With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 152 to political clout, jobs, and self-direction to transcend the barriers of segregation and post-segregation. Yet these few moments of black selfrealization were overwhelmed by white elite political power that intimidated federal leadership. Making a New South reflects new scholarship. It includes an examination of conservative and ultra-conservative white leadership, including a northern interloper who led Clinton, Tennessee, whites to oppose integrated public education. It is also a study in frustration as the Cold War and anticommunism undermined progressive attempts to make freedom real for African Americans. These essays will be discussed in seminars and classrooms for a long time. I look forward to what promises to be a healthy and informative debate. GREGORY MIXON University of North Carolina at Charlotte With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions. By Frye Gaillard. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008. x, 229 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-8265-1588-9. With Music and Justice for All is a collation of twenty-two short stories accumulated by Frye Gaillard over the span of forty years. The stories cover themes of race, religion, gender, and music, and profile people from the American South. Gaillard calls the book “a collection of verbal snapshots” (p. ix). The introduction begins with the words of William Faulkner that the only thing worth writing about is “the human heart in conflict with itself” (p. 1). Gaillard’s book follows Faulkner’s wisdom; his stories provoke thought and self-examination. Gaillard engages in the art of truth telling in the introduction. He tells about himself, his family, and about life in Alabama during the civil rights movement. Gaillard grew up during the 1950s in rural Montgomery County in what he calls “the heart of Dixie,” where the movement began . “The way we understood it the whole thing started in the city of Montgomery, when Dr. King made a speech to a rally at a Montgomery church” (p. 2). He describes his first impressions of Martin Luther King Jr. and explains how many white Alabamians, including his own family , believed King was an insurrectionist like Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. He talks about King’s fight to desegregate the city of Birmingham and his battle against the city’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor. Gaillard recalls that during the struggle A P R I L 2 0 0 9 153 for integration some black Alabamians refused to embrace King’s method of nonviolence; instead of turning the other cheek to the dogs and water hoses, they “showered [the white] policemen with rocks” (p. 4). Gaillard exposes how his own family believed that Alabama’s segregationist Governor George Wallace’s racist views were “simply a principled defense of states’ rights” (p. 6). Gaillard even discloses his initial belief in their views: “at the time it was a theory that I wanted to accept—a gesture of loyalty, I suppose, to the family” (p. 6). Each of the four sections of Gaillard’s work contains accounts that surround a different theme and every story keeps the reader turning the pages. Part I echoes one of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign slogans , “Unite For Change.” This section examines courageous individuals who fought for social change like the Greensboro Four—the four African American freshmen (Ezell A. Blair Jr., David Richmond, Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain) who integrated a Woolworth store in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960. Part I also illustrates that when change finally comes it usually comes from unexpected places. In 1966 two black athletes, freshmen Perry Wallace and Godfrey Dillard, integrated Vanderbilt’s basketball team. All of the stories in Part I prove ordinary people can bring about lasting change. Part II explores the ministries of renegade preacher Will Campbell and revivalist Billy Graham; the mission and disillusionment of pro-life protester Karen Graham; the liberal and conservative religious war of ideas in Charlotte, North Carolina; the origins of Millard Fuller’s Habitat for Humanity and President Jimmy Carter’s controversial book on the policies of Israel, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid...