In this hard-hitting polemic, one of America's best-known political commentators explains why racial tensions are now approaching critical mass - and points to what we must do to defuse the situation. Carl T. Rowan has spent his entire life fighting for racial justice. The Coming Race War in America names and pinpoints the issues that are tearing this country apart. Rowan blows the whistle on America's "gatekeepers" - in academia, media, and government - who fan the flames of racial hatred, whether intentionally or accidentally. He tears into demagogues who promote racial tensions, from Rush Limbaugh to Louis Farrakhan. And above all, he lambastes politicians who blame welfare mothers, immigrants, affirmative action, and the urban underclass for all of America's social ills - and reinforce a "hate-the-poor" mind-set that can only lead to disaster. Rowan explores the rising tensions in every stratum of society, from upper-class white-males protesting reverse discrimination to young black men desperate for a piece of the pie. He takes a hard look at how and why two African Americans - O. J. Simpson and Colin Powell - could inspire such disparate and emotionally charged reactions, and sees an omen of things to come. What's simmering now, he says, could soon boil over. The signs of the coming race war are everywhere, says Rowan, and there is no easy path to peace. But there is hope. By recognizing the full dimensions of the problem, well-intentioned Americans of all races can push for courses of action - from increased community involvement to greater support for education - that will help relieve tensions and build trust.

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