![]() ![]() Test scores were rising, white flight was minor, and people seemed proud of what they had accomplished.” At one time or another during the first several years, racial fighting closed every high school in the system.” But by 1976, “peace had been restored. And in your book, you write that, “Mobs of white protestors regularly besieged the school system's headquarters. ![]() Steinmetz: In the early '70s, Charlotte was a national test case for busing, which essentially meant that Black students were taking school buses to majority-white schools in an effort to increase school integration. And, you know, of course, Randall was thrilled by that idea. Cynthia is a Pulitzer Prize-winning political commentator. And so, I asked what he would think about involving Cynthia Tucker in the project so we'd bring a multiracial perspective. I thought we need to think about our current political moment and how high the stakes are, and that the South might be an interesting lens with which to do that - an informative lens with which to do that. And Randall thought it was time to take another look. And he called and said, "What do you think about doing an update on Egerton's book in our current political moment?" This was right after the 2020 election. He had watched the same trends that all of us had. Gaillard: Well, first of all, the idea for it came from our editor at NewSouth Books in Montgomery, a guy named Randall Williams, who's about my age, in his early 70s. What made you decide that now was a necessary time to revisit that theme? We're almost 50 years out from when Egerton's book was first published. But from the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon, up to our current political moment, I've started to fear for the loss of progress that I first thought could not be reversed. I was more optimistic than he was then, but I'm not now. So, I was more optimistic than John, who was a good friend of mine, I'm happy to say, kind of a mentor. You had New South Southern governors like Linwood Holton, a Republican in Virginia, and Reubin Askew, a Democrat in Florida, and of course, Jimmy Carter, who said, "Let's put our racial prejudice behind us." All of them said that. The right to vote in the South for African American people seemed firmly established to me at that point. Now, when he said that, when he wrote that in 1974, I thought he was too pessimistic because, you know, the civil rights movement had happened and there had been racial gains. So, he thought that the South was going to continue to export its racism while picking up some of the less desirable qualities from the rest of the country. He did think, though, as the South became less isolated, that it was beginning to look more like the rest of the country in terms of urban sprawl and shopping malls and materialism and those kinds of things, that the South was maybe becoming a less neighborly place, that some of those traditional Southern hospitality values might have been fading or whatever. And by 1974, when he wrote “The Americanization of Dixie,” he was becoming skeptical that that was going to happen. But he hoped after the civil rights movement, that that dimension of the South, the Martin Luther King South, the John Lewis South, would inspire the nation to come to terms with its past. The South had been the epicenter of racism since colonial times because it was the epicenter of slavery. More often than not, they're sharing and spreading the word to each other while the best languishes and withers." What did he mean that the South and the nation were sharing the worst in each other?įrye Gaillard: John Egerton was a really superb Southern journalist who deeply wanted to hope that the South would kind of lead the way in terms of a reckoning with racism and the anti-democratic inclinations that go along with that. But Egerton was also deeply skeptical, writing "The South and the nation are not exchanging strengths as much as they are exchanging sins. Jesse Steinmetz, WFAE Charlotte Talks producer: Your latest book was inspired by John Egerton's 1974 work with a similar title, “The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America.” Egerton wanted to believe that the country had learned from the upheaval of the civil rights movement and became stronger for it. Co-author Cynthia Tucker will be joining him live on Charlotte Talks on Monday, May 16. WFAE's Jesse Steinmetz spoke with Frye Gaillard, Charlotte Observer reporter and editor from 1972-1990, about his new book of essays, “The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance”. ![]()
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