Race, Rhetoric, and Risk: Revisiting the History of U.S. Civil Rights

Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. By Mary L. Dudziak. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000; pp. xii + 330. $29.95.

Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement. By Carol Polsgrove. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001; pp. xxi + 296. $26.95.

The Last Days: A Son's Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of the New South. By Charles Marsh. New York: Basic Books, 2001; pp. 296. $25.00.

The Modern Presidency and Civil Rights: Rhetoric on Race from Roosevelt to Nixon. By Garth E. Pauley. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001; pp. vii + 259. $39.95.

A few months ago a friend who teaches in another discipline called to say that his first book was going to be published by an Ivy League university's press. After we reveled in his good news, he giggled and said, "Yeah, the editor told me that any book with the words 'the Third Reich,' 'the Civil War,' or 'kittens' in the title is an automatic shoo-in." I will not, of course, reveal which of these magic three was in my friend's title, nor will I reveal the press. (For the sake of our friendship, however, I will point out that his book, which has nothing whatsoever to do with pets, is quite good.) Yet even a short stroll through the aisles of your favorite bookstore will probably bear out his editor's claim. There seems to be no shortage of books devoted to these three topics, and probably rightly so, at least in two of the three cases.

Still, my friend's story has made me think of the reasoning behind his editor's apocryphal list of "shoo-ins"—that certain topics are safe bets within the publishing industry, whether the final product is a scholarly monograph or a coffee table book. More to the point, my friend's story has also made me think about topics that could be on this list but somehow are not, compelling topics of general interest that raise important questions and yet are somehow not as "safe" as these three. After reading the four books reviewed in this essay, I've been thinking again about why the history of U.S. civil rights did not make the cut. Certainly the complicated yet pressing nature of the topic demands multiple approaches. Certainly there continue to be a wide variety of interested readers from multiple disciplines. And certainly, as the scope and breadth of these four books reveal, authors continue to ask new questions and provide new insights into such matters.

It seems to me, however, that the topic of civil rights is distinctive in at least one important way. In its being and in its telling, it entails multiple risks. Most obviously, the history of civil rights in the United States is itself a history of risk-taking, made up of the stories of people who put their lives in jeopardy in order to advance their cause. In this sense, the subject matter is compelling in the same ways that all histories of war are. Just as none of us can imagine what it must have been like to fight "brother against brother" in the Civil War or to have joined the Resistance in World War II, today we still shudder when considering the sharp sting of Bull Connor's fire hoses in Birmingham or the unyielding blows of police nightsticks at Selma. My undergraduate students listen to these latter stories with incredulity, and we often talk about the dual nature of their wonderment. They are unable to comprehend the level of commitment that would motivate someone to put his or her life on the line against such overwhelming odds; they are also baffled by the institutional and cultural practices that made such activism necessary. In retelling stories of...