Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination: Innocence by Association by Jonathan W. Gray (review)

In his first book of literary criticism, Jonathan Gray examines the civil rights movement through four white writers: Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Norman Mailer, and William Styron. While these writers, who claimed sympathy for the movement, played major roles in shaping civil rights discourse, they did so, Gray argues, in ways that simultaneously held the South blameless for racial tensions and presented African-Americans as politically and culturally naïve. Gray posits that these white, liberal, and predominantly southern writers are generally regarded as transformative voices for civil rights, but, as his subtitle implies, critics overlook more problematic aspects of their works because of their association with the pro-civil rights cause. Gray’s intent, then, is to examine these problematic aspects in order to show that “each of them maintained some resistance, an unwillingness to embrace fully the various counter-narratives being offered by the ascending civil rights movement and its adherents” (4).

Gray organizes the book roughly chronologically with four chapters, each focused on one author and his/her texts relevant to the civil rights movement. For Warren, Gray explicates his 1930 essay, “The Briar Patch,” his 1956 essay Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, his 1961 Legacy of the Civil War, and his 1965 collection of interviews with civil rights leaders Who Speaks for the Negro? While critics generally see Warren as having put aside his more conservative stance on civil rights by the time he writes Segregation, Gray sees Warren in both Segregation and Legacy of the Civil War still clinging to the idea that exceptional white southerners will ultimately lead the nation in pursuit of true civil justice, relegating African-Americans once again to beneficiaries of the largesse of whites. It is not until Who Speaks for the Negro? that, according to Gray, Warren fully embraces the idea of a truly integrated pursuit of civil rights.

After providing an overview of Mailer’s literary works, the only northern writer Gray examines, he looks more closely at Mailer’s 1956 essay “The White Negro” and his fourth novel, 1965’s American Dream. Here Gray shows Mailer’s continuing attempts to reject American conformity and materialism, culminating in a call for middle-class whites to emulate marginalized African-American culture in order to better endure the trials of the Cold War. For Gray, however, this call for racial equality is somewhat mitigated by Mailer’s “selfish desire to say something meaningful” (11).

Welty wrote three pieces that deal directly with the civil rights movement: the 1963 short story “Where Is the Voice Coming From?,” a thinly-veiled telling of the Medgar Evers assassination; her 1965 essay “Must the Novelist Crusade?”; and her 1967 short story “The Demonstrators.” While Gray sees Welty’s fictions as biting denunciations of white supremacy and vivid depictions of southern small-town structural violence, he sees her essay as merely an attempt to justify the inaction of the alleged “silent majority” of the South who agree with integration but stand passively by while others commit atrocities so as to preserve the status quo. This chapter also suffers from Gray not being familiar with or not referencing Welty scholarship written since Harriet (not Nancy) Pollack and Suzanne Marrs’s 2001 edition of Eudora Welty and Politics: Did the Writer Crusade? He did not include, for example, Marrs’s 2006 authorized biography of Welty, in which one can find a much richer and more complex history of the writer during the civil rights era.

Gray completes his discussion by examining the work of William Styron, focusing primarily on his controversial 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. Gray begins by establishing Styron’s habit of couching his novels as explorations of existential dilemmas, in which a protagonist, faced with an intense moral impasse, struggles to express himself and his desires within the narrow confines of an oppressive society, often relying on violence to solve the dilemma and define himself. Gray...