Southern Journey: A Return to the Civil Rights Movement

by Tom Dent

Drawing on interviews with blacks, whites, segregationists, civil rights workers, and others, a look back at the civil rights movement and its implications examines its impact on American life and society, as well as its personal role in the author's own life. Tour.

Genres: History

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1991, Tom Dent took a nine-month road trip to see the legacy of the civil rights movement in the South. In this record of his journey from Greensboro to the Mississippi Delta, he revisits the high and low points of the struggle, trying to learn what came of it. A gifted observer, Dent is also a deeply compassionate human being. He finds ways to convey the hopes and heartbreak of everyone he talks to, sympathetic and otherwise. What he discovers along the way isn’t necessarily uplifting. But as Unita Blackwell, mayor of Mound Bayou, says, “That’s history”—and that’s exactly what Dent was after.