The Band Played Dixie: Race and the Liberal Conscience at Ole Miss.

• Author: Meacham, Jon

For southerner, History is as much a pastime as bourbon-drinking, and football: even all these years distant, we can still wreck dinner parties with passionate arguments about whether Bragg or Forrest could have turned the tide. So this is an especially interesting moment in the old Confederacy, a year of two important anniversaries in our second civil war -- the struggle against Jim Crow. It was 40 years ago this fall that President Eisenhower had to send federal troops to integrate Central High in Little Rock, a conflict that marked the emergence of the power of network television by bringing the spectacle of white riots against black children to a nation just beginning, really, to understand the scope of the Southern problem. And it was 35 years ago that James Meredith tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi, a seemingly simple act that forced Eisenhower's successor, John Kennedy, to order U.S. soldiers into Oxford to prevent anarchy.

Both milestones are prompting journalists to ask the inevitable How Far Have We Come? question. On television, get ready for the old black-and-white images of John Chancellor reporting from Arkansas and of mobs of crew-cut crackers (I can say that; I come from Tennessee, and am married to a Mississippian) rushing into lines of helmeted infantrymen in Oxford. Historical anniversaries have a kind of liturgical significance: they force us to review the drama of our past and figure out what lessons we ought to draw from what has gone before. In the case of civil rights and the South, there are two overarching points that come out of the domestic passion play of the '50s and '60s. The first is that despite its current standing in the polls, the federal government was, once upon a time, a force for enormous good, and it is only the unthinking Southerner who unreservedly joins in the shrill anti-Washington mood of the moment. The second is equally important: race relations only improve when there is a change of heart as well as of law. This sounds obvious, but in a way the real story of race in the contemporary South is what happened after the high-water mark of the mid- to late-'60s -- after the March on Washington, and after the Lorraine Motel.

Nadine Cohodas, the author of a strong 1993 biography of Strom Thurmond, explores the tricky, terrain of the post-Movement South in this new book. She chooses Ole Miss and Meredith, and sets a high bar for herself: "The legal apparatus of segregation has been...