They Didn't Put That on the Huntley-Brinkley!: A Vagabond Reporter Encounters the New South.

• Author: Reed, John Shelton

THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS WAS one of the great morality plays of our century--indeed, one of the greatest of all time--and stage-managing that play was a major accomplishment of the movement and its allies in government and the media. But of course this struggle between black and white (literal and metaphorical) had its gray areas, its ironies and contradictions. As Rheta Grimsley Johnson writes in her foreword to this book, "Save us from more white sheriffs with potbellies battling it out with civil rights saints amongst the magnolias. It was more complicated than that. It is more complicated than that." The reporters who covered the movement knew that, even if they didn't always report it.

Hunter James, a retired newspaperman whose career spanned the era of the civil rights movement in Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama, has set out to tell the "hidden story of the civil rights movement," to show how the movement worked itself out as "blacks and whites who had lived together as neighbors and sometimes as friends suddenly had to learn how to become friends and neighbors all over again in a different way."

James's book flags in places (his accounts of the Nixon and Goldwater campaigns don't add much, for instance), his command of the language sometimes falters (someone is "fomenting at the mouth"; old Atlanta was "a polyglot of festering shantytowns"), and too many punctuation and spelling errors survived copy editing. His attempts to reproduce dialect are probably unfortunate. I don't question the accuracy of his rendition, but it sometimes gives an Amos 'n' Andy flavor to the proceedings. ("Dunno, boss. Can't rightly say. I reckon hit's jes goan depend on how all dis schoolin' turn out en whether dis city ever goan recognize dat we is men too en dat we got our rights jes like de white man has his'n.")

These flaws don't matter much, though. Basically James is just telling stories, and most of them are good ones. In my experience, old-fashioned working reporters are like small-town doctors and lawyers--worldly raconteurs, pleasantly cynical if they're not too sour--and James is one of the breed. His book ambles from one good yarn or memorable character to another, and if it has a point it's just that, well, it's a tunny old world.

Typical (speaking of sheriffs) is the quotation from Sheriff Bill Lee of Greene County, Alabama, that gave James his title. Lee, a former All-America tackle for the Crimson Tide, described how he saw his...