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  • Sharing Some of the Prize—Reluctantly
  • William Clayson (bio)
Gavin Wright. Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2013. xii + 353 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

When I was in the Army, my commanders taught me to BLUF the Commanding General. That meant that I was to issue the Bottom Line Up Front in my briefings. My BLUF on Sharing the Prize is that the title is misleading. The title should be White Southerners Reluctantly Share Some of the Prize After Resisting Integration with Violence. Gavin Wright provides an impressive amount of statistical information in this book on the economy of the South in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Scholars will appreciate and use Wright’s economic analysis for decades to come. But, in the end, Sharing the Prize promises more than it provides in terms of understanding what the prize is. What I expect when I pick up a book on the Civil Rights Movement, complete with a close-up on the dust jacket of weathered black and white hands entwined, is to be inspired. Instead Professor Wright informed me that the Civil Rights Movement provided economic benefits to blacks and whites in the Southern United States during the last half of the twentieth century. The author’s seeming lack of experience with Southern people outside academic capitals like Charlottesville or Oxford weakens the book.

Wright’s numbers show that whites and African Americans advanced economically in the South in the decades since the Civil Rights Movement, but they also reveal the persistence of gross racial inequality in the region. From my perspective, the author seems uninspired by the far greater story we tell our children in classrooms: People 400 years ago made economic choices that turned generations of human beings into chattel slaves based on the color of their skin; then they freed them after a holocaust of violence, only to allow them to become second-class citizens in the civilization they built; until finally these heroic people reached the promised land in our own time.

Wright ponders: “Why did white southerners defend so passionately and for so long an inefficient system that evidently failed to serve their own best economic interests?” (p. 2). The obvious answer to this is racism. Southern whites held on to racist preoccupations that held them back economically. [End Page 346] Near the end of the book, however, Wright acknowledges that “unobtrusive measures of racial attitudes . . . find distinctly higher levels of racial prejudice in the South than in the non-South.” This suggests to me that Wright knew what he was up to all along. He was too polite to say it, so I will: Southern whites, get over your racism! Integration improved your economy.

A broader review of the most recent literature on the Civil Rights Movement would have strengthened the book. Notable exclusions from Wright’s bibliography include Taylor Branch, Dan Carter, and Gary Gerstle. Wright no doubt knows of these authors and their books, but excluding their ideas from the narrative turns the inspiration of the Civil Rights Movement into a sideshow to the triumphant march of economic progress. These authors inspired me as a twenty-something reader and aspiring historian. My fear is that some idealistic kid is browsing through a Barnes and Noble now looking for inspiration and she will find this book instead. “Hey,” that kid might think, “my history teacher teared up when he played the DVD of the ‘I Have a Dream Speech.‘ That was inspirational, and according to this book, it all worked out in the end.” Did it? Wright admits that 37 percent of Southern blacks living below the poverty line is no cause for celebration, but the optimistic tone of the overall narrative leaves it to the reader to decide why chronic poverty persists among Southern blacks.

The absence in Wright’s bibliography of Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s article from the March 2005 issue of Journal of American History, “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” troubles me. Dowd-Hall’s premise is paramount to the new historiography of the movement:

By confining the civil rights struggle...

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