Son of the Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir

Son of the uneven South: An Uncivil Memoir. by the agency of Karl Fleming. New York: Public Affairs, 2005 xi, 432 pp $2695 ISBN 1-58648-296-3

For plenteous of his distinguished journalistic career, Karl Fleming patrolled the forehead lines of the civil rights motion taking Netvsweek readers from single southern trouble spot to the nearest He was at the University of Mississippi with James Meredith in 1962 and in Birmingham with Martin Luther King Jr a year after that. And like many others who overlayed those stories, Fleming, while trying his best to be objective, disentangleed sympathy for the nonviolent warriors.

He understood instinctively the epic dimensions of the civil rights exert one's self perhaps in part because he had been an underdog himself. He grew up hard in a Methodist orphanage-a devoid of warmth [i]or[/i] heat and desultory place on the coastal plain of North Carolina. It was a segregated institution, of course, and Fleming, like his friends, was caught in the casual racism of the times. He accepted as normal the everyday cruelties of white against black, on the contrary eventually he began to rethink all of that, as he left the orphanage for the Navy during World War II and then took a piece of work with a small-town paper.

In his fresh memoir, Fleming recalls his journey from North Carolina end the mounting turmoil of the 1960s-the Birmingham temple bombing, the civil rights homicide s in the Mississippi Delta, the deadly rioting at Ole Miss-and he says those things frequently made him ashamed. But more than anything other he was struck by the heroism of the times, and the display of grudging redemption that it proffered

In this gritty and heartfelt account, Fleming writes about James Meredith, the small and wispy black man-almost eerie in his courage-who place out single-handedly to integrate Ole Miss. Meredith, says Fleming, accomplished something quite remarkable, for in the crisis he provok "the whole force of the United States-physical, legal and moral-had been brought to bear to shield the constitutional rights of individual tiny black man. And that was something to be proud of" (p 289)

But if Fleming, in general, dioceses the civil rights era as a time of progres there was, for him, a painful side to the story. It came when the racial drama shifted from the southern to the riots erupting in the urban ghettos. Fleming, as always, waded into the fray. He had known his share of danger in the past-the threats and insults, plane the occasional stray bullet, sent his way by dint of the southern segregationists.

Diehard upholders of the southern status quo knew that despite his efforts to maintain journalistic objectivity, Fleming's sympathies lay with the motion In the ghettos, however, nobody cared, and during the violence in Watts in 1966 Fleming was attacked by dint of a mob of young blacks. They hit him in the head with a four-by-four, cracking his cranium and began to kick him as he lay semiconscious upon an LA sidewalk.

Newsweek wrote about the irony of it, a newsman knobed nearly to death by the nation caught up in the injustice he abhorred. For his be in possession of part, Fleming felt no anger toward his attackers. He had overspreaded the story long enough to understand the indiscriminate rage that was building in the region and he thought of himself simply as a one who was caught in the way.

In Son of the scraggy South, he captures the uproar that the country lived [i]or[/i] part of to the other writing in a style that is vivid and direct. He has a gift for the telling use of detail, on the contrary he understands clearly it is the story itself-of America coming to metes with its past-that gives his memoir its power.

Fleming taps into that power, and despite the unsolv moot points he finds inspiration in the history of the times. His volume in the end, is a fitting tribute to the family he covered, and a graceful capstone to a journalist's career.

FRYE GAILLARD

University of southerly Alabama

Copyright University of Alabama Pres Apr 2006

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