes that the teachers were often deeply respected community leaders, and many black Southerners saw their reluctance to put all black America's eggs in the desegregation basket as sensible realism. (Many parents and students, who took great pride in their schools, believed that the threat of desegregation would give them what they wanted--equal funding.) Desegregation, by contrast, was a gamble devised by a band of legal visionaries. As NAACP lawyer Constance Baker Motley noted, "We didn't really get any grassroots activity around school desegregation." Fairclough has no doubt that, on balance, school desegregation was best for the majority of black students and even teachers. But he recognizes that it came at a price--the black community lost a valued institution--and that it did not bring the broader equality that civil rights leaders hoped to achieve.

Fairclough revisits the ticklish problem that Christopher Jencks raised in his 1972 book Inequality: Do desegregation and other school reforms put the cart before the horse? In hindsight, school desegregation "could not be separated from the political and economic dimensions of white supremacy," Fairclough writes. "Not only could blacks never establish equal educational opportunity in the Jim Crow South, but also education, by itself, could never produce equality." In any event, few Southern districts experienced significant desegregation until the 1970s, and since then, white flight and resegregation have undone much of the progress that did occur.

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