The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance Hardcover – February 15, 2022 by Frye Gaillard

Description

Author: Gaillard Frye

Package Dimensions: 0x203x788

Number Of Pages: 176

Release Date: 15-02-2022

Details: Product Description
In 1974 John Egerton published his seminal work,
The Americanization of Dixie. Pulitzer Prize-winner Cynthia Tucker and award-winning author Frye Gaillard carry Egerton’s thesis forward in
The Southernization of America, a compelling series of linked essays considering the role of the South in shaping America’s current political and cultural landscape. They dive deeper, examining the morphing of the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan into the Republican Party of today, the racial backlash against President Obama, family separation on our southern border, the rise of the Christian right, the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, the death of George Floyd, and the attack on our nation’s capitol. They find hope in the South too, a legacy rooted in the civil rights years that might ultimately lead the nation 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 democracy under siege.
Review
In this elegant and incisive book, Cynthia Tucker and Frye Gaillard sketch a picture of a modern America shaped by multiracial freedom struggles—as well as by the vicious, protean structures of white supremacy. We see through its lens that the undermining of civil rights movements and distortion of their memory is the story of the South but also of the nation. The Southernization of America issues a charge to its readers: choose democracy in defiance of our country’s most narrow impulses and with a resolve equal to that of previous generations, or else. —
Adriane Lentz-Smith, author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I

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

In this short but impactful text the coauthors theorize that the common thread in our shared history will always tie back to the American South and its history of racism. Rich in primary source references, the book is a must read for those wondering how we got where we are in today’s age of politics and racial reckoning. —
Booklist

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

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 gi