A Country in the Balance: A Q&A With Cynthia Tucker and Frye Gaillard

Writers Cynthia Tucker and Frye Gaillard invite readers to wrestle with and find hope in the South in their new book, The Southernization of America.

Interview by Rachel Priest

Cynthia Tucker and Frye Gaillard are no strangers to the South. Both are native Alabamians who are now colleagues at the University of South Alabama. Nor are they strangers to writing. Tucker won a Pulitzer Prize in Commentary as the editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Gaillard has authored more than 30 books on Southern history and culture. In fact, they aren’t even strangers to The Bitter Southerner. Both have penned pieces for us, such as The Broken Road of Peggy Wallace Kennedy, The Way of John Lewis, and Traveling While Negro. 

With their personal experiences, observations, and keen understanding of the South, they’ve joined forces to write The Southernization of America: A Democracy in the Balance. In alternating essays that touch on topics such as voter suppression, revisionist history, the rise of the Christian right, police brutality, and the tactics of Lee Atwater to Donald Trump, among others, Tucker and Gaillard invite readers to wrestle with the South’s past and present.

The book’s title is a nod to John Egerton’s The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America. Published in 1974, it argued that the South was emerging from its past of slavery, violence, segregation, and ignorance and moving toward a place more aligned with the rest of the country. But Tucker and Gaillard’s book, written close to 50 years later, contends that rather than the South borrowing from the best of the nation, the nation has since taken the worst from the South. 

The Southernization of America is a brutally honest look at the forces and people of the South that led to the current state of our nation. Yet it also offers glimpses of hope and points to the lives and legacies of John Lewis and Jimmy Carter, of Stacey Abrams, Raphael Warnock, and Jon Ossoff as guiding examples of where we can go if we both recognize and reckon with ourselves and our region.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. 

Rachel Priest: What was the catalyst behind both of you saying yes to writing this book, and why now? 

Frye Gaillard: I have worked with NewSouth Books in Montgomery for a long time. They are a really terrific independent publisher with a strong commitment to the South and a strong social conscience. So when they asked if we would be willing to write about this topic, it just seemed like it was timely and important. It seemed like it was a chance to say that the South — part of the country that many of us love deeply and yet are acutely aware of its flaws — has influenced the country in some ways that are not good and very obvious and in some other ways contain a surprising amount of hope. 

And then the idea came to me of writing it with Cynthia, whose career I had long admired, who has become a colleague of mine at the University of South Alabama. And I thought we would bring two perspectives to the story: one from a white guy and the other from an African American woman. But I think we were so surprised at how very similar our perspectives were on all of this.

Cynthia Tucker: Our sensibilities about the South are very similar to those of The Bitter Southerner in general. And that is that we love the South, we understand its flaws, and we’re both dedicated to talking about the South in its fullness — its rich history, good and bad; its culture, good and bad; and, in our book, its influences on the nation, good and bad.

Writing this book was a way for me to process what I saw happening in the country. I was really struggling in the wake of not just the election of Donald Trump, but what I saw revealed in my fellow Americans by the election of Donald Trump. And by the time I really started to work on the book, Joe Biden had been elected, but Trump had received more votes the second time around than he did the first time. I was taken aback by that.

RP: The book is told in essays written by one or both of you. How did you decide who would write which chapter, and what was the process like when you wrote them together?

FG: When Randall Williams of NewSouth approached us about doing this, it was one of those rare occasions where I knew absolutely, within a matter of hours, exactly how I would want to approach the subject. It was like the outline fell out of the sky, and I wrote it down and shared it with Cynthia, and she saw where I was going with it and bought in. 

We just divided it up. We each wrote our parts, and then added to each other’s, critiqued each other’s, strengthened each other’s, and made it one voice. I didn’t know how that would go. It was an amazingly seamless process, which happens when you’re working with a real professional.

CT: Frye may have spoiled me to the idea of having a co-author, because working with him was … so easy. When he showed me the first outline, I just wanted to add a chapter about the Christian right, because that’s also something I have been thinking about for a long time. I had known [Frye] first through his work, and I knew he was dedicated to writing about the South truthfully — starting with his own family, quite frankly, and he had done it brilliantly. I certainly thought we could work together, but the process was even easier than I expected it to be.

RP: In the book, you touch on major themes and issues such as voter suppression, social and racial hierarchies, revisionist history, the creation of private Christian schools known as “seg academies,” police brutality, and the tactics of politicians such as George Wallace, Donald Trump, and Newt Gingrich. What was the hardest to write about, and why?

FG: It was hard to consider how much the worst of the South has influenced the country. When George Wallace was running for president … we knew he was not going to win the election. Donald Trump comes along in 2016 and, to me, was Wallace on steroids and gets elected. And then, as Cynthia said, even though he lost the next time, he still got more votes than he did the first time, which says something really disheartening to me about the level of racism, or at least tolerance for racism, that exists in the country. 

There are other issues that intertwine their way through all of that, but the ability to dehumanize, to look down on, to denigrate our fellow human beings as the common denominator — that isn’t unique to the South, but we perfected that art back in the earliest days of slavery. We perfected that art during the disenfranchisement of African Americans, we perfected it during all the years of segregation.

And then came the other South, the Civil Rights South, the human rights South of Jimmy Carter, and it still lives in the work of John Lewis and Stacey Abrams, in the election of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, in the work of the Rev. William Barber.

The degree to which the dark side of the South came roaring back after the election of our first Black president was just so disheartening. And to dive into that and to see it also reflected in the cruelty of policies like family separations on our southern border, and to feel the echoes from an earlier time when families were separated during slavery. To try to make those historical connections and those moral connections was emotionally wrenching. 

CT: Writing this book has helped me to process what I saw happening, and getting it on the page was for me, in some ways, cathartic, although what I was writing about was deeply painful. I want to add to what Frye talked about: about racism and dehumanizing the other. Donald Trump just took several pages from George Wallace.

Wallace was reelected governor [of Alabama] after he had apologized to Alabamians for the way he had behaved previously. So when I was a young adult, I thought that the best of the South was going to be what the nation learned from the John Lewises. The battle for voting rights, I thought, had been won and the South had taught the nation. 

In the late 1990s, the Southern Baptist Convention finally apologized for its endorsement of slavery and began to recruit Black churches and Black members. So there was this period when I thought that the best of the South was going to be what, slowly perhaps, crept out into the rest of the nation. I thought that we were learning real brotherhood and sisterhood, led by the South. Unfortunately, I am not sure that that’s what we're seeing.

FG: I had the same feelings. We had two white presidents from the rural South — Jimmy Carter in the 1970s and Bill Clinton in the 1990s — who had their flaws, as men and as presidents. On the other hand, they were also giving voice to the best of the South.

I remember seeing [Civil Rights leader] Jesse Jackson weeping with joy on that night that Barack Obama was elected. I remember the prediction by Robert Kennedy when he came through running for president and visited the South … that an African American man would be elected in 40 years as president. I thought America had come to a plateau from which we would never descend, progress that could not be reversed. And I was wrong, as events since then have shown. And yet we also think of the maiden speech of Raphael Warnock on the floor of the U.S. Senate, where he talked about how he holds the Senate seat once held by segregationist Senator [Henry] Talmadge. And Warnock said, “That’s why I love America.” And he said, “I’m the proud native son of Georgia.” And Georgia was one of the states that gave Joe Biden his margin of victory in terms of rejecting Donald Trump as president. So it seems to me that it’s all still in the balance. It’s all, What do we do now? And where do we go from here? How hard do we work? How much do we believe in the South at its best and therefore in America at its most promising? 

RP: What makes the issues you write about in your book so uniquely American? 

FG: I think it’s a universal human condition that living in peace and respect and proximity with people who are not quite the same as us is a hard thing to do. You look at the Middle East, you look at Northern Ireland for a while, you get tribal conflict on the continent of Africa. America has its own sort of North American apartheid-history spin on this sort of universal characteristic. But I don’t think we can take much comfort in saying that other places have this problem, too. 

We have to decide if this wants to be a good place to live. If we’re at each other’s throats, if we’re trying to dominate one another, if we’re deliberately and willfully misunderstanding one another, if we’re being mean to each other, we have it within our power to make America a crappy place to live. We also have the opposite in our power. And so in addition to political policies and voting rights and all of those things that we talk about, there’s that sort of broader moral backdrop about our shared humanity that can guide us if we’ll just let it.

We know we're capable of being better than who we are too often in our politics. It’s just a question of whether that’s what we choose.

CT: I agree with Frye completely that tribalism is universal, baked in, primal. However, I would also point out that one of the things that’s different about the United States is our founding documents. Even the Western European democracies don’t have founding documents that are quite as glorious as ours are. We have never lived up to those words, but the words are deeply inspiring. They have inspired countries worldwide, and we like to hold those words up to other countries. So we have a … moral obligation to keep struggling toward the promise of those founding documents.

RP: In the book, you talked about polarization and the tactics of creating an “us” versus “them,” both on a larger, political scale and on a more personal level. Cynthia, I know that in one section you illustrated how some people have “othered” you and wrote: “I was told that I didn’t understand the South, though I’m as Southern as gravy on biscuits. I was told that I didn’t understand ‘heritage,’ though I understood the difference between theirs and mine quite well. I was told that I wanted to rewrite the past, though I wasn’t the revisionist in the room.” Were there any other personal experiences that helped you or Frye write this book? 

FG: Just the whole experience of growing up as a white Southerner and coming belatedly to the same realization that Cynthia talked about: that we’re all Southerners. What I hope for is a time when, even though we’ve experienced the history and the culture of the South in different ways, perhaps we come to understand it in a similar way so that we realize how much we are shaped in similar, at least parallel, ways. I mean food and culture and music and literature and art and all of those things that enrich life. Those are multicultural realities in the South. If we could just remember not to be so stupid in our politics, we could maybe be more comfortable and even celebratory in our common humanity. 

Every now and then I feel like we’re learning that. But it’s like we have to keep relearning it. And our politics seem to be the worst of us … politics become the vehicle for our mean streak. The South has a mean streak. The country has a mean streak. And when we have a national figure, like Donald Trump, appealing only to the mean streak, boy, sometimes we can muster a nasty one in our part of the country. And yet we see glimpses and glimmers that we are better than that. So we hope for that. It’s white Southerners who continue to need to make the most progress. I hate to say that because I am one, but, man, we’re slow learners.

CT: I am so glad that Frye talked about the other parts of Southern culture, where we have so much in common. I’ve got to tell you, because I grew up in the segregated South, it took me a while to figure that out, too. I remember the first time, in my 20s, I was somewhere in a very rural area [in Georgia] reporting a story. I went to this tiny little … white church, and they were doing shape-note singing and I sat there and I thought to myself, I have heard this before in Black churches. I was just struck by that, and they had dinner on the grounds and I thought to myself, “My goodness, white people do this.”

RP: You left the book open-ended. Why?

CT: We both believe that it’s history yet to be written. We are hoping for the best of the South to prevail, but it is not yet clear.

Georgia represents such an interesting case study in all of this. In its recent history, it not only gave Joe Biden his victory, but the first Black senator ever from Georgia was elected. Jon Ossoff is the first Jewish senator [elected in a Southern state] in more than 100 years, if memory serves, and they revived, in campaigning together, the forgotten alliance between Jewish Americans and Black Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. Moreover, there were Republicans, Governor [Brian] Kemp and [Secretary of State Brad] Raffensperger, who stood against the onslaught of Trump and his allies. It was Kemp and Raffensperger who said, No, you lost Georgia. We are not going to try to overturn an election. We’re not going to do something illegal. We’re going to stand with the Constitution. But it’s not clear what Kemp is going to do next. He is under siege from Trumpists in Georgia and nationally. So one of the questions that’s unanswered is whether Kemp will continue to try to do the right thing, or, in his lust for victory and power, will do the wrong thing. That is very much an unanswered question. 

RP: And my last question is, who is this book for? 

FG: I think anybody who is agonizing over our current American moment may find bits and pieces of wisdom and inspiration in the words and the stories of the people we write about. They might find examples of a kind of dogged hope that, despite how dark the hour is or can seem to be, we can make some progress. Maybe they find hope in the long arc of history … letting ourselves imagine how hopeless it must have been for African Americans after the collapse of Reconstruction and the glorious belief that citizenship would be there to affirm the humanity that had been denied during enslavement, and all of a sudden that is stripped away — yet their hope wasn't stripped away.

So maybe the hope we need to find now is that kind of battered hope on the other side of the dark and evil forces that have been loosed upon us and remember that there were people who never gave up hope before, even though they could have. So we take our inspiration there. Or maybe our inspiration is more direct. Maybe we just listen to Senator Warnock when he says, “That's why I love America,” and talks about the possibilities. We wanted to offer some hope, even as we explored the dire possibilities that also confront us.

Rachel Priest is the assistant editor at The Bitter Southerner. She grew up in Minnesota but moved to Georgia in high school, where she continued her education at the University of Georgia. She is passionate about amplifying adoptee and Asian voices, traveling, and a good cup of coffee. You can find her work published on Rewire and at rzpriest.com. Follow her on Twitter @rz_priest.

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