Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism by Edward H. Peeples, Nancy MacLean (review)

When a white male was born in the American South, indeed in the United States, it was very easy for him to go through the entirety of his life never questioning the privileges accorded to him by his skin color. In the state of Virginia, bastion of the Confederacy’s government and haunted by ghosts and mythologized memories of the Civil War, white supremacy was an especially comfortable attitude to hold. Such was the case with Edward H. Peeples, whose lineage as a descendant of Confederate soldiers positioned him as a willing participant in the white South’s ongoing efforts to enforce hierarchy based on whiteness. And yet despite stories of glory shared around the dinner table, Peeples’s parents’ economic misfortunes cast them into the working class. It turned out that this demotion opened Peeples up to the oppressions experienced by those not favored with white skin and wealth and prodded him to question and then openly challenge white supremacy.

Scalawag, Peeples’s memoir, is an important book because it offers a firsthand glimpse of the transformation of a working-class white Southerner raised in the ideology of white supremacy who eschews that mindset over time and joins the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. While much has been documented about progressive whites from the 1930s forward, the memoirs that exist of whites who resisted segregation have tended to come from the middle and upper classes, such as that of Lucy Randolph Mason, Virginia Durr, and Florence Mars. And increasingly, as civil rights scholars have turned their attention to the attitudes of white Southerners during the civil rights movement, their focus has largely been on those who opposed massive resistance efforts. Few studies have examined whites in this modern period of civil rights activity who supported black struggles for equality. In the tradition of the chronicles of the Reverend Will Campbell from Mississippi and, more recently, of Robert Zellner from Alabama comes a story from the upper South, where adherence to the rules of white supremacy were enforced by what Peeples calls the “Virginia Way”: “stealth racism” (167). Unlike the more overtly violent lessons in white supremacy prescribed by Campbell and Zellner’s experiences in the Deep South, Peeples’s curriculum consisted of a myriad of lessons on the accepted biases of the day and was not exclusive to race but included class, gender, and religion.

Peeples learned early that while his family claimed to love the black employees who served them, he noticed that “the ‘love’ they offered other African Americans was strictly qualified” (11). As long as blacks in Virginia did not challenge their assigned place, white Virginians ruled over them with velvet-covered iron fists. But as Peeples’s family’s economic situation became more fragile, he began to learn the limits of his white privilege. It was through what Peeples describes as a “hypermasculine truculence” that his new station was reinforced (19). In short, Peeples felt ostracized and bullied by the middle- and upper-class students in his school. In seeking out a group to which to belong, he joined roving gangs of white youths who would often prey on vulnerable black neighborhoods. So long as they did not venture into white neighborhoods with their delinquencies, the establishment tolerated and even encouraged such behavior as a way to control both blacks and poor whites.

Ironically, or perhaps inevitably, it was Peeples’s experiences being bullied and then bullying others that began to open his eyes to the injustice of the system that had indoctrinated him. This opening wedge was soon followed by several formative experiences that prevented Peeples from accepting his role in the racial hierarchy and launched him into human rights work. It is vitally important to understand Peeples’s transformation from a bona fide segregationist to a lifelong human rights activist for at least two reasons. First...