Civil rights demonstrators had been threatened with chainsaws and sprayed with poison from a crop-dusting airplane. But increasingly, the violence directed against Greene County black folks came from other blacks. One of the most painful conversations in this book is with Wes Taylor, an aged black man whose young daughter was blinded by shotgun blasts from enforcers, out to get those who did not vote the insurgent line. In Greene County neither the worst fears of whites nor the highest hopes of blacks have been realized. Some whites have left the county, but the feared mass exodus never happened.
Economic power is still solidly in white hands, political power now in black.
That, he suggests, is progress, of a sort. Even those of us who are more optimistic than he can agree with that. John Shelton Reed teaches and directs the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.