America has a redemption complex, which explains why we seem to be perpetually revisiting the South of the civil rights era to atone for the sins of segregation. Only this past June, front-page headlines proclaimed deliverance down in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where 80-year-old Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen was belatedly convicted of manslaughter for his role in the Klan execution, during the Freedom Summer of 1964, of civil rights activists James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. The attraction of such dramas is obvious: They pit heroes against villains in silhouettes of black and white, and even if it takes forty-one years, as with the Chaney-Schwerner-Goodman case, the good guys eventually triumph.
Of course, we know that the calculus of moral consequence is more ambiguous than that. Abstract principles like good and evil are often cunning agents of the ruthless truths concealed in human nature, notably the blind consistency with which those who have power take advantage of those who don’t. “Fine Christian gentleman,” after all, was code in the South for “segregationist.” Indeed, even the most decent of white Southerners exploited the fraudulent superiority conferred on them by simple virtue of their skin color. This was the sort of garden-variety conformism that the social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew argued did not reflect serious conviction. What, then, is to account for the rogues and dissidents, those who took up positions on the polar ends of the racial status quo, either as extremist abusers of their power or as champions of the powerless?
The perplexing dynamics of moral choice are explored in two new books about ordinary Southern white men who ended up on opposite sides of the civil rights revolution during the final cataclysmic days of segregation. In both, (im)moral behavior seems less like a conscious act than the slippery-slope momentum of random historical and biographical convergence. Son of the Rough South is Karl Fleming’s memoir of how he transcended an “uncivil” boyhood in an orphanage to bear intrepid witness to the civil rights struggle as a Southern correspondent for Newsweek in the 1960s. While Fleming was covering the martyrs of the Movement–and occasionally, as in Philadelphia, Mississippi, risking his own life–Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., the subject of Gary May’s The Informant, was helping to create them. As the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s undercover man inside the Ku Klux Klan, Rowe parlayed his sole obvious asset, his whiteness, into a license–arguably–to kill, drawing the federal government into a foggy collaboration with the hooded brotherhood of paramilitary segregationists. The toxic codependency between Rowe and the FBI culminated in the debacle that is the focus of May’s book: On the final day of the voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery in the spring of 1965, a white activist from Michigan named Viola Liuzzo was stalked by four Klansmen and shot to death; one of the men was Rowe.
Both Tommy Rowe and Karl Fleming were poor white children of the Depression-era South. Like many of their ilk, Rowe turned on his hard-up black confederates with the vehemence of what Freud called the narcissism of small differences. Fleming was different. His experience made him identify with the underdog. At age 8, he had been delivered to a Methodist orphanage in North Carolina by his mother, a washed-out, passive-aggressive widow who “ate enormous meals all the while complaining that she could ‘hardly eat a mouthful.'” Fleming achieved a sense of self-reliance and discipline by way of the usual challenges–backbreaking chores and inventive play (slingshots fashioned from dogwood branches)–amid similarly lost boys called Cootie, Big Jeebie, Snot-Eye and Little Nigger. The last nickname notwithstanding, the orphanage was white-only, and young Fleming claimed no racial consciousness. The orphanage boys’ turf battles with the local black kids (“soda crackers” versus “niggers”), he says, were merely contests of virility: “We had no idea what racism was.” He found out in the late 1940s when, following a stint in the Navy and a couple years of college, he fell into a reporting job at the Daily Times of Wilson, North Carolina.