Until All Would Be Free : There were Southerners who saw that <i> civil rights </i> meant civil rights for everyone : SPEAK NOW AGAINST THE DAY: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, <i> By John Egerton (Alfred A. Knopf: $35; 704 pp.)</i>

It began in Birmingham. It is Nov. 20, 1938, and the opening session of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare as “upwards of fifteen hundred delegates from thirteen states, progressive sons and daughters of the Mother South, . . . come . . . to take up a monumental task. . . . Some . . . are dressed . . . for church or the theater--the men in dark suits and hats, the women in dresses and coats with ankle-length hems and fur throws at the shoulders. . . . A few wear simple print dresses and faded bib overalls and brogans--the uniform of factory workers across the South.”

There are politicians: Claude Pepper, Maury Maverick and a few maverick New Dealers like Will Alexander; Eleanor Roosevelt is on her way. And they are a “curious blend of social classes,” brought together by Joe Gelders, but “there is something else unusual about the crowd; though most of them are white, a substantial minority are Negroes.” Barry Bingham, publisher of the Louisville Courier, and Hosea Williams, foundryman and Communist, are there, along with a handful of Jewish, Catholic and Protestant clergy, present too are Highland Folk School’s Myles Horton and Jim Dombrowski; from Tuskegee, F.D. Patterson; from Fisk, Charles S. Johnson; from Atlanta’s Morehouse College, Benjamin Mays; and up from Florida, a young scholar, C. Vann Woodward. Their task is ending the oppression of fellow Southerners.

They knew who were oppressed and how, but there would have been almost as many ideas about how black Southerners were to achieve an equal place in the region, how people were to live as neighbors, as there were delegates. “Speak Now Against the Day” is one Southerner’s great, generous, sprawling story of how awkwardly and passionately people of good will came together to become the indigenous interracial component of what was to be the Civil Rights Movement. There are a good many black Southerners in his vast cast of characters, but essentially Egerton’s focus is on his fellow white Southerners. And he makes it plain, that against a stonewall of powerful obduracy, these people would comprise an indispensable component of the movement for civil rights.

In his eagerness to mention everyone who ever had a halfway helpful thought about racial justice, Egerton leaves us wishing for more analysis of the disparate approaches to reform that so often seemed in conflict one with another. One does not see among the often disagreeing white reformers a coherent plan of action to match the brilliance of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal and Educational Defense Fund’s strategy.

On the sensible assumption that there was a world that even insensitive judges would understand, NAACP lawyers, with infinite patience, brought desegregation cases pointedly involving law schools, which even the denser of judges could comprehend. Chipping away, they finally brought the Supreme Court to the 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education that undercut the entire doctrine of “separate but equal.” In contrast, most white Southerners, though they would be horrified by the simile, behaved like latter-day (soft-spoken) Garrisonian abolitionists counting on moral suasion to bring about reform. They depended on local and non-political organizations like the Southern Regional Council to bring their fellow Southerners to their senses.

There was a strong reluctance among a great many to bringing in the federal government--their government--to lend an essential hand. This was due in large part to the ancient hatred of what white Southerners imagined had happened during the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War. Then, federal assistance in the bringing of racial justice to the South was looked to briefly, but promisingly. It was not, as southerners would later think, a time of unrelenting oppression of the defeated South either by the federal government or predatory northern capitalists. Unluckily, a misremembering of that 19th-Century period (which Egerton himself betrays in his paragraph-long recapitulation of the era) contributed to a 20th-Century failure of strategy.

Egerton is far more interested in suggesting the diversity of the swelling of sentiment that was to culminate in the Civil Rights Movement than in analyzing the very different routes to reform that were being espoused. There were radicals such as Virginia Durr, taking the battle into national politics by running for the Senate on Henry Wallace’s ticket in 1948, and Mylo Horton, whose Highlander School was dedicated to a call for basic social change on not only racial, but also class lines. And there were others who were far more cautious.

Egerton focuses on Ralph McGill, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, and sees him as emblematic of a changing mood. McGill moved from a tepid and inconsistent attention to racial justice to a strong expression of its need. One senses, in fact, that Egerton, a small boy in Kentucky in the days of the earliest events of his book’s main chronicle, became aware of the need for change in much the way that McGill did.

This book, along with David L. Chappell’s recently published “Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement” (Johns Hopkins), wholly dispels the notion that the white South was an undiluted scene of same-minded determination to maintain white supremacy through segregation. Egerton knows just how powerful were the forces of that determination and did not feel the necessity to rehearse the well-known facts of black oppression in the region. His attention is on its alleviation. While paying respectful attention to the increasingly urgent activities of Southern black protesters, he pays little to those outside the South who were sympathetic to their cause and pressing for governmental action. Those non-Southerners who do enter his story, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Gunnar Myrdal, do so as visitors to the South. What Egerton has achieved with his focus on white Southern activists is to ensure that future studies of the Civil Rights Movement will see black and white inside agitators, as well as those from the outside, as participating as a triumvirate.

Egerton gives Ralph McGill--a fellow writer--the book’s last word, a ringing call to action as the curtain is about to rise on the Civil Rights Movement: “There comes a time when you must stand up and fight for what you believe, for what you know is right and true--or else tuck tail and run.”

Egerton ends his story in the 1950s on that triumphant note, knowing that a great era, perhaps the greatest in the South’s history, was dawning. But finishing his book 40 years later, one is sobered. Not even the finest hour of the Civil Rights revolution was the Day of Jubilee. Without question, much was achieved, but much resistance, long quiescent, remains. In more subtle, but perhaps no less dangerous ways, the descendants of those who once so powerfully blocked men and women of good will in the South are once again spreading a doctrine of hate.

Once again, there will have to be a gathering of men and women of good will, once again in the minority, who will not let the flame of humanity and decency flicker and die. And the candle must stay lit not simply in one region. Recently, John Egerton, speaking not of the period of “Speak Now Against the Day,” but of our own time, said, “The South is not America’s problem, America is America’s problem.”