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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

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.

* 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.

* Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II *

In this elegant and incisive book, Cynthia Tucker and Frye Gaillard sketch a picture of a modern America shaped by multiracial freedom struggles—as well as by the vicious, protean structures of white supremacy. We see through its lens that the undermining of civil rights movements and distortion of their memory is the story of the South but also of the nation. The Southernization of America issues a charge to its readers: choose democracy in defiance of our country’s most narrow impulses and with a resolve equal to that of previous generations, or else.

* author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I *

A beautifully written yet searing meditation on American democracy. This brilliant and compelling book makes clear that the greatest threat to democracy is America's eternal pandemic—racism.

* author of Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause *

With their Alabama roots, Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker established themselves during distinguished newspaper careers as leading chroniclers of the civil rights movement. Their new book is required reading when that movement's gains are endangered by the resurgent assault on progressive values represented by Donald Trump and his entranced followers in the old Confederacy. The authors provide an alarming analysis of how "the explicit racism, the brazen xenophobia, and the cartoonish conspiracies" promoted through Fox News by a Republican Party in moral decline have once again gripped our beloved region. Their penetrating account reminds us anew that enlightened journalism is the South's best hope.

* former executive editor of the New York Times and author of My Soul Is Rested *

Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker's book on the recent and current struggle for democracy in the South and the nation is a work of true distinction. Written by two prominent journalists from Alabama—one white and one black, one male and one female—it offers a wide-ranging and carefully crafted analysis of our current dilemma, a perilous situation rooted in regional pathology and national hubris. Full of moral urgency, their words of wisdom go beyond diagnosis to an insightful prescription for rescue and redemption.

* author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice and Arthur Ashe: A Life *

Two Alabama journalists, one White and one Black, examine the expansion of Southern prejudices into our larger nation. A thoughtful, probing look at our national character.

* Kirkus Reviews *

In this short but impactful text the coauthors theorize that the common thread in our shared history will always tie back to the American South and its history of racism. Rich in primary source references, the book is a must read for those wondering how we got where we are in today's age of politics and racial reckoning.

* Booklist *

The Southernization of America is an eloquent and perceptive essay collection that tracks the intertwining of Southern and Republican values from the 1970s to the present. Concluding with a plea for "a sense of moral urgency" in pursuit of racial equality, this is a trenchant study of the South's firm grip on the American consciousness.

* Publisher's Weekly *

"'Best New Read for 2022'" Selection

* WABE *

Among the great strengths of their book is its spotlight on the evolution of increasingly polarized rhetoric and ramped-up voter suppression policies that extended bigotry and intolerance through the nation.

* The National Book Revi