Son of the Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir

My partner met Karl Flemming when Mr. Fleming visited the National Civil Rights Museum her in Memphis. We bought the book immediately, but it took a while for me to read it. I am really glad that I did though. Mr. Fleming's upbringing in the very depressed south was fascinating and opened my eyes to a life that was very foreign to me. However, the most powerful part came close to the end, and I quote from page 416: "In a fancy new Jackson mall, two young black women having lunch at Primo's Restaurant lectured me at passionate length on how nothing was better. A decade earlier they might have been beaten or killed but here they were, eating stuffed flounder surrounded by white patrons not paying any attention, with a white waitress asking, 'Can I get you ladies anything else?'" These changes and our acceptance of the status quo make this book essential reading. We cannot forget history and its lessons, no matter how unpleasant those lessons might be. Karl Fleming gives us an inside view of a most important part of human history. Lest we forget... Thank you, Mr. Fleming for sharing your story with us.

I picked up this book after hearing the author interviewed on Fresh Air. What initially attracted me was the opportunity to get a clear, honest, first person perspective of what really happened down south during the civil rights struggle. Karl Fleming, as an author, with a long career as a journalist, has a rich, pithy writing style and absolutely uncompromising honesty. As a genuine bookworm, I can say with all honesty that this is one of the most well-written books I have ever read. We follow the author carefully and deliberately through a difficult, destitute childhood--growing up in an orphanage in North Carolina--and seamlessly merge into the beginnings of his career as a reporter. From there the author finds himself, a born-son of the deep south, repeated witness to the full force of the ugliness of white violence, repeatedly and with shameless impunity. To the white establishment and the rude and coarse elements that they empowered, Karl Fleming was a traitor and his life was threatened on several occasions. But what stands out most is the brazen impunity of the elected officials as they dealt violently with their "impudent niggers." I can't do the author's prose nor the story justice, but like at least one other reviewer, I found this book almost impossible to put down. Honesty and objectivity are in especially short supply these days, and it is the author's unflinching clarity about the ugly events in his own life that convinces me that the author is clean and honest throughout. In a time of superheated media and partisan press, it is mightily good to be reminded what excellent, honest reporting truly is.

This book is over 400 pages long and I finished it in two days. It is without a doubt one of the very best books I have read in some time. Karl Fleming describes in great, interesting detail how his mother had to give him and his sister up to live in an orphanage because she wasn't able to provide for them. His experiences during this time period are many. He tells us of the unwritten rules the boys followed, the adults (Mable "Muh" Brown, in particular) who befriended him, the bully "Fatty" Clark, who gave him such a hard time, and the church sermons he had to listen to that portrayed God in such an angry way that, as an adult, unfortunately, turned Karl Fleming against attending church. Karl was without a college education, but he educated himself with his love of reading several of the classics from American literature. Hired by newsweek as a reporter Karl Fleming brings the reader to Oxford, Mississippi, where James Meredith enrolled as the first black student. The bombing of the black church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls, the death of three civil rights' workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and other unfortunate incidents in the civil rights movement of the 1960's are dealt with in vivid detail. Portraits of southern bigots such as Bull Connor, Ross Barnett, and others who resented their black citizens from having the equal rights they so richly deserved are also provided. Fleming, despite his growing up in North Carolina, sided with the underdog blacks because he, himself, had grown up in the orphanage being bullied. I feel God placed "Fatty" Clark in Karl's life as a young boy as a way of preparing him for what he would encounter in his job as an adult. I would suggest you have adequate time when you sit down to read this book because you're not going to want to put it down.

Growing up in the deep south during the civil rights era, I can remember school being closed because the KKK had called a big rally. Even at the time I can remember watching the television news the night Brown vs. Board of Education (separate but equal education was not equal at all) and realizing that the world was about to change. It's good to read this book and review what happened through the eyes of a professional reporter who was actually there for most of the action. The title talks about the 'Rough South.' And indeed it was. In looking back on it with fifty years of perspective, it was an amazing transition. And all in all, it was not nearly as rough as it could have been. There were a lot of people there who really hated each other and on both sides. Today there is still some racial friction in the south, but not even a shadow of what it was then. This is a remerberance of a time of great fundamental change in out culture very well told.

I knew of Karl Fleming as the journalist who was there for vitually every important event of the Southern Civil Rights movement. What I hadn't known was how he got there, what made him able to see the changes sweeping throught the South and the country before most other reporters in the country. His growing up years in the white underclass might have prepared him to be as resistant to change as any good old boy. But he grew up in relative innocence, in a white Methodist orphanage, and emerged with a naive curiosity that made him a great reporter. This is a book about a life that simply could not be lived in any other era in this country.