The Southernization of America
A Story of Democracy in the Balance
Published on 1. May 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
176 pages
978-1-58838-562-8 (ISBN)
Description
Pulitzer Prize winner Cynthia Tucker and award-winning author Frye Gaillard reflect in a powerful series of essays on the role of the South in America's long descent into its present political predicament. In 1974 the great Southern author John Egerton published his pioneering work, The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America, reflecting on the double-edged reality of the South becoming more like the rest of the country and vice versa. Tucker and Gaillard dive even deeper into that reality from the time that Egerton published his book until the present. They see the dark side-the morphing of the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan into the Republican Party of today. They explore the roots of the racial backlash against President Obama; the specter of family separation on our southern border, with its echoes of similar separations in the era of slavery; as well as the rise of the Christian right, the demonstrations in Charlottesville, the death of George Floyd, and the attack on our nation's capital-all of which, they argue, have roots that trace their way to the South. But Tucker and Gaillard see another side too-a legacy rooted in the civil rights years that has given us political leaders like John Lewis, Jimmy Carter, Raphael Warnock, and Stacey Abrams. The authors raise the ironic possibility that the South, regarded by some as the heart of the country's systemic racism, might lead the way on the path to redemption. Tucker and Gaillard bring a multiracial perspective and years of political reporting to bear on a critical moment in American history, a time of racial reckoning and of democracy under siege.
Reviews / Votes
Cynthia Tucker and Frye Gaillard, two of the South's most perceptive journalists, explore the lingering influence of the old Confederacy on modern American politics. One reads this book with a shock of recognition and dismay, but also with the hope that the leaders of the future may emerge from the battlegrounds of the past. -- Lawrence Wright * Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Plague Year and The Looming Tower * The hard questions facing us as Americans are at the heart of this book by two of the most provocative Southern writers of our time: What will we do about race and how do we begin to heal our raw political divide? Cynthia Tucker and Frye Gaillard trace the developments that have driven us to today and insist we have an honest look in the mirror, and a healthy debate, to save us from this current destructive path. -- Judy Woodruff, anchor and managing editor * PBS NewsHour * A powerful book on the centrality of the South to the American experience. Through the lenses of the role of evangelical religion, the struggle over school desegregation, the election of the first Black president, and the subsequent election of Donald Trump, Gaillard and Tucker compellingly demonstrate that the South is in no way an outlier to our larger U.S. society, but instead a true barometer of the promise and perils of the times in which we live. -- Claude A. Clegg III * author of The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama * In these vital essays, Gaillard and Tucker provide a clear-eyed examination of the persistence of white supremacist poison in our politics, and the enduring courage and determination of civil rights advocates who combat it. The Southernization of America is indispensable reading on how the promise of American democracy remains under siege by violence and hate-and what will be required to ensure it has a fighting chance. -- Sarah Posner * author of Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind * The wisdom that flows through this slim volume packs a punch well beyond the book's weight. Journalists Cynthia Tucker and Frye Gaillard, with keen recall of telling anecdotes and pithy writing, have deconstructed how their beloved South, always desperate to find an exportable commodity, continues to discover ready markets for the xenophobia, white supremacy, and hypocrisy that defined it for decades. And yet, in the tradition of I'll Take My Stand, We Dissent, and Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, Tucker and Gaillard connect dots that give Americans of goodwill hope for the future. -- Hank Klibanoff * coauthor of The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation and creator of the Peabody Award-winning podcast Buried Truths * With a journalistic eye for detail, Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker present a bracing account of America's reckoning with race and justice over the past half-century. The result is a sobering but clarifying narrative of where we've been, and a call to persevere in pursuit of our democratic ideals. -- Kristin Kobes Du Mez * New York Times bestselling author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation * In these incisive essays exploring the impact of Southern white supremacy on our national life, Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker have shown that William Faulkner was right: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." As they eloquently remind us, we are now facing a crossroads in our national life in which we must choose between whiteness and an America that embraces racial justice and true democracy. -- Dan T. Carter, Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina The Southernization of America is necessary reading for all who would understand the current crisis in which the nation finds itself - turned against its ideals and turned toward abiding bigotry. Knowing how we got here is a critical step toward finding a way out. -- Alice Randall * author of Black Bottom Saints * At the peak of the civil rights movement, the Democratic Party finally expelled its Southern, white supremacist wing-only to see its demagogues and their followers make a toxic migration to the Republican Party. In The Southernization of America, Tucker and Gaillard use the sharp pens of journalists to concisely capture the direct line from that political transformation to Donald Trump and the dangerous movement he embodies today. The book also reveals how the worst aspects of what was once the Southern way of life have metastasized across the country to contaminate the values of millions of Americans who should know better. -- Douglas A. Blackmon * Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Publishing group
University of Georgia Press
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
213 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-58838-562-8 (9781588385628)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Frye Gaillard (Author)
FRYE GAILLARD is a former writer-in-residence in the English and history departments at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of thirty books, including With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions; Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award; The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina, winner of the Gustavus Myers Award; and A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s (Georgia), an NPR best book of 2018. He lives in Mobile, Alabama.
Cynthia Tucker (Author)
CYNTHIA TUCKER is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist who has spent most of her career in journalism, having previously worked for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a Washington-based political correspondent. Her work as a journalist has been celebrated by the National Association of Black Journalists, who inducted her into its hall of fame, Harvard University, and the Alabama Humanities Foundation. Tucker spent three years as a visiting professor at the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and is currently the journalist-in-residence at the University of South Alabama. Her weekly column focuses on political and cultural issues, including income inequality, social justice, and public education reform.
FRYE GAILLARD is a former writer-in-residence in the English and history departments at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of thirty books, including With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions; Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award; The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina, winner of the Gustavus Myers Award; and A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s (Georgia), an NPR best book of 2018. He lives in Mobile, Alabama.
Cynthia Tucker (Author)
CYNTHIA TUCKER is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist who has spent most of her career in journalism, having previously worked for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a Washington-based political correspondent. Her work as a journalist has been celebrated by the National Association of Black Journalists, who inducted her into its hall of fame, Harvard University, and the Alabama Humanities Foundation. Tucker spent three years as a visiting professor at the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and is currently the journalist-in-residence at the University of South Alabama. Her weekly column focuses on political and cultural issues, including income inequality, social justice, and public education reform.