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David L. Chappell. Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 303 pp. $42.00.
This book, the author declares in the introduction, is about the relationship between morality and politics. Examining the effect on the development of the Civil Rights Movement, David Chappell concludes that it is, at best, a contentious one, a relationship that often distorts the view of those directly affected by it as well as those who treat it as an abstraction.
Judged in terms of social justice, there can be no moral defense for the treatment of the nation's African American minority under a Constitution that condoned slavery and, after its abolition by force of arms, continued to provide the sanction of law for forms of racial segregation that reduced blacks to second-class citizenship.
Judged in terms of political reality, the justification, or at least the explanation, is that the Constitution also required majority rule, and in the United States most voters, with varying degrees of fervor, have been devoted to a concept of white supremacy that still roils the political process.
This is the "American Dilemma" Gunnar Myrdal defined fifty years agobrought about by the intrusion of an intractable moral issue upon a political system designed to effect compromise. The unresolved conflict produced the myths and stereotypes David Chappell examined in the course of the extensive research that distinguishes his work.
"This study began," he writes, "with a simple, and to me at the time, startling, observation: there were white Southerners who supported the civil rights movement .... Growing up in the 1960s in what must have been a typical northern white liberal family, I had an image of the white South as one big lynch mob waiting to happen."
Chappell was quickly disabused of the notion that the only exceptions were the few white Southerners identified in the media as active participants in street demonstrations and sit-ins. When he sought them out he found that, while he admired their conviction and courage, most had not suffered anything worse than the opprobrium and economic disadvantage that is the lot of anyone who defies the social conventions of his own kind. This had made them "outside agitators," and rendered them as ineffectual as the ideological...