Does This Road Lead to Redemption?
Two of the South’s most respected journalists—Pulitzer Prize winner Cynthia Tucker and author/historian Frye Gaillard—address a hard question: Has the South exported its worst qualities to the nation, or can our better angels survive?
I first learned her name on the night of May 29, 2020, four days after her video went viral. By now we had watched it multiple times—transfixed by the horrifying nine minutes, a policeman with his knee on a Black man’s neck, gazing with a kind of reptilian menace in the general direction of the camera, while the life drained out of the body beneath him. We had listened in shock to the victim’s pleas, his desperate cries that he could not breathe, and finally we heard him call out for his mama.
We knew by now that his name was George Floyd. We knew the killer’s name was Derek Chauvin. But many of us had not thought to ask who exactly had made the video, who had had the presence of mind to leave us unable to shrug off the truth. On “The Last Word,” his late evening show on MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell gave us the answer. It was a seventeen-year-old girl.
“The full truth of this story can only be told,” O’Donnell declared in what sounded like hyperbole, but was not, “because of the heroism of a seventeen-year-old girl, Darnella Frazier…. She pushed record on her phone and she stood there and held her ground for ten minutes.”
Thus opens “‘Thank God, a Young Person Had a Camera,’” one of the essays in Frye Gaillard’s uplifting collection, Heroes and Other Mortals, due to be released April 1. An Alabama native, Gaillard, who has written or co-authored more than two dozen books, was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame in March. He has spent his career writing about an America in search of redemption, focusing especially on his native South, a landscape of pain and promise, racism and repentance.
It’s no surprise, then, that I was drawn to his work. In 2019, when he invited me to collaborate on a project, I readily agreed.
Though we were born on opposite sides of the color line—Frye is white, I am black—we have come to see the South in much the same way: a place that holds lessons, some to follow, some to shun, for the rest of the nation. We wrote a book of essays, The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance, that traces the development of American democracy through a Southern lens and concludes with our concerns about the direction of our nation’s political and civic life. We wondered as we wrote that book whether a flourishing, multiracial democracy would survive under the assault of reactionary forces.
We still wonder.
In this conversation, we talk about recent currents in our civic life, as well as Frye’s latest projects.
Cynthia Tucker: Heroes and Other Mortals profiles several people, some well-known, others relatively obscure, whom you believe exhibited courage and conscience at pivotal moments and had a profound impact as a result. You write about George Wallace’s daughter, Peggy Wallace Kennedy; Sidney Poitier; Mikhail Gorbachev; and a Palestinian family who lost their land to an Israeli settlement. What was the inspiration for the book?
Frye Gaillard: I call it my accidental book. It sort of came together as a possibility in my mind when I was looking through a cardboard box full of pieces that I had written over the years. I was thinking I might throw it away when I started, but I realized there was a theme that I had not thought about at the time I was writing individual articles. I was writing about social justice and other human problems by writing about people who are trying to make the world better.
“It was such an intense microcosm of what so many of us of that generation went through in the South. We learned that people we had loved deeply, whose decency in other parts of their lives we knew to be part of who they were, but they were part of this system of racism.”
(For example), I had written about Peggy Wallace Kennedy, daughter of George Wallace, and how she had struggled with her father’s legacy and had emerged from that struggle herself as a staunch advocate of civil rights and human rights. It was just a reminder that redemption is possible. Whether it’s probable anymore, I don’t know. But these are stories of people who tried, who did their best, some of whom succeeded, some of whom didn’t.
CT: What interested you about Kennedy?
FG: She grew up during that period of her father’s life when he stood for terrible things. He was an ardent segregationist, and he caused a lot of hurt. He was the champion of racial backlash. Here’s someone who grows up with that and is never quite comfortable with it and in her adult life became a champion for civil rights and human rights. And she wrestled with it in a very personal way when she was raising her own children.
When her children were young, she took them to the MLK museum in Atlanta, and there happened to be an exhibit about George Wallace during his segregationist days. And one of her children said, “Mama, why did Paw Paw do those bad things?” It all came crashing home to her. It was such an intense microcosm of what so many of us of that generation went through in the South. We learned that people we had loved deeply, whose decency in other parts of their lives we knew to be part of who they were, but they were part of this system of racism. And Peggy, I think, wrestled with that as bravely as you can.
CT: You also wrote a short essay about your encounter with Sidney Poitier when you were a student at Vanderbilt in Nashville. You seemed to want to illuminate something about his character.
FG: In 1966, I was at Vanderbilt, and Fisk (an HBCU also in Nashville) celebrated its centennial, inviting Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier to be the speakers for the centennial celebration. I worked for the Vanderbilt student newspaper, and my editor and I went to hear them. They did their formal presentation, and then they went to talk to students just informally. They were willing to talk about anything the students wanted to talk about. They said, “Your generation is leading the path to freedom,” and they talked as equals to those students for a long time. Finally, one of the administrators said, “We need to close this conversation, so you won’t miss your plane.” Poitier responded, “We’ll catch a later plane.” So the conversation with the students continued for a long time afterward. It was just a reminder of a celebrity who didn’t act like one.
CT: It strikes me, looking at your work over the years, that you’re an optimist about the promise of America. You are always looking for those stories that shine a light on our better angels. Am I right about that?
FG: I came of age in a time that I look back on as a time of optimism—the 1960s. My political awareness of the world sort of formed around an awareness of the civil rights movement, particularly as it was being embodied by people who were pretty close to my own age. John Lewis was only a few years older than I, and so these very young people were setting this audaciously optimistic agenda for the whole country with their belief that a great country could be greater, that it could be more inclusive and more just. And so, I think I came of age inspired by optimists. Lewis, among others, remained that his whole life, even when the pendulum seemed to be swinging in the opposite direction. He refused to feel defeated or to feel it wasn’t worth it.
“Without any kind of meticulous planning, they just went the next day and sat at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s. And it captured the imagination of young people all over the South.”
Having said all that, I’m acutely aware there are huge disappointments in the mood swings of history. We’re living in one of those pendulum swings now. So regardless of the current state of my own optimism, I’m just trying to hold up examples of people who kept on trying. That seems worthwhile to me.
CT: The 1960s were clearly formative for you. One of your best-known books, A Hard Rain, is about that era. And it opens with the four young men (Franklin McCain, Joe McNeill, David Richmond, and Ezell Blair Jr., all students at North Carolina A&T University) who started the Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins. What drew you to their story?
FG: I got to know Franklin McCain well when I lived in Charlotte. He remembered how, on the night of January 31, 1960, he and his three closest friends, self-described nerds, were in a dormitory bull session talking about the daily insult of segregation. There were “white only” signs everywhere they turned. They were supposed to sit at the back of the bus. Drinking fountains and lunch counters were segregated. And, as young people will do, they sort of blamed their parents for this: “Why didn’t our parents resist?” And then, as Franklin told the story, they thought, “Wait a minute, what have we done?” So Joe McNeil said, “Let’s do something tomorrow.” And so, without any kind of meticulous planning, they just went the next day and sat at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s. And it captured the imagination of young people all over the South. All of a sudden, it was a means of protesting that spread like wildfire. I’m not sure they were overly optimistic about the heart of America, yet they indisputably touched it in a very deep place. They touched mine. There were these brave young people calling the question, so we found ourselves paying attention.
CT: Jimmy Carter has been a subject of yours over many years. You wrote a short biography of him, Prophet From Plains, and you co-edited a volume entitled, The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter. What was it about Carter that made him of such interest to you?
FG: I think my interest in Carter goes back to the time when he first stepped onto the national stage when he was inaugurated as governor of Georgia and said, “The time for racial discrimination is over.” He wasn’t the only New South governor saying those kinds of things—Linwood Holton, a Republican in Virginia, did, Reubin Askew, another Democrat, in Florida, did—but Carter kept people’s attention more than the others because he pretty soon started to run for president. I watched Carter try to apply the principles of the civil rights movement to his human rights policy as it affected American foreign policy. And he did it imperfectly. Yet it was always there and always sort of pushing him.
When he lost in 1980, I was disappointed. But he didn’t go away. We started seeing him sweating in the hot July sun, building houses for and with poor people in America. And then we saw the work of the Carter Center and its attempts to eradicate horrifying diseases in developing countries that many of us had never heard of. And it occurred to me as a writer, almost in a literary sense, that here’s this guy redefining his life, finding meaning in his own life through this prodigious example of service to other people. But for Carter, it wasn’t sacrificial. This was where he found purpose after a bitter, heartbreaking defeat. He found a way to move on.
CT: You talked about coming of age during a time of optimism, and I remember that era in the same way. My parents were telling their children that there would be far more opportunities for us than there were for them. That age of optimism seemed to reach its zenith with the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
Our collection of essays, Southernization, was released just after Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, but we understood nevertheless that democracy was teetering on the brink. Reactionary forces were amassing and harnessing power at the state and federal levels. In my view, events since the publication of Southernization have moved in exactly the direction I feared they might. I feel that I’m living in a country that I don’t recognize. What are you feeling?
FG: Well, I think our worst fears were realized on November 5, 2024. The Southernization of America has two possible meanings. One is that the South has exported its worst qualities, its racism and all the undemocratic qualities that go along with that. The other is the possibility that has always been—that we would export our best qualities, the civil rights South and that Jeffersonian promise that all of us are created equal. We’ve never quite lived up to that as a country. Still, here was this eloquent, intellectual, slave-owning Southern white man who, ironically, gave the country the North Star of possibility that we can work toward a more perfect union where everyone is created equal in the eyes of the law. But that’s the piece we are losing hold of in this country.
I don’t know what to do about it. I’m encouraged that some people are fighting some of those awful policies in the courts, and some are protesting peacefully in the streets, which is calling on the legacy of the civil rights South. But the other thing we can do is just to keep decency alive.
Buy Frye Gaillard’s Heroes and Other Mortals: Stories of Our Better Angels from the Salvation South Bookshop
CT: Among the institutions under siege right now are colleges and universities, and you and I have shared experiences here at the University of South Alabama. I think the work we’ve done here has played an important role in helping to prepare citizens for the future. And our students are not the so-called elites.
FG: One of the things that I have most enjoyed about the working relationship with you is that we have shared time at this university—a public university where half the students are the first generation in their families to attend college. And the quality of discussion outside of class, as outside speakers come in and as current events prompt discussions—all of those things give us an opportunity to help teach and model and explore how to engage with each other with civility, even disagreeing with civility. That happens here. And that’s important. Not to be too corny about it, but democracy depends on that.
CT: At the moment, democracy is under siege. It’s depressing. But in my darker moments, I think about the actual history of the civil rights movement. While we look back now and celebrate the victories, the movement was not broadly supported. People—Black and white, Christian and Jew—died to ensure that the United States finally became a true democracy. So I force myself to remember how much the civil rights struggle actually involved. It wasn’t easy, but valiant people kept the struggle alive.
FG: I think that lesson is there for us to draw on. You look back on the life of Dr. King. I have heard people say that he wasn’t the greatest strategist of the civil rights movement, but what he had was this ability to make the leap of faith. Not only was it not inevitable that they would succeed, but it defied rationality almost. Every instrument of power, except their faith, was in the hands of people on the other side. And it seems like a lot of us are feeling like that now. But we can draw on the wisdom and strength of people some of us were alive to see.
I’m not convinced that all is lost. All could be lost. Countries do crumble. This may be our moment. This may be the moment when all the dark sides of our historical DNA, the racism, the history of ethnic cleansing of indigenous people—if the echoes of that are too strong, maybe it will eventually do us in. I’m just not convinced of that. We have lived through times when we have seen our better angels triumph, and I don’t want to let people forget that.
Cynthia Tucker, a veteran newspaper journalist, was editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper for 17 years. In 2007, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. She is now journalist-in-residence at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. She is the co-author, with Frye Gaillard, of The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance. She became a member of the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame in 2013 and won the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer in 2022.