Away Down South excerpt

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution printed a great excerpt from James C. Cobb’s Away Down South over the weekend. Entitled “RED CLAY AND THE BLACK EXPERIENCE,” the excerpt addresses “the readiness, even eagerness, of African-Americans both in the South and outside it to identify themselves unequivocally as Southerners and claim the region as home.” Here is the opening paragraph:

Twenty-seven years after her arrival as one of the first two black students at the University of Georgia had helped trigger a riot, Charlayne Hunter-Gault came back to address the graduating class of 1988. Though not nearly so dramatic as her first appearance on campus, her return on this occasion was in some ways no less significant. She was speaking at commencement, but her remarks would have been equally appropriate for homecoming. Hunter-Gault established this theme at the outset, noting in language that contrasted starkly with the hateful rhetoric — “Two, four, six, eight, We don’t want to integrate, Eight, six four, two, We don’t want no jigaboo” — that had greeted her on her initial visit to the campus, that it was “good to be back home again. In a place that I have always thought of as ‘our place.’ ” If, on the one hand, Hunter-Gault’s remarks were remarkably gracious and even conciliatory, they were also noteworthy in the matter-of-factness with which she assured her mostly Southern white listeners that the South was her home, too.

The excerpt clearly supports The Weekly Standard’s comparison of Cobb to the legendary historian, C. Vann Woodward. “With Woodward’s death, Cobb is perhaps our best historical interpreter of the South and this may be his best book.” Another historian that this reader would compare Cobb to is Paul Fussell.

LINK to excerpt at AJC.com.

P.S. – Keep an eye out for Charlayne Hunter-Gault’s new book, New News Out of Africa, coming in April.