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Floridian of His Century: The Courage of Governor LeRoy Collins. By Martin A. Dyckman. Foreword by Gary R. Mormino and Raymond Arsenault. The Florida History and Culture Series. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2006. Pp. xii, 332. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-2969-6.)
When historians designate a paradigmatic figure to embody Florida's transition from Old South to New South, an individual who exemplified the presumed moderation of that journey, that person is Governor Thomas LeRoy Collins (in office from 1955 to 1961). This book is a literary extension of that premise and, as such, offers little in the way of new scholarship or theories on that journey and the moderation factor in Florida during the post-Brown years. Even so, Martin A. Dyckman has crafted a well-written and engaging narrative of the highlights-and low points-of the "courageous" and "moderate" governor that will appeal to the general public and engender some probing questions from scholars of Florida, the South, and the modern civil rights movement.
Expanding on the work of Tom Wagy's Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida: Spokesman of the New South (Tuscaloosa, 1985), Dyckman has mined newspapers and a smattering of personal papers and interviews to produce a genteel history of a genteel southerner, LeRoy Collins. In penning this compelling narrative of Collins's life, the author invariably returns to the issue of racial...