African-American & Black, Memoirs, Journalists, Reference & Collections, South, History, Political Science 

A remarkable and moving memoir of growing up poor in a tough place and covering the most brutal - though often inspiring - aspects of the civil rights revolution Legendary civil rights reporter Karl Fleming was born in North Carolina's flattest, bleakest tobacco landscape. Raised in a Methodist orphanage during the Great Depression, he was isolated from much of the world around him until an early newspaper job introduced him to the era's brutal racial politics and a subsequent posting as Newsweek's lead civil rights reporter took him to the South's hotspots throughout the 1960's: James Meredith's enrolment at the University of Mississippi, the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, the assassination of Medgar Evers, the murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi and more. On May 17th 1966, Fleming was beaten by black rioters on the street of Los Angeles. Newsweek covered the incident in their next issue, and here's what they wrote: "That he was beaten by Negroes in the streets of Watts was a cruel irony. Fleming had covered the landmark battles of the Negro revolt from Albany, Georgia to Oxford, Mississippi to Birmingham, Alabama, and numberless way stations whose names are now all but forgotten. No journalist was more closely tuned into the Movement; once when a Newsweek Washington correspondent asked the Justice Department to name some Dixie hot spots, the Justice man replied, "Ask Fleming. That's what we do." In Son of the Rough South, Fleming has delivered a stunning, revealing memoir of all the worlds he knew, black, white, violent and cloistered - and a deeply moving read for anyone interested in the rough South. - from Amzon