Discovering the South: One Man's Travels Through a Changing America in the 1930s by Jennifer Ritterhouse (review)

In Jonathan Daniels's best-selling book A Southerner Discovers the South (1938), Jennifer Ritterhouse finds a vehicle to take the reader on a journey through some of the hot spots in southern race relations during the New Deal years. In doing so, Discovering the South: One Man's Travels Through a Changing America in the 1930s joins a growing body of scholarship on the long civil rights movement. By examining the writing of this influential white, southern, liberal newspaper editor in 1937, Ritterhouse asks readers to imagine themselves as passengers in Daniels's "big, comfortable Plymouth" along with a historian in the backseat offering commentary based on "hindsight and a huge amount of historical scholarship" (pp. 15, 16). Ritterhouse's goal is to write history rather than biography, using Daniels's stops in Raleigh, North Carolina; Lookout Mountain, Nashville, and Memphis, Tennessee; Scottsboro, Tuskegee, and Birmingham, Alabama; Marked Tree and Hot Springs, Arkansas; and Atlanta, Georgia, to tell a story about the nation and the South. The national story may be a bit of a reach, but the southern story is strong.

Ritterhouse argues that the civil rights movement could not have "taken off and gained as much ground" in the 1950s and 1960s "if the United States had not already entered the long civil rights era—if it had not emerged into new political and human rights territory through New Deal–inspired journeys like that of Jonathan Daniels" (p. 15). She is careful to say that her book examines the long civil rights era rather than the long civil rights movement because Daniels was not an activist but rather "a mostly sympathetic observer" (p. 297n24). Ritterhouse acknowledges her debt to Charles W. Eagles's Jonathan Daniels and Race Relations: The Evolution of a Southern Liberal (Knoxville, 1982), but Eagles devoted only a few pages to A Southerner Discovers the South. Ritterhouse focuses on Daniels's 1937 journey, crystallizing a moment in American history when the New Deal was at the height of its power and yet limited in its ability to make racial and class changes in the South.

Ritterhouse deftly weaves in jottings from Daniels's journal and the latest historical scholarship on the Scottsboro Boys to describe increasing efforts to fight back against an unjust criminal justice system maintained by white southerners. She examines the interplay among communists, socialists, and liberals, those further to the left who pushed liberals like Daniels to take a stand against segregation and to call for federal intervention against lynching. Ritterhouse notes that Daniels supported a fairer system of segregation but contrasts Daniels's views with those of more committed radicals, including members of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, whom he interviewed for A Southerner Discovers the South, and the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, which he declined to join. Sometimes the quotations of other historians seem a bit long, but overall, they add depth to the story.

Carefully chosen Farm Security Administration photographs by Dorothea Lange and others are interspersed throughout the book, helping readers visualize many of the people and scenes that Daniels encountered. Ritterhouse links Daniels's book with a widely seen book of photographs on southern poverty, Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell's You Have Seen Their Faces (New York, 1937). Daniels had hoped that Life magazine would print an abbreviated version of his journey with photographs, and he took time to take the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt on a southern tour, but their collaboration was never published. Ritterhouse's use of photographs thus makes Daniels's journey more vivid for the present-day reader.

The sections on Lowndes County and Birmingham, Alabama, places that became prominent in the 1960s civil rights struggle, are especially compelling. Ritterhouse describes the Dickson family's murderous and coercive efforts to exploit black convict laborers in Lowndes County...