THERE GOES MY EVERYTHING: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975 (Knopf) by Jason Sokol is reviewed in the Wilson Quarterly by Roy Reed. This book might be read along with Kevin Kruse's recent White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern 
Conservatism. Here's Reed on Sokol: Negroes know their place and are happy with segregation.They have no desire to vote or take part in political affairs.
Integrating schools and public accommodations will lead to mongrelization of the races.
The civil rights movement is a communist plot and a threat to the freedoms of white people.
God is a segregationist. He says so in the Bible.
If you were a white person living in the South before the world turned upside down in the 1960s, you probably believed every one of those statements. You probably believed them if you were a white Northerner, too, but that’s another story. Jason Sokol, a young historian at Cornell University, is concerned with white Southerners, and he is determined that we not forget how far the South had to go to expel the poison of racism.
For the rest, click here. For an excerpt, click here.
