The Civil Rights Era and Southern History

The books under review here invite readers to think critically about a problem Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino addressed in their edited volume, The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism. What does it mean, Lassiter and Crespino asked, to recognize that it is time to end the kind of distinctive Southern history and historiography that presents the South not merely as a different region, but as a place that is “exceptional from the rest of America and in historical opposition to the dominant national trends”?¹ Some of the books under review contain analyses that show how the culture, politics, and economics that shaped Southern societies during the Civil Rights era connected those places to—rather than separated them from—other parts of the country. Rather than an exceptional place defined solely by regional and historical peculiarities, some of these books show how, “southern and American history are transformed when the South is no longer exceptional, but rather, fully integrated into the national narrative.”²

However, some of the books under review, or parts of them, remain wedded to the idea that the South possessed exceptional characteristics—that its distinct particularities alone shaped its history. Those analyses certainly perform important revisionist work within the field of Southern history. For example, the two volumes that focus on Southern student activism during the 1950s and 1960s call attention to the important differences between Southern student social movements and the hotbeds of college campus protest that defined the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. Furthermore, both the anthology by Cohen and Snyder and the monograph by Marshall argue emphatically that Southern black students in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) occupied an early primary leadership position in New Left student movements that unfolded in the 1960s. By overemphasizing the South’s importance and distinctiveness, these revisionist texts allow readers to think about Civil Rights Movement history and histories of American racism in new, provocative ways.

What happens, though, when contradictions in the South’s exceptional characteristics surface? What should historians do with inconsistencies that reveal the South, or specific parts of the South, not as a monolithic culture or society, but a place of variety, nuance, and diversity of thought and experience? How should historians interpret social and political developments of the Civil Rights era, such as when white people aggressively resisted school desegregation programs, which looked very similar on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line? If a Southern town or city—Nashville, in this case—developed social relations around racial segregation that mirrored Boston more than Birmingham, should historians characterize Nashville’s mores as distinctively “Southern?” When historians build a specific narrative box labeled “Southern” and reserve it as the only repository for certain events, practices, ideas, and mores, they risk sweeping under the rug many inconsistencies and contradictions that inevitably shaped the past, and overlooking commonalities that existed across state and regional borders. We can learn so much more about the South, the rest of the nation, and indeed the world, when we break out of narrowly defined narrative boxes, explore contradictions and inconsistencies that shatter our myths about historic places and people, and use those...