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Present at the revolutions

By EUGENE PATTERSON
Published May 15, 2005

SON OF THE ROUGH SOUTH

By Karl Fleming

Public Affairs, $26.95, 320 pp

Reviewed by EUGENE PATTERSON

Too much of history is hearsay. Karl Fleming is a direct witness. His near-fatal absorption of the heaviest jolts in America's 20th century domestic history arms him as an original source.

No reader can turn away from a telling this fresh and firsthand. The Depression that savaged the nation in the 1930s hit hardest in the South, and Fleming lived it at the bottom as an overworked and underfed boy in a Raleigh, N.C., orphanage. At 17, he entered the Navy in time for only the ending edge of World War II.

After the GI Bill of Rights bought Fleming a couple of uninspiring years at Appalachian State Teacher's College, he drifted into newspaper work on little North Carolina dailies in Wilson, then Durham and Asheville.

In the late 1950s, I hired him to work on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution magazine because I saw poetry in his clippings and power in his person. Bill Emerson of Newsweek saw my waste of him on soft features and hired him away in 1961 to be point man in the newsmagazine's coverage of the gathering storm in civil rights. He teamed with Claude Sitton of the New York Times Atlanta bureau in the South's first sustained coverage of the black movement toward freedom from the postslavery bondage of racial segregation.

His hair-raising survival of life-threatening moments includes the night in 1962 at the University of Mississippi's Lyceum when a white mob attacked federal marshals who were trying to shield James Meredith's court-ordered admission as the school's first black student. In the early-morning hours, Fleming stepped out on the Lyceum's porch to get a look at the violence that killed two men, including a French reporter, and wounded hundreds that night. "Suddenly I heard splatting noises right behind me.

"I . . . saw four bullet holes stitched into the white wood column behind me. I went back inside and angrily announced that "If I was James Meredith, I wouldn't go to school with those people.' "

Three years later in Watts, Fleming - seeking to hide his Pentax camera in his car trunk - found himself fingered to a black mob by Stokely Carmichael. "Just before I was attacked, there was a brassy, electric feeling in the sour air - as just before a thunderstorm in my native South, or just before riots I had experienced," he writes. "I could feel it in my teeth akin to the sensation of biting aluminum foil. There was nothing new to me about danger. I was as alert to it as a bird."

Then the 5-foot length of 4-by-4 lumber smashed him in the head.

As he fought for his life in a Los Angeles hospital, with his body bruised by the kicks of some 20 black youths and his upper and lower jaws broken and his skull deeply fractured by the wooden beam they swung, the Southerner Fleming said: "If I was a young black man growing up on the streets of Watts, seeing what they had seen and going through what I know that they went through to survive, I might have felt like hitting some white guy in the head too."

He despaired that after Watts, Dr. Martin Luther King's moment of loving and nonviolent leadership had passed. Carmichael's Black Power and "burn, baby, burn" had drowned out We Shall Overcome. By the time King was murdered in 1968, Fleming felt that "King had become an old voice and Carmichael ("Go home and get your gun') was the new one."

By 1968, writes Fleming, "I was sick of hatred, violence and bloodshed. In a four-year stretch, I had covered four assassinations - John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy and Medgar Evers. I had covered the murders of the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi. I had covered the bombing murder of the four little girls in Birmingham. I had seen hundreds of black people beaten by white cops and angry mobs. I was just sick of it all. I was totally burned out."

This book is compellingly written by a decent and ruthlessly honest man who risked his all to serve others by telling their story. He brings that story authoritatively alive. As Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes, has said of Son of the Rough South, "Copies please to every history teacher in the country."

- Eugene Patterson is editor emeritus of the Times.

[Last modified May 13, 2005, 12:24:03]