Running comment on the running sores of prejudice, inequality,
bigotry and lines of racial demarcation, as the author, a Negro,
knowing the life of the have-nots in McMinnville, Tenn., starts his
way out and up, through some education, the U.S. Navy, where he got
a commission, then a college degree and lastly a job on the Morning
Tribune in Minneapolis. It was in this paper that these reports
first appeared in a series of articles as he traveled through 13
southern states experiencing contemporary white and black
relations, while looking for the promise of the "New South". There
were glimpses of it - in individuals (the Warings of South
Carolina), in institutions (the University of Oklahoma): there were
signs of advancement in more open thinking: and there were the old
stigmas of substandard housing, inadequate health care,
discrimination and Jim Crowism in theaters, hospitals, hotels,
transportation, education, voting, the whole long list, and the
constant doubt and uncertainty as to treatment as a Negro and
possibility of public rebuff. Washington, D.C., Florida, Georgia,
Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee - sometimes with new
laws but old practices, by deeply rooted white supremacists,
sometimes bristling with segregation or fears of mongrelization,
sometimes with a spark that might be a beacon for the future. And
the conclusion- that what the Negroes need most - and want - is
dignity which can be achieved in terms of humanity. A balance sheet
of little things which throws big shadows - both white and black -
on American race relations, outspoken but not underhanded. (Kirkus
Reviews)
In 1951, Carl Rowan, a young African American journalist from
Minneapolis, journeyed six thousand miles through the South to
report on the reality of everyday life for blacks in the region. He
sought out the hot spots of racial tension-including Columbia,
Tennessee, the scene of a 1946 race riot, and Birmingham, Alabama,
which he found to be a brutally racist city-and returned to the
setting of his more personal trials: McMinnville, Tennessee, his
boyhood home. In this "balance sheet of American race relations,"
Rowan plots the racial mood of the South and describes simply but
vividly the discrimination he encountered daily at hotels,
restaurants, and railroad stations, on trains and on buses.
Originally published in 1952 and long out of print, South of
Freedom is a first-rate account of what it was like to live as a
second-class citizen, to experience the segregation, humiliation,
danger, stereotypes, economic exploitation, and taboos that were
all part of life for African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s. For
this edition, Douglas Brinkley provides a new introduction,
incorporating recent interviews with Rowan to place the work in the
context of its time.
An engaging, disturbing look at the opinions of the time on the
"Negro problem," Rowan's tales of travel in the South under Jim
Crow are especially valuable today as a means of seeing how far we
have advanced-and fallen short-in forty-five years.
"A factual, personal, excellently written and very moving
story?.Rowan covers the South, finding all degrees of prejudice
from humiliating annoyances, through segregation in its various
forms and degrees, all the way to outright manifestation of hatred
and fear." -- San Francisco Chronicle
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