Literature, Civil Rights, and the Political Imagination

As Minrose Gwin notes in Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement, the black freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s represented a “remarkable historical moment of alternative political imagination.” Although much effort has been devoted to understanding that remarkable moment, only recently have scholars turned their attention to literature’s role in this transformative struggle. If Aristotle is right that the main difference between history and poetry is that historians record what has happened while poets represent what may happen, then our understanding of how the civil rights movement reshaped America’s political imagination must include the careful study of the movement’s literary legacy. Gwin’s Remembering Medgar Evers and Jonathan W. Gray’s Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination take up this task in different but equally illuminating ways, reminding us how literary representations of the movement played, and continue to play, an important role in imagining alternative, and more just, political realities.

Gray focuses on four white writers—Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, and William Styron—who produced significant works during the movement’s crucible years. While those years liberalized each author’s views, each struggled “to embrace fully the various counternarratives” offered by the movement. In this way, they reproduced the racial dynamics of an earlier period in history, Reconstruction. Relying insightfully on David Blight’s delineation of the “reconciliationist,” “white supremacist,” and “emancipationist” visions that competed for hegemony after the Civil War, Gray notes how “American innocence” was born when reconciliationists and white supremacists “locked arms” to produce an “ideological forgetting that enabled the rhetorical union of the United States at the expense of the former slaves.” This forgetting was essential to shaping “American exceptionalism,” and Gray argues that Warren, Mailer, Welty, and Styron, while sympathizing with integration, left important aspects of white innocence and America exceptionalism intact in their civil rights essays and fictions. The resulting study intriguingly places these writers within a larger national narrative of squandered opportunities where our refusal to renounce innocence and exceptionalism has prevented us “from completing the work necessary to finally integrate people of color into the broader society.”

Gray’s opening chapter deals with the writer whose position on race evolved most dramatically. Seeking to be “simultaneously conservative . . . and progressive” in “The Briar Patch” (1930), Warren elided the historical responsibility southern whites had for segregation, blaming instead a parade of “[n]efarious carpetbaggers, bluecoats, lazy Negro politicians, and scalawags.” When he returned to the question twenty-five years later in Segregation, he expressed a more integrationist view, albeit one that still maintained a strong “antipathy to emancipationist narratives” and protected southern innocence. Only with the Legacy of the Civil War (1961) did Warren finally offer a “vigorous condemnation” of southern apologists for slavery and segregation. Still, this condemnation was qualified by Warren’s unwillingness to acknowledge agency in the black community, never pausing to consider the war’s legacy in terms of “lived experience of Blacks in the South.” This recognition would eventually emerge in Warren’s final work on race, Who Speaks for the Negro? Explicitly rejecting “The Briar Patch” as a “failure of the imagination,” Warren achieved a “full evolution” on race, condemning states’ rights as a perversion of democracy and acknowledging integration as the only way to build a just society where all could flourish. With this turn, Warren came as close as any southern writer of his generation to embracing the emancipationist vision that is the true legacy of both the Civil War and the civil rights movement.

For Mailer, the trajectory was different. Beginning his career by imagining himself as “a progressive and anarchic artist stifled by the conformity of the times,” Mailer was inspired by the media coverage of the Montgomery bus boycott...