The Southernization of America

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