In this interesting quilt of historical narrative and family memoir, McWhorter, a journalist who grew up in Birmingham, charts the collusion and connections between these two apparently disparate worlds of buffets and bombs–between the polite precincts of establishment whites (“Big Mules,” in Birmingham parlance) and the klaverns of the Ku Klux Klan. She courageously confronts the question many white Southerners prefer to avoid: to what extent were seemingly respectable whites responsible for the climate of cruelty and violence that prevailed in the Jim Crow South?
McWhorter’s conclusion is deeply troubling. She traces the roots of the Klan’s resistance to integration to the Big Mules’ battle against organized labor during the New Deal; the bloodthirsty haters were, in a way, the elite’s foot soldiers. The book moves back and forth (sometimes a bit abruptly) between the epic and the personal. One thread is McWhorter’s search to understand how her own father, the son of a prominent family, descended into the murky world of the klaverns. McWhorter’s grandmother once told her that she didn’t ask what her son was up to “because I was afraid he would tell me.” McWhorter gives us the answers her grandmother did not want to hear. The result is a big, important book, a challenging portrait of an American city at the center of the most significant domestic drama of the 20th century.
